‘It Was All So Miserable!’ Joe Scarborough Trashes Vivek On GOP Debate — Praises Haley For Slamming Trump and Defending Biden

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough trashed Vivek Ramaswamy and the “miserable” GOP debate — but he liked the part where former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed ex-President Donald Trump and defended President Joe Biden.

On Wednesday night, eight candidates took the stage for a debate moderated by Fox News anchor Bret Baier and fellow Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on Fox News, while Trump skipped the proceeding to do Carlson’s Twitter/X show.

A general consensus has emerged that Ramaswamy, who bore the brunt of the attacks from other candidates onstage, and former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley were the most attention-getting candidates of the night for varying reasons.

On Thursday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Scarborough and co-host Willie Geist conceded Ramaswamy won a lot of attention but weren’t pleased with how he leveraged it, and had kind words for Haley:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Some kind of debate last night, but Nikki Haley had a couple of moments. She really did. There’s another moment, really, where she she basically said, come on, let’s stop lying to everybody. It’s not Joe Biden that caused the deficit. It’s not Joe Biden that caused the debt. It’s Donald Trump. And you all went along with it and said nothing. So it was it was a fascinating debate.

I got to say, Ramaswamy was going around. He really was insulting. Everybody’s bought and paid for. I mean, what I found in politics is when you have somebody going around the stage saying everybody’s bought and paid for, they’re the one who’s bought and paid for. But he reminded me of Tracy Flick in that old that that old movie about politics. (GEIST: Yeah. Election) Yeah. Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. And it’s just this little kid going around trying to say the right lines and do the right things. Everything was so prepackaged. Everything. Everything, there wasn’t a conspiracy theory he didn’t follow fall down. There wasn’t an insult he didn’t launch. It was all, oh, it was all so miserable! But it was a fascinating debate in other aspects. Nikki Haley And, you know, DeSantis kind of was like Biden. Like, I know they both love to hear that. But DeSantis just kind of stayed in there. He didn’t do anything great. Anybody that wanted to, like, save his campaign are going to be disappointed. Anybody that wanted to see him collapse would have been disappointed. He just kind of hung in there. And I think for me, the headlines are Nikki Haley had a couple of really good moments. Vivek did his best to insult absolutely everybody. Chris Christie was actually thrown off his game a bit by vac because they went back and forth. At one point, Chris Christie saying Vivek sounded like ChatGPT. And but again, dissing DeSantis kind of held his own. All in all, probably not much of a change except a lot of press for Vivek. And who knows, maybe some conspiracy theorists will support him coming out of this.

WILLIE GEIST: Yeah. If this was Vivek Ramaswamy night to introduce himself to the country, which he said was his goal last night, for people who said, Who is this guy? He did that. He earned a lot of time. He was center stage next to Governor DeSantis. But also with that time, he said we should cut off aid to Ukraine altogether. He said the climate change agenda was a hoax. And he said he would issue a preliminary, a preemptive pardon of Donald Trump for all these crimes he’s alleged. We’re going to see Donald Trump turning himself in in Fulton County today. So, yes, he had the spotlight. Yes, he introduced himself, but that’s what he did with it

Watch above via MSNBC’s Morning Joe.