Joe Scarborough Likens Trump’s ‘Unbelievable’ Lies to Hitler’s Psychological Profile

Joe Scarborough really wants his viewers to know that his on-air reading of his previous Tweets excerpting Hitler’s psychological prosecution file from a United States Office of Strategic Services in has absolutely nothing to do with any other elected leader that’s currently dominating the news.

There are remarkable similarities between Hitler’s profile and how the Morning Joe hosts view President Donald Trump in light of the Commander in Chief’s recent and unproven claims surrounding a caravan of migrants currently based near the Mexico-Guatemalan border.

Yesterday Trump made numerous claims that the caravan posed a serious threat to Americans in what cynics saw as naked fear-mongering. Trump said that the mass of migrants included members of the gang MS-13, “Middle Easterners” and criminals in a craven attempt to scare his base into turning out to vote.

The tweets he read on air? Well here they are:

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never accept blame; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; repeat it frequently enough people will believe it.” 1/2

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 23, 2018

Hitler’s psychological profile in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services. 2/2

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 23, 2018

Scarborough repeatedly claimed that his reading of this psychological profile pertained only to Hitler “and pertains to no one else” thought that was a schtick that would make even the hackiest Catskills comic blush.

Scarborough was clearly making a comparison to Hitler’s repeated lying to that of Trump’s, and, impossibly, it wasn’t even an unfair comparison.

After Mika Brzezinski  wisely framed the discussion with a Toronto Star Op-Ed that read “Trump has been a serial liar about just about everything for his entire tenure in office” before stating that “President Trump’s claims about the Honduran caravan heading towards the U.S. Are steadily being debunked.” She then read Trump’s tweets that ended “Must end laws!”

Scarborough almost laughed out at that last claim, saying “Must change laws?! As if Republicans don’t control the house and the Senate. And the White House. And the bureaucracy and the Supreme Court. They control absolutely everything.” He finished with “The lies are just unbelievable, aren’t they?”

There is an old Internet adage known as Godwin’s Law that asserts that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler. The corollary to this rule is that the first to reference Hitler has lost the debate.

In this instance, however, Scarborough’s likening of Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler is not unreasonable hyperbole. Trump appears to be throwing out false claims which seem to be openly parroted by conservative media who no longer feel compelled to follow accepted journalistic standards.

The outlier? Fox News Shep Smith, who fact-checked Trump’s false claims and was even referenced at the end of this MSNBC clip as evidence that Trump is just making stuff up.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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