Joe Scarborough Goes OFF on Yale/Harvard Educated Ron DeSantis Playing a Dope on Television: ‘So Insulting!’

Joe Scarborough called out what he sees as a clear charade by conservative politicians and media personalities that, despite their Ivy League education, play “dopes” on television in what seems a deeply cynical play of phony populism that lies at the base of the Trump movement.

While the segment did not entirely focus on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, he got the most specific shout-out by the Morning Joe host on Wednesday morning. “He plays so stupid, this Yale and Harvard guy,” Scarborough said. “They’ve got signs popping up in Florida that says, “Make Florida America Again. It doesn’t even make any sense!”

Florida is indeed a state that will never be America, though clearly, the DeSantis campaign is playing on some nationalistic metaphor that appeals to conservative nostalgia for a time when…things were different.

He then listed the conservative politicians that he feels are most egregiously play acting the populist part, starting with former President Donald Trump, to which he said “I don’t know how his dad got him into school, but he got into Penn.”

“Then you have DeSantis, Yale, and Harvard. You have Ted [Cruz], Princeton and Harvard,” he continued while an image of Stanford and Yale-educated Josh Hawley showed up on screen. “All these guys that are playing dopes on television, like you said, it is so insulting, this populist game they play. It is insulting.”

And so it went until later in segment Rev. Al Sharpton compared this observation to minstrelry of a (thankfully) bygone era in American history.

“It’s the ultimate level of cynicism,” Sharpton noted. “It’s like we’d call blackface use when you’re trying to mock blacks. They’re mocking people that they never were. I think it means that they really hold them in contempt and their politics really holds them in contempt.”

“Donald Trump is also taking their money,” Willie Geist circled back. “He continues to raise money, asking those people you just talked about, rev, to pay his legal bills. Mr. Billionaire.”

“And he yells at them on text” chimed in Mika Brzezinksi.

“It’s beyond cynical,” Geist concluded, saying, “They’re pretending their party didn’t try to overthrow a presidential election, that’s anti-democratic.”

Scarborough concluded by observing that “this has nothing to do with ideology .” He still considers himself a centrist conservativism, but his screed had everything to do with illiberalism and “phony populism.”

Watch above via MSNBC.