‘Everybody Put on their Baghdad Bob Hat!’ Morning Joe Crew Rips GOP ‘Lockstep’ With Trump’s BLS Firing
Morning Joe hosts ripped Republican lawmakers for falling into “lockstep” with President Donald Trump for firing the Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Dr. Erika McEntarfer, just hours after the department released an unflattering jobs report for July.
Trump fired McEntarfer on Friday after a disappointing jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs added last month and a rise in unemployment to 4.2%, well below expectations.
More damaging were steep downward revisions to previous estimates: May’s job gains were slashed from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s from 147,000 to just 14,000. Trump accused McEntarfer of acting politically, offering no evidence, and vowed to appoint “someone who’s going to be honest.”
On Monday’s Morning Joe, however, host Joe Scarborough took aim at Republicans for being out of touch in repeating Trump’s spin, evoking “Baghdad Bob” – the nickname for the Iraqi Information Minister who famously insisted on live TV “there are no American infidels in Baghdad” even as U.S. tanks rolled into the city behind him during the 2003 invasion.
Scarborough said:
This is one of these moments. I will say the second term, people ask, what’s the second term? The first term inside the White House, second term, as you know, and other people that work day in and day out with people that are working in the Trump White House this time, you know, you can get off the record, you can sit, you can talk to them: ‘Well, this doesn’t make sense. He’s stretching this here….’ And you can, you know, you get straight answers, often back and forth, and have a really good, meaningful discussion and try to figure out, you know, what in the world is going on.
For me, this was an exception to that rule. Everybody put on their Baghdad Bob hat this weekend because there was no justification for it. I was surprised that I didn’t even get the sort of quiet eye rolling from inside the White House. I guess they understood they were going to follow the Baghdad Bob line and they all did it this weekend.
Co-host Jonathan Lemire joined in: “Those in the White House, those close to the president, were in lockstep – asserting, without evidence, that there was bias in these job numbers and that President Trump was simply justified in doing what he did. None of that is true. This is a bad one. Historically, this is a bad one.”
“Governments, economies, and businesses can only make decisions based on hard data, on statistics. This calls into question so much of what Washington produces,” he warned.
Watch above via MSNBC.
