Joe Scarborough Torches Maduro — But Warns Trump About ‘Regime Change’

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough slammed ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as illegitimate and not someone who was a “good man,” but warned President Donald Trump about the complexities of “regime change” by quoting former President George W. Bush on Iraq.

The comments followed the capture of the country’s former leader and his wife in a surprise Delta Force operation early Saturday.

Scarborough kicked off Morning Joe’s analysis of the weekend’s events on Monday by panning Maduro’s legacy, relaying that he believed that “in time” the Western hemisphere would be “better with him gone,” but added that “things never go as you expect” with actions like this.

After rolling back a clip of Trump telling reporters on Air Force One from Sunday that the operation was about “peace on earth” the host quoted Bush: “You know, it is stunning, it is breathtaking talking about ‘we own this place.’ It reminds me of what George W. Bush said, and I looked it up, on May the 1st, 2003: ‘In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.’ And 22 years later there are still thousands of troops in Iraq trying to maintain order there.”

“And Donald Trump is very critical of that,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said.

Scarborough continued: “Yeah. So you will certainly not hear from me any suggestion that Maduro was a good leader, a good man, a legitimate leader of Venezuela, he certainly was not. And I suspect in time we hope the hemisphere will be much better with him gone.”

“But the problem here is things never go as you expect,” he added. “When you’re trying regime change, the lesson of the last 20 years is regime change doesn’t work, it never goes the way you expect it to go.

Rounding on Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president, Scarborough said: “And, Mika, we saw that right out of the gate the other day when President Trump said she’s going to do what we tell her to do, and she’s going to work with us and then immediately after that Delcy Rodríguez delivered a much different statement.”

On Saturday, in the hours after the military operation, Rodríguez had initially declared Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela and the mission as an “atrocity.”

Brzezinski noted that since then, on Sunday, Rodríguez had moved to strike a more conciliatory tone, calling for “peace” and “cooperation” after Trump’s interview in The Atlantic, warning she’d face a “very big price” if “she doesn’t do what’s right.”

Watch above via MS NOW.