Ep. 81 Transcript: Joe Scarborough on President Truman's legacy

Today we brought Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough to discuss his new book Saving Freedom: Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization.

If you want to purchase Joe’s book,or any other book featured on The Realignment, check out our bookshop.org storefront. We get a 10% commission on sales and you help support local booksellers.

The Realignment releases episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Our Substack goes out every Friday. Subscribe below:

Where to Listen:

• Browser

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• YouTube

---

Full Transcript:

Note: This is a rough transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Marshall Kosloff: Joe Scarborough, welcome to The Realignment.

Joe Scarborough: Thank you so much, Marshall. It's great to be here. Really appreciate it.

Saagar Enjeti: Good to see you, Joe.

Marshall Kosloff: So Joe, let's just start here. These books about any President when they air, come out after an election, they're usually making a statement about the moment. After the 2012 election, you had a book that came out about Ike, Reagan, the Republican party's evolution, during the second half of the 20th century. Pre play research.

Joe Scarborough: Nobody listened to that shit. If they had, we wouldn't have gone in the direction that they went in. I wrote three books trying to tell Republicans not to lose their, can I swear here?

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, please

Joe Scarborough: Not to lose their shit and they never listened. But if you go back and you read the book that I wrote in '13 and the book I wrote in '09, the book I wrote in '04, it was all just begging my party, to keep it, to stay conservative. I'm a small government conservative, but to be conservative with a small C, and I finally gave up and just started writing about Democrats.

Marshall Kosloff: But you just led me into my question, which is Harry Truman. Why Harry Truman in 2020?

Joe Scarborough: It's interesting. The timing was great. I had no idea when I started writing the book. I had actually written a book about Trump because cause I'd known Trump for 12,13 years, went through about four or five drafts. And I finally decided after the 14th book on Trump dropped, is that I'm just, I said, I'm not. Listen.

I don't, I'm not going to get into that crowd. So I decided I was gonna, because I got so tired about talking about Donald Trump for three hours a day and writing about him for a year. I said, I'm going to write about some Presidents that I loved that inspired me to get involved in politics.

And I got elected to Congress in '94, which, 8,000 years ago. And when I went in, I was considered this right wing, small government, libertarian, populist, and people would come into my office and see two pictures. One would be of Ronald Reagan that would surprise nobody, but the other one was of Harry Truman.

And they asked me why I had Truman. There were a lot of different reasons why, another one of my heroes in high school with Harry Truman along with, Bobby Kennedy as well. Both of them said it like it was. Both of them had no problem going against the orthodoxies of their day, even the orthodoxies of their own political parties.

But with Truman, I love the fact that he came from a humble background. Maybe it's the populist in me, the state school guy in me. I love that he came from a humble background, and ended up changing the world in a way that led Winston Churchill to saying, 'of all men, no one has done more to save Western civilization than Harry Truman.'

What he did over the course of two or three years, following World War II forever changed our world, created a stage, an international stage that helped launch the American century, alleviated I think an unprecedented refugee crisis across Europe and help rebuild Europe.

Saagar Enjeti: Okay, Joe, contextualize that a little bit, because you put Truman so far in that Pantheon of Presidents where not a lot of people would necessarily put it.

You've got Washington's farewell, Monroe doctrine, World War I, and then Truman. Not, again, not a demarcation point that we might traditionally think of. Why do you put him that way? Because I tend to agree with you, but, and I think he deserves the, I think he deserves the credit due. Why do you think it's been so long that we're only just recognizing that?

Joe Scarborough: I, unfortunately, I'm going to repeat a joke that I can no longer repeat around my children when I'm explaining things because, they've heard it so much. So now you have to feel their pain. I always thought like the little joke where an old fish is swimming past, two young fish and the old fish goes 'nice water today.'

The young fish say, 'what's water.' And, the, it's not really a funny joke, but it does make a great statement that we are often not aware of what, why, what we're surrounded by. We're not often aware of our own environment. We're often not aware in this case of the foreign policy world that we inherited from Harry Truman. It took Donald Trump and the Trump presidency for us to understand exactly what we were missing. And with Harry Truman, you have a guy who had a lot of failings, but at the same time, on the international stage, he really did create the world that we live in.

He, in 47, he knew that he had to work with Republicans and Democrats alike, and move the country away from the isolationism and peacetime that they'd been in since Washington's farewell address, pass the Truman doctrine, which pushed Stalin and the Soviet union back into Eastern Europe, and stop them from moving forward into central and Western Europe, passed the Marshall plan, which again, alleviated a historic refugee crisis and helped rebuild Europe and then pass NATO.

And in so doing, really promoted Western style democracies, and promoted the democracies that, we've seen actually on the decline over the past four years, whether you look at what Donald Trump's done, or whether you go to look at the what's happening in Hungary, what's happening in Poland, what's happening across the world.

So, I think most historians, even though Truman left with a 22% approval rating and was considered a failure of a President when he left. I think most historians would say, and most foreign policy analysts would say that he was a great or a near great president on the foreign policy stage and the most influential since World War II.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Marshall Kosloff: So here's the question. And then we're not interested in doing a relitigating Donald Trump show. I don't think anyone wants to hear that or do it. But for the quick one point where it's relevant, you're referencing over the past four years ago, four years, this went away. Did it go away because Trump was this aberration that was separate from American traditions or had the edifice that Truman put together along with George C. Marshall, bipartisan set of foreign policy elites moving forward. Did it go away because that foundation has started to rot after the Cold War? How do you think about that?

Joe Scarborough: I think you make a great point in that, I don't know that I would say it has begun to rot. It started to rot under Trump, but I do think if you talk to most foreign policy analysts, serious foreign policy analysts, they would say the Truman doctrine, the Marshall plan, NATO were all extraordinarily important from 1947 to December 25th, 1991 when the Soviet Union fell and they've continued to be relevant, but I don't think there's any doubt, the point that you, your question actually makes a great point that yes, that's worked for the past 75 years, but we need to update those institutions.

We need to make them more relevant as far as NATO goes. I will say, that though it pains me to say this, I do think Donald Trump, even though he has no idea, what the 2% pertains to as far as defense budgets go. I do think Donald Trump's asking questions that a lot of Americans have been asking.

