Joe Scarborough: China, Europe ‘Can’t Believe Their Luck’ as Trump’s ‘Dumb’ Cuts ‘Destroy’ U.S. And Give Rest of World An Edge
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough says that sources at institutions in Europe “can’t believe their luck” as President Donald Trump’s “dumb” cuts to elite universities and National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) scientific research “destroy” the U.S. and “help” the rest of the world.
The blistering critique, Scarborough said, had come from the mouths of academics and economic leaders and came, he added, as a warning that the U.S. was handing over its technological and economic edge to global competitors.
Speaking live from London in the U.K. on Tuesday, Scarborough said allies were seeing recent attacks on universities like Harvard — denied $2 billion funding because of the university’s refusal to implement Trump DEI orders — as not just ideological, but self-destructive.
Institutions here, whether you’re talking about Cambridge, Oxford, all across Europe, they can’t believe their luck. They can’t believe that America is dumb enough to cut funding to NIH. America is dumb enough to cut R&D funding. They’re dumb enough to chase off the best and the brightest students. And they’re getting those students coming here.
Scarborough painted a stark before-and-after: when he visited Europe just three months ago, he said, British and European leaders were fixated on America’s dominance. Now, that tone has shifted dramatically.
To sum up everything I learned yesterday, three months after all I heard in Britain and Europe was about America’s supremacy, economic supremacy, and how they wanted to be more like us. And that was three months ago [or] four months ago in December.
Things have changed so dramatically.
A Britain and a Europe that 3 or 4 months ago said we’re never going to catch up with America, just said, ‘My god, they’re actually slowing down and going to let us catch up.’ And the big start again, that Harvard story, they think they’re owning Harvard. They think they’re owning Columbia. They think they’re owning these schools. And I mean, [the Trump administration] said: ‘All right, we want to destroy one of these big schools.’ All they’re doing by cutting those grants is they’re helping China. They’re helping the EU. They’re helping Britain.
They’re helping economic competitors and allies by basically saying: ‘Yeah, you know what? We’re not interested in this anymore. We’re going after an ideological agenda. And you can have the best and brightest minds in tech. You can have the best and brightest minds in AI, you can have the best and brightest minds in bio research.’
It’s really again, they cannot believe what we are doing to ourselves.
Watch above on MSNBC.
