Joe Scarborough Unloads on ‘Clueless’ Joni Ernst for Mocking Graveyard Video

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough unloaded on Senator Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) mock apology, posted from a graveyard Saturday, after backlash over a quip that everyone was “going to die” during a raucous town hall Friday while addressing constituent concerns about Medicaid cuts under President Donald Trump’s tax plan.

Rather than retreat, Ernst leaned in further over the weekend, releasing an Instagram Story video in which she mockingly apologized from a graveyard.

“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth,” Ernst said in the video. “So I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”

She closed: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

During Monday morning’s show, Scarborough slammed the senator as “clueless” and attacked the video for “making jokes” while senior citizens have their Medicaid “gutted.”

When Joni Ernst is asked what she’s going to do about the fact that maybe 40% of children in the state of Iowa, her state, are going to be impacted by Medicaid cuts, and about 50% of seniors that are in nursing homes in her state are going to be impacted by these cuts. Her response is: ‘Well, we’re all going to die anyway.’ And then she makes a joke about it in the graveyard.

This is, I’m sure Webster’s dictionary wants to kind of use video in the future. Put that next to clueless, because that’s what these Republicans are right now. They’re clueless. They’re savaging health care in their own districts, in their own states, and Joni Ernst feels confident enough not only to say: ‘Well, you’re going to die anyway.’

Then she feels confident enough that she can do whatever she wants to do, go into a graveyard and make jokes about how everybody’s going to die anyway.

Think about how she burst onto the scene. She was going to be the person that was going to go after pork barrel spending and all the squealing and all that other stuff. And so that’s how she starts. And this is where she comes to, which is again, making jokes about senior citizens who are going to have their health care gutted about children in her state, going to have their health care gutted. And a response is we can all die anyway later.

Democrats have slammed the senator’s tone as glib and morally bankrupt, especially given the stakes. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s plan could cut Medicaid spending by $723 billion over a decade, potentially increasing the number of uninsured Americans by 7.6 million.

Watch above via MSNBC.