Marshall Kosloff: Could you clarify the 2% point because you're referencing NATO.

Joe Scarborough: Oh, my God, sorry.

Marshall Kosloff: There's everyday people who listen to me after

Joe Scarborough: Donald Trump would always go 'they all promise to pay 2% for their defense budgets and I've got them to repay more money.' And there was this big NATO pot. No it's just a requirement that if you're in NATO that you spend 2% of your annual budget on defense and there are some countries that have not done that.

And so I think a lot of Americans, 75 years after, 79 years now after Pearl Harbor, are saying to themselves, wait, should we really carry the load for all of Europe? Should we carry the load for Japan? And I agree, we shouldn't carry it as much as we have over the past 75 years or so, which goes to your point, we need to get, the Europeans and Japan and South Korea and other allies as engaged as we can.

So I, I do think it would have been good for us to have a President who actually understood foreign policy diplomacy, could have carried to its logical end. But I'm hoping that the Biden administration will continue to keep pressure on our allies to contribute to the cost of defense.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Marshall Kosloff: Sorry Saagar. One quick thing here. And what you're saying brings up something I noted at the start where you described yourself as a populist, humble roots. I'm a fellow state school grad here too. So I identify with that, to a certain degree, there's a contradiction here, foreign policy, especially the foreign policy history that you're telling is incredibly elite driven.

All of these guys, even Robert A. Taft who was the, not populist, but he's the more isolationist adjacent. And he's the one who was making these Trumpian, like arguments in the fifties as a sort of remodel to this, it's an elite project, right? He was the son of a president top of his school, top of his class at Harvard, all those sorts of things.

How do you as a person, firstly define your populism. That's just interesting to hear, because if you're a listener, you're thinking, wait, Joe, you're at MSNBC. What kind of populist is that? How does that work? And then how do you think about the way that foreign policy is the opposite of any form of humble, salt of the earth driven place?

Joe Scarborough: As far as my populism goes, perhaps I've become a little less populist than I was in 1995 when I was carrying around a torch, and screaming 'the streets will flow with the blood of the unbelievers.' I'm not doing that anymore. I am, at the  same time that I'm skeptical of the federal government becoming too involved in our lives.

I also am extraordinarily skeptical of The Wall Street, Journal editorial page and CEOs and hedge fund managers. Just talking about unfettered free trade, no matter what. I believe in free trade generally, just like I believe in smaller government generally. But obviously there are times when the federal government needs to get involved there are times where the federal government needs to get aggressively involved.

And there are times when we need to pull back from trade deals and make sure they're negotiated in a way that don't damage working class Americans' lives, don't hurt union members as much as I think they have in the past. Now that said I still support. I think it was a mistake that we didn't move forward with TPP, because I think that would have been a bold strategic move.

It would have helped us in our competition with China. But at the same time, I think it's a question of just negotiating in a tough way. I also think too, and this is a mistake that I made in Congress, one of the many mistakes I made in Congress. I would talk to small business owners, they would complain about regulations.

They would complain, there'd be one guy that had two workers and he would spend three days of his week, dealing with federal and state and local regulations, OSHA regulations, environmental regulations in Florida, the DEP whatever. And I really felt for him, I think a lot of us that got up there were like saying, hey, we got to cut regulations.

We've got to cut regulations. Some of those regulations we cut where it was like a one size fits all approach. And we cut regulations for Wall Street.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: And so we were like, wait, well wait. So while these banks are saying that they, that federal government should be telling them what they can and what they can't do.

And it was a one size fits all approach. And it was, I think it was devastating. It led to the financial collapse of 2008. So I don't, I'm not a, I am not a Wall Street Journal, editorial page conservative. I don't think I ever have been. I don't think what's good for Wall Street is good for America. I don't believe that if the less taxes billionaires and multi-millionaires pay the better off it is for Americans. I agree with Warren Buffett, that you  take, for instance, a capital gains tax, it doesn't have to be down to the zero or 10% or 12% people are gonna still make investments, even if they're taxed on those investments. I may not have answered your question very well. No, I don't blindly.

I am listen. I'm a small government, free market, free enterprise guy, but I don't trust this Congress. I didn't trust Trump. And, I wouldn't trust anybody in Washington to just blindly cut taxes and blindly cut regulations like my party has been doing over the past 25 years because it leads to gross inequities that actually threatens American capitalism, and I am an American capitalist, but what we have done over the past quarter century has damaged capitalism and has undermined people's confidence in American capitalism because the income disparity is so grotesque.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. Not a lot of disagreement here, Joe. The real question though, is in this system that you're talking about the post Cold War era, because that's where this actually becomes most important.

A lot of these underlying assumptions around the cold war get transferred into really the era where you came up,'94, right? PNTR. With China, permanent normal trade relations, NAFTA, many of these other trade deals, TPP, like you've mentioned there at the tail end of at that at least era where people were singing this song as one of unfettered good and if you questioned it, you were a quack, right? That is where I think everything went wrong. And where I have said here is it's, I'm not against elites. It's just, I think we have a bad elite with bad assumptions that have gotten us now in the post-World war era, Iraq Afghanistan, many of these trade deals exacerbating the inequality and the inequities that you described there.

How do you reckon with that? Which is that, how do you reckon with that era where I think things really did go off the rails. And a lot of the assumptions were that were so baked into our politics, our elites, in our daily life became utterly and totally disconnected to the point where a man named Donald Trump was able to ascend to the presidency by pointing them out.

Joe Scarborough: So I'm writing down a list right now and this is one of my favorite exercises, just to talk about the failure of elites. And I was a populist before this, but, so let's just talk about this century. Yeah. Cause you all are so young and so good looking. I am priviledged to see how young and good looking you are.

You won't remember this, but at the turn of the century in 2000, The United States was in an extraordinary position. We were, talk about peace and prosperity. We were, I think probably at the height of American influence across the globe without any real challengers. And then in 2001, we had 9/11.

In 2002, we had WorldCom, MCI and Enron. In 2003, we had weapons of mass destruction. In 2004 or five, we had Katrina. In 2006, we had the Iraq war and sectarian violence tearing Iraq to shreds. In 2008, we had the wall street meltdown, and you can just go down the list and you can continue that list.

