Joe Scarborough Blasts JD Vance ‘Exploiting Grief’ — By Invoking Trump’s Dead Intern Conspiracy

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough slammed Senator JD Vance (R-OH) for “exploiting the grief” of two parents from Springfield, Ohio, by politicizing the death of their 11-year-old son Aiden Clark by recalling the time former President Donald Trump’s attempted to smear him by promoting a conspiracy theory about an intern of his who died.

In August 2023, Clark was killed on his way to his first day of sixth grade when his school bus was forced off the road by a minivan. In May 2024, the driver, Hermanio Joseph, a legal Haitian immigrant, was convicted and sentenced for involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide.

During Morning Joe’s opening on Tuesday, the hosts highlighted a moving front page story in the New York Times about how Clark’s parents were struggling to navigate the use of their son’s story by MAGA to attack immigrants by focusing on Joseph’s status.

Asking co-host Mika Brzezinski to hold up the newspaper, Scarborough said: “I can’t imagine the pain those parents are going through. And then to watch their son, their child used as a political prop, to be lied about, making the pain worse.”

Scarborough then relayed his own story from May 2020 when Trump attacked him by calling for the reopening of the case of Lori Klausutis, an intern who died in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001 when he was a congressman. The death was deemed accidental as Klausutis suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition but Trump implied there was more to the story.

This is not personal to me, but this is personal to people I know. When Donald Trump decided to attack me because he didn’t like my Covid coverage and he lied about a woman who worked in my office and claimed that we were involved and that I had her killed.

And her husband, the widowed husband, begged him to stop lying because of the excruciating pain that it put her parents through and put him through the fact that he had not been able to move on for 25 years because of the lies. They could not find rest or peace. And Donald Trump didn’t care. He just kept doing it because he didn’t care what the family thought. He didn’t care what the husband thought. He didn’t care [about] the people whose grief he was only making worse…

Pivoting back to Clark’s story, Scarborough continued:

And here we have in Ohio, Mika, we have a family enduring that pain because their son’s being lied about for political purposes and they have been put on notice.

The father spoke before the city council, I believe a month or two ago, saying please stop lying about my son. You know nothing about him. And if you did, you would know this is the opposite of what he would be saying right now based on the wonderful short life that he lived.

Scarborough went on to attack Vance and Trump he accused the Republicans of being “without shame” and “decency” – claiming there had been a change in standards in U.S. politics.

But they don’t care. I cannot imagine these men. I cannot imagine people when parents are begging them: ‘Please stop lying about our dead children, please stop. Let us bury them in peace and move on.’ They won’t do it, Mika. They are without shame. They know better.

And yet they continue to exploit the death of a young child in Springfield and others and lie about it because they want to gain power. This is stark. And if you think this is normal, well you haven’t been around politics long enough, because I can tell you if it happened while I was in Congress, if it happened while Claire [McCaskill] was in the Senate and somebody did this, they would be excommunicated. Nobody would talk to them. They would be scorned. Their leadership would say, ‘You apologize to the parents, you take back the lie or you will be stripped of your committees tomorrow. You straighten up.’

But there are no guardrails, Mika. No guardrails on the truth, no guardrails on decency, no guardrails on the very things that keep us bound together even in the most difficult of political times. And let me say that happens. Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan could not stand each other’s political philosophies, but they worked together. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich could not stand each other’s political philosophies and that got ugly. They still work together for the betterment of America. But balancing the budget four years in a row for the first time in a century: here, no guardrails, no ties that bind, no decency. And I think decency is on the ballot as much as democracy.

“They are inflicting pain on people purposely,” Brzezinski said.

Watch above on MSNBC.