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Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough compared Donald Trump’s continued claims about the 2020 election to themes explored in George Orwell’s 1984 after the president’s nominee to lead the nation’s intelligence community repeatedly declined to say that former President Joe Biden won the election.
Nomination of Jay Clayton
During a contentious Senate confirmation hearing, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, was repeatedly asked whether Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Clayton acknowledged only that Biden had been “certified” as president, stopping short of directly recognizing his victory while also avoiding questions about his previous statements regarding election integrity. If confirmed, Clayton will replace acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte.
The hearing came one day before Trump delivered a televised address centered on his continued claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Criticizing Donald Trump’s DNI pick
On a recent episode of Morning Joe, the panel aired several exchanges from the confirmation hearing before Scarborough criticized Clayton’s testimony, accusing him of striving to “entertain the president’s delusions.”
“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,” Scarborough said.
“But, again, you have this man, this learned man, who, again, is more interested in the president’s delusions about 2020 than telling the truth,” he added.
Calling back to George Orwell’s ‘1984’
Scarborough then referenced Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
“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 told his audience.
The host also invoked political philosopher Hannah Arendt, saying, “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 [Adolf] Hitler. She was talking about [Joseph] Stalin. We could be talking about [Viktor] Orbán or any number of authoritarians through the years,” he added.
Scarborough concluded by calling Clayton’s hearing “demeaning for him but also frightening for us that he can’t state what everybody in that room knew” — that Biden won the 2020 election.