And I think there has been a failure of Washington elites and what I'm about to say will ensure that everybody will be angry at me so I'm going to go ahead and say it, whether you love George W. Bush or hated George W. Bush, whether you love Barack Obama, hated Barack Obama, whether you love Donald Trump or hated Donald Trump.

I can tell you the, these three gentlemen shared one thing in common. They didn't understand Washington. They didn't really like being in Washington. And all of them would prefer to watch ESPN most of the day to actually being president of the United States. And I understand that, yes, and I've said Barack Obama was one of the most important presidents, not only in our lifetime, but I, as far as the advancement of civil rights in America, I say, The emancipation proclamation, Martin Luther King, in 1963 and the election of Barack Obama.

And you know what I'm going to say now. That's sad. It was a glorified state Senator, right? A glorified state Senator that came to Washington, Harry Reed immediately saw him and said, you don't like it here. Why don't you run for president? And so he got into the presidency the same way George W. Bush got into the presidency, the same way Donald Trump got into the presidency, not understanding Capitol Hill.

Not really liking or respecting the senators that he was working with. And if you don't believe me on Barack Obama, my God that  most of the  bad stuff I heard about Barack Obama came from senior Democratic senators on Capitol Hill saying this guy just doesn't understand. This guy is not communicating with us.

He's actually collapsed his entire cabinet down to two people, Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes. They make all the decisions on foreign policy. The Secretary of State doesn't matter. The national security advisor doesn't matter. None of them had matter. Donald Trump, my God, it collapsed down into one person.

With Donald Trump and George W. Bush just, he was surrounded by people who were supposedly the wise men of Washington DC, but he didn't really listen to them. When he was asked why he didn't ever bring Colin Powell into the office to get his advice on whether he should go into Iraq or not. Since Colin Powell actually had led the fight in Iraq, just a decade earlier, he said, I knew where he stood.

I knew he was against the war. So there's no need for me to get his opinion. And so there was a lack of understanding that Harry Truman had, that Joe Biden has, that LBJ, for instance, look at these three presidents. You've got Joe Biden who people always look down on because he went to a state school.

He wasn't an Ivy league guy. He talked about that during the campaign. Look at LBJ who graduated from Southwest Texas teachers college, and then a Harry Truman who takes the cake on this front, graduated from Spalding commercial college in Kansas City. And you have these three gentlemen who didn't have the education pedigree that most of official Washington and elites would want.

But they had the political pedigree. They understood how the Senate worked. So when it hit the fan for Harry Truman, when he was put into the Presidency, despite the fact that FDR didn't even tell him about the Manhattan project, didn't tell him about anything. He knew who to call in the Senate and he immediately got lined up with Arthur Vandenberg who had been an avowed isolationist.

He was smart enough to understand this is the guy I have to talk to. And not only did he talk to him during the day, but Walter Isaacson described in the Wise Men, described how at the end of every day, Truman would make his staff get in the car and drive over to VandenBerg's townhouse and brief him on everything they had done all day.

This is one of my, this is one of my biggest complaints about Bush and the Iraq war. He could have gotten buy-in. He could have gotten even more buy-in if he had slowed down. But he didn't do it. It's the same thing with Barack Obama and Obamacare. I understand the Republicans were horrific. I understand what Mitch McConnell said.

I understand all of that, but, and I think a lot of Democrats would really will disagree with me strongly here, especially my friends who worked in the Obama administration. They said we did everything we could do, but she said, okay. So I know Mitch McConnell was a jerk and said he wanted you to fail.

What outreach did he do with Mitch McConnell? We invited him over to eat, okay. You know how many times, one time, one time, one time. And it didn't go well. That's not how Washington works. I don't say this as a critique on Barack Obama. I really don't. I'm just saying we've had three presidents in this century that haven't understood how Washington works.

I learned really quickly. I came up as a hot head. I learned very quickly. I would go into the House floor. And you'll never find a picture of me sitting down with Republicans on the house floor. I immediately went to the Democratic side. All of my friends, Democrats, all of them. When I come back to Washington, it's Democratic because I would always go in, I would sit down, I would talk to Democrats.

I might, my friendships would be with Democrats because I knew that's how I was going to get things done. And I also just socially was more relaxed with Democrats than Republicans, but Harry Truman understood it. I think Joe Biden's gonna understand it. I hear time and time again from Republicans that when they needed to get things done during the Obama administration, they'd go to Biden because Biden understood the horse trading that went on, on Capitol Hill.

Marshall Kosloff: So quick thing, Joe here, what if there's a problem here, which is that what if Bush, Obama, Trump have correct intuition, which Washington actually doesn't work, which the system you're referring to with Truman LBJ, you're really catching the tail end of this. You have people like Tip O'Neill being Speaker of the House, working with Reagan a decade before you came into Congress.

That system no longer works. And there's no such thing as understanding DC anymore. And what DC is actually good at is implementing these failed 21st century policies we're talking about. And at the same time, this is where I would sympathize with you. They are what they're capable of. Here's a better way of putting this.

Obama, Trump, and Bush are capable of diagnosing the DC doesn't work. There are good politicians, so they can make the case and get elected on that, but they can't actually implement what's next. I guess I want to just challenge the idea that there is such thing as how Washington works in 2020.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: It's Politics. It's, it has been, this is how things have worked for thousands of years for several thousand years. Bismarck said politics is the art of the possible. The problem is when you don't understand how Washington works, when you aren't there, you don't understand that usually a good deal is when both sides go away pissed off. You don't understand that you have to give up a lot to get a lot. And that's something that, again, because these people weren't creatures of Washington, they didn't understand. Let's look at two governors who understood how to make things work in Washington, DC, one Republican, one Democrat, and they share one thing in common.

Ronald Reagan in California as a Governor, Bill Clinton in Arkansas as Governor. Guess what? Ronald Reagan always had to deal with liberals in California. Had to, had no choice or else he wouldn't pass legislation. Bill Clinton, poor guy, 12 years had to deal with Arkansas conservatives and was never going to get anything done unless he'd figured out how to do that.

