GOP lawmakers compared to 'giddy' Taylor Swift fans after 'painful' Trump meeting
MSNBC's Willie Geist compared Republican lawmakers to giddy Taylor Swift fans after they met with Donald Trump on Capitol Hill.
The presumptive GOP nominee returned to the Capitol for the first time since inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, and congressional Republicans lavished praise on him to such a degree – "he's electric," said one – that the co-hosts of "Morning Joe" cringed with second-hand embarrassment.
"Just in case you're keeping score at home, they were saying this about a man convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault against a woman, was found to be guilty, by definition, definitional purposes, by a judge in New York of raping that woman," said host Joe Scarborough. "He said, you can call it what you want to call it, but everybody else outside this courtroom calls it rape. When he talked about definitions of the U.S. Army or definitions of – again, medical organizations. This is who the Republicans are throwing their arms around with reckless abandonment."
Scarborough recited the seven-year losing streak Republicans have endured with Trump as their figurehead, and Geist scoffed at star-struck Republican lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who gushed afterward that the ex-president had looked directly at her and said hello.
"You could go to a Taylor Swift concert this summer and see less giddiness about her from teenage girls than we saw from Republicans on Capitol Hill about Donald Trump right there," Geist said.
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"Yeah, brutal," agreed co-host Mika Brzezinski.
"It's truly staggering," Geist added. "These are grown men, supposed leaders, who just cannot be more excited to be in the same room, to breathe the same oxygen as Donald Trump, to jump up to standing ovations. As you say, Joe, many of the people in that room giving him an ovation, getting as close as they can to make sure they're in all the photographs with him for their campaign ad, are the ones who condemned him on Jan. 6 and the days after Jan. 6, before they put their fingers in the wind and realized that his supporters still liked him and changed completely. It is not surprising anymore, but to see it up close, with him side by side with them, then running to cameras to talk about how excited they were to have been waved at or recognized by him in some way, it is something to behold."
The co-hosts singled out Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for derision after he shook hands with Trump, whom he has explicitly blamed for the insurrection and and has hurled racist abuse at his wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao.
"You talk to people, liberals, conservatives, you talk to people who were there on Jan. 6, no one was more angered by what happened than Mitch McConnell," Scarborough said. "Mitch McConnell talked about it. When he was on the Senate floor, he talked about all of those things that Liz Cheney said right there. Now, again, it's just a collective sort of amnesia, just complete moral vacuum at the core of the Republican Party. What about [House speaker] Mike Johnson? 'We gave him sustained applause.' It's so painful."
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