Joe Scarborough Issues Orwellian Warning After Trump DNI Pick’s Evasive 2020 Election Answers: ‘Demeaning for Him, But Frightening for Us’

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough issued an Orwellian warning after President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence pick, Jay Clayton, repeatedly declined to say that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election during a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday.

Pressed on the result, Clayton would only say that Biden had been “certified” as president, stopping short of directly acknowledging his victory while sidestepping questions about his previous claims concerning election integrity. Clayton, if confirmed, would replace Acting DNI Bill Pulte.

The hearing came a day before Trump is due to deliver a televised address, reportedly focused on his continued claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

During Thursday’s show, as attention turned to Wednesday’s confirmation hearing, the Morning Joe crew rolled three lengthy exchanges when senators grilled Clayton on the matter, repeatedly pushing him to make a declaration.

“To entertain the president’s delusions,” Scarborough began.

He continued: “I mean, over an issue that if you wanted to take judicial notice of who won that election, you could take judicial notice in any courtroom across America: There are 63 federal judges who said that Biden won it, you had the Supreme Court of the United States rejecting one Trump appeal after another, and even in one Pennsylvania case, saying that there were not enough votes to even swing Pennsylvania. You just go on and on.”

“But again, you have this man, this learned man, who, again, more interested in the president’s delusions about 2020 than telling the truth,” he said.

Pivoting to quote 1984, the infamous novel about the dangers of authoritarianism, Scarborough said: “How can that sequence not remind people of George Orwell, who said, ‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and your ears.’”

He continued: “And when I saw it, not to be melodramatic, but I thought of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she said, ‘The first goal of tyrants is to tear down the institutions that protect the society.’ And the way they do that, authoritarians, they do that by replacing competence with blind loyalty.”

“And of course, she was talking about [Nazi German dictator Adolf] Hitler, she was talking about [Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin, we could be talking about [Hungarian Prime Minister Victor] Orban or any number of authoritarians through the years,” he added.

“But yeah,” Scarborough warned in closing. “This is demeaning for him, but also frightening for us that he can’t state what everybody in that room knew.”

Watch above via MS NOW.

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