And both of them figured out how to do it. And I will tell you, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton couldn't stand the Republican Congress. Did not understand us. Didn't, just didn't get it at all. And we couldn't stand Bill Clinton, but Clinton was smart enough. He knew how to always put us in a corner. Sure. The great thing about Clinton though, really quickly, we could impeach him on Tuesday and on Wednesday, he'd call you up and he'd be like, let's go golf. Yeah. What? Because Bill Clinton always understood what these three guys in the 21st century haven't understood. There's always another vote. There's always another time they're going to need you on legislation. And that's why he got a lot of things done with the Republican Congress that did not like him.

Saagar Enjeti: Totally. And look, we talk a lot here about those power dynamics and I completely agree. I can just hear the internal screams of some of our listeners cause they're like, yeah, but when they worked together, it was bad. It was like, Reagan worked with Democrats to cut taxes and usher in this large explosion of what we have today, which is that, and this is, our left listeners are like, yeah, bill Clinton worked with Republicans to gut welfare.

Every time Washington comes together. Or for example, what you're putting forward, let's say the Georgia Senate races go the way they do. Biden and Mitch McConnell could team up in order to pass TPP again. I know he does support that, but a lot of people don't, it seems really that what you're talking, it sounds almost like you're fetishizing bipartisanship for the sake of it without the ends themselves being considered.

Joe Scarborough: No. a bad bill is a bad bill. I don't want to get that fucking bill passed. And I say that to all of your friends that are listening right now. Right now, there are Americans who are suffering because we can't get COVID relief through the United States Senate, the House passed it, the Senate won't pass it.

And Mitch McConnell has proven that he operates in bad faith time and time again. So what are we seeing happening? And I'm excited about it. We're seeing Republicans and Democrats alike coming together. And so whether it's on the Republican side, you're gonna have Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and, Lisa Murkowski, is going to be working with Joe Manchin I'm sure Mark Kelly, Kyrsten Sinema. I think in the new Senate, you're going, you'll have Governor Hickenlooper, Senator Hickenlooper, going to have six, seven, eight, nine centrists, that are going to get together and help pass legislation that I guarantee you Bernie Sanders will hate on the left and Tom Cotton will hate on the right.

So yeah. Is Bernie going to get everything he wants? No. Or Democrats? No. And Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz and all the people on the right that claim to be small government Republicans, but are actually raging hypocrites who blew out the deficit and the debt more than anybody else. They're all going to be complaining. But I do think there's going to be a middle ground where we can get some good legislation passed.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, just, but again though, this is my point, which is that, and I've covered this a lot in day in, day out. Okay. That bipartisanship bill isn't great. It's got corporate liability. It's got no stimulus checks has got a modest increase in unemployment insurance.

And that is like half of what Nancy Pelosi could have gotten. You said, Mitch McConnell doesn't operate in good faith. I don't think really Pelosi does either. She all but admitted it recently. And that's just to my point is when we have an environment here, stimulus checks are at 85%. Something like that.

If you go and you look at the polls and that's just not even within the bipartisan consensus. So it seems to me that the bipartisan consensus on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on economics and so much more is dramatically out of step with where the people are. So when you're saying like, Bernie is not going to get what he wants, it sounds a bit flippant, but Josh Hawley's also not going to get what he wants.

Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, but I'm saying what they want. You have two senators who represent. Two out of 98 who are demanding something, which is demanded by 80% of the people. And that's where the out of step nature of this just seems to be a bit of a problem.

Joe Scarborough: Well, I don't, I don't know what to say other than it's

Marshall Kosloff: We don't get Washington.

Joe Scarborough: Let me tell you, let me tell ya. It's just simple math. If you're Joe Biden, you're either going to have to get to 50. Or you're going to have to get to 51. And unfortunately, for a lot of your listeners, I think Republicans have been far more effective in driving hard bargains over the past several years.

But, looking ahead, are we going to get over the next two years the type of healthcare reform that I would like, that you all would like, I'm afraid not because what, while I am a small government conservative in many respects, I think our healthcare system is an absolute disgrace. And I think we need to actually fix Obamacare and expand upon Obamacare.

I don't see that happening over the next two years, unless you have people, unless some of the Republicans will get on board. Maybe they will. I do think we have a shot at immigration reform, real meaningful immigration reform and Republicans have remained silent, and, in a time of moral crisis, not only on the immigration situation, but also on refugee crisis, that we've  had.

So I'm hopeful we can get there. I know, the last six years of the Obama administration, no meaningful legislation was passed. So President Obama was forced to sign executive orders. Donald Trump, didn't give a damn about getting anything passed in a meaningful way. So other than his tax cut, which was grotesque, and the amount of money it gave to the richest Americans, you can't even say 1% beyond that.

He just signed executive orders. I'm, I am a hopeful, I'm hopeful that we can have a consensus on a lot more legislation, that can get passed. I'm curious. How did you think Nancy, was not, has not operated in good faith?

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, I know. It's a good question. She was asked recently in that press conference on Friday, or I get we're taping this on Monday just for everybody's, just for everybody's awareness.

And she was like, yeah, I'm open to a smaller bill. Now that Joe Biden is president elect and I'm like, now the upper bound of what's possible is $900 billion. Previously it was 1.8 trillion. And look, maybe McConnell and them shoot it down.

Marshall Kosloff: Maybe Saagar. The quick context to give here is that the argument would be that supporting the bad faith, which is an additional round of stimulus checks would have helped Trump win reelection, which I think is true.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. I think it's 100% true. Trump wins the election if another round of stimulus checks goes through. So if Nancy, look at the end of the day, she probably made the right political calculation. But I think it was, it's a big problem. I'm just looking now today, the average American owes, or there's an owed, I think of $5,000 in back rent and in expenses.

Because, we have an eviction moratorium, but we don't have a rent moratorium or more. And I look at that and I'm like, this is a profound failure. And look, there's no Mitch McConnell stanning going on here. I just think it's a true bipartisan failure at this point.

Joe Scarborough: It really is and we're in trouble. I there's no doubt, working Americans are in trouble.

And I think we're in trouble as a nation. There's a lot of things that have been happening over the past six to nine months economically that are going to catch up with us in 2021. And the lack of stimulus checks, the lack of COVID relief, I think is, I think even if they end up passing something, It's most likely not going to be enough, because what's been happening the past two or three months.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. This is a disaster.

Marshall Kosloff: So let me be the devil's advocate here. Not for this specific argument, but just point out something that people are no doubt thinking, Joe, you started this episode off by pointing out that you've been writing a lot and thinking about the future of the Republican party, obviously, you still have a very important voice a lot of people listen to. Do you think a. What's your thought on the future of the Republican party as we're navigating this weird Trump interregnum, where it's not clear whether he'sleaving or staying, and then two, do you think that people are willing to listen to what you say, and not just you personally, but the class of people that you represent.

And I mean that in the best sense of the term, which is that you are a former Republican office holder, you have a prominent media space. How do you just think about that when you think about the obvious idea of it. Cause this is what, it's useful when we're talking about the people back home in the sense of, I'm sure there are plenty of people in Florida who are like, Joe abandoned us.

He didn't support Trump. So I'm not going to listen to him about the future, even if we're talking about entirely different things.

Saagar Enjeti: Yep.

Joe Scarborough: Yeah. For me, it's very simple. I love my job. I get paid, they get paid more money than I ever thought I'd get paid to say exactly what I think. And that's why I'm able to criticize both parties.

Marshall Kosloff: And why aren't you a politician on TV? I don't understand.

Joe Scarborough: And I don't care, but I really, I, no, I'm worried about the country and I'm worried about the future of the country. And I just, I'll, let me just, I'll just lay it out. I hope this Republican party has no future. I hope it's destroyed.

Donald Trump is a racist. He's a bigot, he's fascist and my Republican friends, and I can still call them friends. I can have friends that I disagree with politically, but my Republican friends that I used to work with have remained silent through the racism, through the  fascism,through the breaching of constitutional norms.

I hope they go the way the Whig party. And I, I don't think they deserve anything more than a complete and total collapse.

Marshall Kosloff: What's fascinating here is that we just saw two different Joe Scarborough's though, because earlier in the episode, you're referencing Robert Kennedy and LBJ.

Hard-nosed Truman, Bill Clinton, golfing one day getting impeached another day. It's very realistic, right? It's very, how do you see works? It's not pretty, but then we're talking now about how Republicans should have acted during the Trump era, which the hard nose part of us would know that mostly the Republican politicians are not popular with the base.

You would know that Donald Trump would. It's even like look what would happen to, how am I forgetting this Senator from Alabama? Who was the, Jeff Sessions? So what would happened to Jeff Sessions? Jeff Sessions, who even went Trumpy yet still at the end of the day was stomped over it.

So how do you reconcile the, what you think is the morally right thing to do with the politically advantageous thing to do?

Joe Scarborough: First of all, if I were in Congress, I would have to deal with people that I disagree with. That's why I told you what I was considered a right wing nut job. I would go in Congress and I would sit down and all my friends would be Democrats.

And we would try to find areas that we agreed on. But for me personally, I have to do what I think is morally right. Which I haven't seen a lot of, politically I haven't seen a lot of Republicans doing that. Listen, you're talking to a guy right now who led a coup against the first Republican speaker to sit in the chair in 40 years because I didn't think he was, I didn't think Gingrich was keeping his word on a variety of issues.

And so you are right. If I were in the United States Senate and I were a Democrat, I would have to figure out how to work with Republicans. And regardless of how horrifically they acted, just like Democrats in the 1970s, including Joe Biden, had to work with segregationists and past segregationists, whether it was Eastland or whether it was Strom Thurmond or whoever it was you just, again, you got to get to 51 votes.

So you got to make that calculation and get there any way you can, but I guess because I am a Republican, I was a Republican, I guess I hold my own side to a higher level. And what this Republican party has proven is what I spent my entire life, trying to disprove that Republicans weren't racists, that Republicans, weren't a, hard-hearted when it came to taking care of poor people. That Republicans, weren't, anti-immigrant all of these things. This Republican party under Donald Trump, they've actually proven that all every horrible thing that liberals have said about the Republican Party over the past 25 years are true.

Saagar Enjeti: And yet Joe, Donald Trump just got more minority votes than second most amount of minority votes than any Republican since 1960. He got, he improved his performance in this party. And when you're talking here, we want it to go the way of, you know what, I can't remember what you said, but you essentially want it to go the way of the Whig party.

Joe Scarborough: I want the party to die.

Saagar Enjeti: So what if though, that the party that you talk about from 1990s, is dead, has gone the way of the Whigs, and that Trump is the future of the Republican party, because look, we, you talked about Joe Biden.

He can talk state school, all he wants, but if we look at the suburbs, if we look at who exactly is voting, the clearest delineator of votes in the 2020 presidential election was a four year college degree. And second to that, largely was wealth, and the democratic party largely embodied by a swing of many folks like yourself, former Republicans going and voting for Joe Biden.

And that's fine, right? Because there's a millions of working class Americans. So why would you want that to die? You've just talked here about working class consensus. You've talked here about questioning trade. You've talked here about so much of the mistakes of the elite. That is what Trump embodied.

And if there is a future of the Republican party, I would say Trump at his best, embodied it. And if there is a future for the Republican party, don't you think it's going to look a lot more like Donald Trump than it is what you're discussing.

Joe Scarborough: But this is a party that sat silently by while Donald Trump lied about a pandemic that's going to end up killing about 400,000-500,000 Americans. This is a Republican party that remained silent when Donald Trump refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if you lost. This is a Republican party that remained silent when Donald Trump tried to arrest, tried to have arrested his political opponent the last two weeks of the campaign. Think about that. He was trying to pressure his Attorney General to arrest his political opponent. And Republicans remained silent. There could be, because here's the deal. This is an. This isn't about their ideology.

This isn't about their issue, where they stand on issues that engagement in the world, the Republican party has proven over the past four years, and especially in the past four weeks that they have moved to an anti democracy, a post democracy party. There can be no compromise for that. I can compromise with Bernie Sanders all fucking day. Bernie, you want students to have all of their loans,

Saagar Enjeti: our Bernie people are loving this right now.

Joe Scarborough: Bernie, you want shit that's never gonna happen. Okay. But let me tell you something. I understand. I think the student loan, racket, I think it's a scam. So let's figure out where we meet the middle Bernie, and you know what Bernie would say. He'd go, okay, Joe, let's do it.

Okay. So we can disagree radically on the way we look at things and we can still find a middle ground because Bernie knows he's never going to get 51 votes for his socialist democratic view of America. And I know I'm not going to get 51 votes for my worldview from 10, 15 years ago. At this point, I will tell you my obsession is, having Washington work again, and having conservatives and Democrats, socialists and libertarians figuring out how to get Washington to work again, not. Not to pass legislation just for the sake of passing legislation, but moving the ball down the field on a healthcare, on student loans, on immigration, on education reform on all of these issues that matter.

And again, I'm not going to be happy with everything. Bernie's not going to be happy with everything, but we could sit down and talk.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: Which, which is something you can't, how do you sit down, how do you find a middle ground with a political party that is trying to throw out 150 million votes and disregard an election?

They are either anti-democracy or they are post democracy. I don't know what you call it, but they don't, they don't deserve to survive. One other thing I want to say to, you said that Trump got more minority votes than anybody else?

Saagar Enjeti: Second, sorry. Second to Bush. Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: Okay. But let me say this, first of all, the poll sucked this year.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: The exit polls, like how can we trust the exit polls? I don't know.

Saagar Enjeti: Let's go County by County data, then County by County data. Right. Zapata County.

Joe Scarborough: So let's say that Donald Trump really did get 12% of the black vote. Big deal. He lost 88% of the Black vote. And let's say he got 33% of the Hispanic votes. Guess what?

He lost 67% of the Hispanic vote. And guess what? The demographic changes. This is what, this is my pet peeve since the election. I write the demographics is destiny. Cause that's been something I've been arguing for years based on my concerns about entitlements, social security, Medicare, everything else.

But demographics still is destiny. So Donald Trump got 33% of the Hispanic vote. Guess what? In the state of Texas there nine Hispanic babies being born for every one white, Caucasian baby. All right. If I don't want Republicans to ever win the white house again, I'm good with getting 67% of the Hispanic vote and 80, 80, 88% of the black vote, because they're never going to win the White House back again with the numbers breaking the way they're breaking over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

Saagar Enjeti: To me, it's all about the trend line, right? Which is that if you can increase your Hispanic performance and 33 today, 40, tomorrow, 50, the next, who knows, again, this is all contingent on a bunch of policies, which I'm probably just as black pilled on the GOP as you are, for different reasons.

But I guess the question I keep coming back to is why is it as morally objectionable to stand by and watch Bush lie about the war in Iraq? Then it is. How has that somehow codified and fine. And yet what you're laying about it, but the pandemic and voter fraud, et cetera, it just seems like rank partisanship all around.

That's the part that I can't get my head around, which is that if we're going to go back to a Republican party that stood by and watched American soldiers get killed in Iraq and didn't speak out for years and years and years, how was that not frankly more morally objectionable than what we have right now?

Joe Scarborough: I think if you sit down and you talk to people that knew George W. Bush, that worked with George W. Bush, you can start with Ted Kennedy and others. They would say that though George W. Bush, was a fatally flawed president, certainly as it pertained to Iraq, there were other areas where he did extraordinary things.

He saved 13 million, 14 million lives. PEPFAR was, in Africa with PEPFAR. You could talk about the fact that he was a champion for immigration reform. He was out front on immigration reform, working with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform. He worked with Ted Kennedy on education reform. He was I, and I will say, you're talking to somebody here who, you know, I as much as I liked George W. Bush personally, I considered him an absolute failure as a president. And it stung me more because I thought he hurt American conservatism. I thought he hurt the Republican party. And I thought he heard our country globally. I thought he took a great opportunity on 9/11, and, to after the tragedy of 9/11 and people coming together, I thought he took a great opening for us to reach out to not only to our friends and allies, but also to our enemies and try to, basically, move this country in a more positive direction. Instead, we went into  Iraq and it was a colossal disaster, but that said whether you're talking about George W. Bush, whether you're talking about Barack Obama, whether you're talking about even Richard Nixon.

Talk to people who worked with Richard Nixon they say that guy genuinely loved his country. He did what he did because he loved this country. He was misguided. He should have ended up in jail, but I don't hear anybody that talks about Donald Trump and suggests that this guy was doing what he was doing, because he thought it was in the best interest of this country misguided or not.

It isn't worse that the Republican party, including myself at the beginning, supported going into Iraq because we thought Saddam Hussein probably had weapons of mass destruction and my even still be trying to build a nuclear weapons. Do I think that that's as bad as Republicans standing by while Donald Trump is trying to steal an election?

No. I don't. I think there's a huge difference. I think there's a huge difference when Donald Trump is calling the press enemies of the people, when Donald Trump is constantly attacking, instead of working with Democrats, like Bush did a before and after Iraq. Um, I think Trump is in a complete, I think Trump is in a completely new zone.

And I think when people try to compare what Donald Trump's done, by questioning the independence of the federal judiciary, by calling the press enemies of the people, by claiming absolute power under article two, by hiring people, like Stephen Miller who puts his policies forward to put children in cages.

I just don't think, I don't think there's any moral equivalece there. And I think people that do try to paint a moral equivalence, they are doing the bidding of Donald Trump.

Marshall Kosloff: So in the name,

Joe Scarborough: You don't buy that do you?

Saagar Enjeti: We don't have enough time to go into it.

Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. Look in the name of ending on a positive note of agreement, because this is the big debate that people are going to have basically for the next, for the rest of all of our lives.

Especially if they were coming up with this. We want to end on the note of media. Because obviously let's talk about you for a second, Morning Joe, Morning Joe is great. It was really innovative. It was an actual new way of approaching, the news format, especially from a former politician. Today, something everyone is noticing is all the politicians, while they're in office have podcasts. There's always new channels coming up. How do you think about this space? Because let's just pretend you'd left office in 2018 or you were still in office now, what would you be doing as someone who thought deeply about the media space?

Because frankly, during quarantine, we watched a morning show and then we read, Brian Stelter's book that was the basis of the morning show. You talked all about what you were doing to put together Morning, Joe. That was really funny. So yeah. So what would you say I think about this space if you were starting straight right now,

Joe Scarborough: You mean the podcast space?

Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. Podcasting is a media format, right? Because it's super easy and cheap to do this. We're doing this over zoom or in different States. That's the new thing versus cable, especially, mid two thousands like this, wasn't the dynamic that anyone's doing. So if you were starting out now, how would you think as a creator and a politician in this space?

Joe Scarborough: I would do the same thing that I'm doing on Morning Joe, wherever I did it, which was, you know what, I love the fact that you guys know where I stand.

I love the fact, all the mistakes I've made in the past and we can talk about it. We can debate it. I think people like that, I think the morning show worked because when I got on, I could say, Hey. I I'm a Republican and let me just really piss you off here. And meek, and I would have the most heated arguments about enhanced interrogation techniques also known as torture, right. And so we would have these horrible arguments and I would say, isn't it just so convenient in 2007 that we can all sit back and be shocked and stunned, and try to throw the guys in jail who were doing that in 2002 when Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein and I won't even name the rest of them because they're all my friends, which I'm sure you guys hate too, but Democrats and Republicans alike were like, yeah. What are you doing? Yeah, we going with this and we're taking them, then we go to the black side there. All right. Great, fine. Great. Just do it.

Is it working? Great. Can we do anything else? And then suddenly like the Washington post and a priest breaks a story about black sites and all of this stuff into the program there and go,' Oh, this is the worst thing ever.' I'm like, fuck you, you knew, what was going on all along don't act so shocked and Stein, but what worked is without me saying the F word, except once, on Morning, Joe, we could have that argument on Morning Joe, and it was usually really heated.

Another thing just to enrage your audience, when Michelle Obama said, when Barack Obama was doing, was this the first time I've ever been proud?

Marshall Kosloff: I knew you were gonna say that by the way. I knew exactly what you were going to say.

Joe Scarborough: Mika and I fought for five days over that. Like we get off the show and we were still fighting.

It was going on and on. So it was actually a lot of fun when George Bush was President and Barack Obama was President. But now that Donald Trump, past four years, we've agreed on just about everything. The world's coming to an end locusts are descending from the heavens. They're going to eat the flesh off of our bodies.

Hey, it's like five alarm fire, which has become quite exhausted. But the one thing that everybody knows is no, I just told them out front upfront, can like, ah, you support Don. No, he didn't. I said from the very beginning. I was voting for Jeb Bush. And when Jeff Bush lost, I told people outright, I go, Bush is out of the race, so now I'm going to vote for John Kasich. I remember in 2012 telling people I wanted Jon Huntsman to win. I remember in 2008 telling people I wanted,  let's see, Mitt Romney to win. I really boring. And for really boring white guys,

Marshall Kosloff: Joe, I know people pushed you on this by just have to do it for the sake of the episode.

Joe Scarborough: Let's do it. I, know your gonna do it, I can't wait, come on. I'm ready.

Marshall Kosloff:  It's one thing we have, of course, yeah, like you are going to vote for John Kasich and you wanted Jeb, but you platformed. Donald Trump and you got excellent ratings and you were allotted as an innovator. And to your point, you made a lot of money doing it.

So like at the end of the day, like how much does it matter, that you didn't want to support Trump. That's just like the argument about you platforming him when it was convenient.

Joe Scarborough: So how do I do this without sounding defensive? So let's go, let's walk through this and I'll tell you, I'm going to walk through this and I want to.

I would ask all of your listeners to just be patient, because I'm going to tell you how I really fucked up. Okay. Are you ready? So this is, we're going to walk through this, are you sure I can swear on this? You're all good. Okay. Here's the deal. First of all, people will say you helped Donald Trump in 2016, throughout 2016, it's false.

In December of 2015, after he did the Muslim registry, I said, this is what Germany looked like in 1933. I could never vote for this man. I could never support this man. He's bad for the Republican party. We confronted him about Vladamir Putin in the middle of December of 2015. I'm sure you guys saw that part,that clip, because it's gotten a lot of play even years later.

Sure. I hung up on him. We got into a shouting match. I hung up on him in the middle of 2015. Going into 2016, after, right before Super Tuesday, I said Donald Trump, should be disqualified as President of the United States. It's disqualifying. When he refused to condemn David Duke, refused to condemn the Klan and I continued doing it.

People, the guy was attacking me. Throughout 2016, I was attacking him. We had him on a lot. There's no doubt we had him on a lot. We also, though I said it repeatedly and I could find 30 times in the transcripts where he said, if you're running for office and you want to call in, call in, we'll take your call anytime. Jeb wouldn't do it. Hillary wouldn't do it. We couldn't get Hillary on the show ever. Despite the fact that when Hillary ran in 2008, we were her favorite stop. Like people joked said, Hillary is your girlfriend. You're so nice to her. And we had a great, Hillary and I had a great working relationship.

Not sure why she didn't call in, but Donald called in. Yeah, like somebody said 99% of work is just showing up. That guy would show up. We asked other people to call in other people wouldn't call in. Do I wish we didn't have him on 30, 40 times? You know what, if I were running Germany today from 1932 to 1934, yeah. I wouldn't want Hitler to be on 35 times looking back. It's a, I wish it hadn't happened, but it's not like prime time. Look at prime time and all the networks and what they did was they would run Donald Trump's speech, but they wouldn't run Jeb speeches. They wouldn't run Hillary speeches.

They wouldn't run Kasich speeches, but they would run Trump's speeches at night. I don't think that's fair. And the morning we gave everybody the same opportunity we gave Trump and you can go through the transcripts. And we were harshly critical of the guy for, throughout the overwhelming majority of 2016.

There were some times when he said he was great at what he did, that he was a great political showman that he was, that he destroyed everybody on the debate stage, that he was dominant, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if you were watching, you knew we were, we had a hostile relationship with him most of the year.

Now this is where we really screwed up. Looking back where I think we made a terrible mistake, was, even though at the time we thought she was going to be President. So we focused on it more, the emails. We followed the New York times stories on the Hillary emails. Like everybody did.

We stayed on her. I remember being critical of her after the UN press conference saying she didn't do enough to put it behind her. I remember us being critical of the Clinton foundation, how much money they made at the Clinton foundation. I remember being critical of her for getting paid like $250,000 from Goldman Sachs or getting paid $250,000 from New York state schools going, man, if I, if somebody from my old district asked me to go back and speak for a college, not only could I not charge them $250,000, I couldn't charge them at all because I had been working to, but all of these things seem so small compared to what we've seen over the past four years with Donald Trump and compared to what Donald Trump was doing in 2016 already. So I do think if I could  rewind it, that's definitely  something that I wish that I would do. People always bring up, say, you know what, at one point, Donald Trump, thanked Joe and Mika for their support.

Guess what? I can't control what a mad man does or says. He also thanked David Axelrod for his support. Thank you, David, for your support and all he was doing was thank you for saying that you thought that I could win. We never, we've never supported him and I've got tweets from him to prove it.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. It's honestly, this critique has always annoyed me. It's like you just said, when a politician wants to call in on news show, you take the call, especially a major presidential contender. And I just think it's so dumb. And frankly, I don't think you did anything wrong on Hillary either. I thought you were doing your job.

I watched the show all throughout the time. The final question we have here is, we have a very young audience here. My own, frankly, career is made on young people, hating cable news. So thank you.

Joe Scarborough: I'm glad I can help you with that. And by the way, we're so mainstream Morning Joe is now. They must really loathe me. How you guys doing?

Marshall Kosloff: We're going to get no Joe.

Saagar Enjeti: There's a lot of hate mail.

Marshall Kosloff: We are. We are actually. So Scott Galloway came on a few weeks ago. We said a lot on twitter. We got a lot of hate mail on that one. This will probably be our most hate mail episode, but it's great.

Saagar Enjeti: We really don't give a shit. We want to talk to you.

Joe Scarborough: It's funny, John Heilemann about seven or eight years ago said, hey, can you retweet something for me? I go, yeah, but you don't really want me to. Yeah, he goes, no, I really want you to, you got a lot of followers. I said, okay. You sure? Because I'm about to press the retweet button and I did.

They're like, Holy shit. Instead of, the problem with me, as I explained to John is I don't have a home base.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. That's true.

Joe Scarborough: Republicans are like, you're a traitor. And Democrats are like, we don't want you on our side. So it's been this Trump period has been a very interesting period, but can I just say something on that front really quickly? And then we'll get to the last question. This has been, there so many ways that the last four years have been heartbreaking for me as an American, but it has been so awesome to see who are the people that put their country first over politics. And it has been, for me, it's been one of the most exciting things that have happened, for me, to be on the same side with a lot of people who I had been opposing throughout most of my, political career and public life, who had been on the other sides of issues. It was great to be on the same side of people

Marshall Kosloff: Name names.

Joe Scarborough: That love democracy. People that were attacking me, would be attacking me on Twitter and, I don't want to name names cause I'm hoping we can still be friends after this is all over.

But also, there are a lot there also some Republicans who really irritated me, I won't say their names either who, I just didn't like, okay, I'll give you an example. Charlie Sykes. I thought Charlie Sykes was way too close to Paul Ryan and the populist in me, I just, I, as much as I liked Paul, he just, never comfortable.

Again, even though I understand this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, but I spent my entire time in Washington fighting House leadership, Republicans fighting Republicans in the House leadership. And after Trump was elected. I saw that Charlie was one of the good ones. I was like, Oh my God, like he was saying this same thing.

I was saying, he was going crazy about judicial independence. He was going crazy about Trump attacking the media as enemy of the people. And so that was really nice.  And  I could probably name 20, 30 other people like that. So it's, that's been the upside of the past four years.

But go ahead, ask me the question about cable news and hating cable news.

Saagar Enjeti: It's more just, do you think you, do you think that, what do you think the biggest mistakes that cable made in the last four to eight years, which has created frankly, a tremendous market opportunity for people like Marshall and I.

Joe Scarborough: Here's my problem, with answering your question.

I watch three hours of cable news a day, and that's when I'm on cable news. I'm not a big fan of cable news. In fact, it's,

Marshall Kosloff: That's the Morning Joe pitch, in terms of like it's not. Yeah.

Joe Scarborough: I just don't. And it's funny when Mika and I got married and I think the big shock, there's always a shock when you marry somebody.

And I would walk in to the bedroom at nine o'clock at night. And she would be watching cable news and looking at Twitter. And I was just like, looking around, what the fuck what's going on in here? No, I'm not going to hear them yelling. And you already know what they're going to say before they say it like, no, but she loves cable to show.

She grew up in news and that's her thing. I'm on TV because, I don't know why I'm on TV. I want to get my message out. But I really like being on TV, Mika loves TV. She loves the medium. But I mean, if I look at cable news, I just. I think our message. I hope Morning Joe's message despite the fact everybody that's listening now hates Morning Joe, we, Phil Griffin, who's the president of MSNBC told me, about a month in because you have one viewer and it's Tim Russert. Everything you do. Just know that Tim Russert is sitting, watching, and you got to make sure that every question you ask, every segment you have, every guest you have on is something that Tim's not going to roll his eyes on.

We did that and I remember, our highest rated segment in 2007 was getting Walter Isaacson on still asleep in bed, lying on his back, calling in on a telephone and talking about his book on Einstein. And, my producer was going, this is killing us. Crystal Lake was like, this is killing us. It's killing us.

So I did 15 minutes and it's obvious Walter's heart wasn't in it. He was half asleep and he had never heard of the show. And I said, Walter, listen, this has been so fascinating. Thank you so much. And he's got a break. I go, Walter, I love it so much. Can you stay on another 15 minutes?

He was like, nah. So the next day we got the ratings in and it was not only the highest half hour of that day. It was the highest half hour of the year. So I've just seen a lot of dumbing down. I've seen network presidents focusing too much on how people looked instead of how people thought. I've seen, and prime time, listen, if I know what you're gonna say before you say it, I'm just not going to watch your show.

And I just think there's a lot of tribalism going on, especially at night. And it makes me tired.

Saagar Enjeti: Certainly. And then one last Joe question. I also host a morning show and I hate these hours. So what are your tips for having to talk coherently?

Marshall Kosloff: Niche question, audience of one.

Saagar Enjeti: This is literally only for me and my consumption, but what do I do, man?

I,how do you talk cogently and then survive for the rest of the day?

Joe Scarborough: Did you ever see Denzel Washington? The movie where he was the pilot that flew the plane up.

Saagar Enjeti: Flight. Yeah Flight

Joe Scarborough: Flight, flight. Yeah, it was a great movie. Remember how he got ready? I'm joking kids.

Saagar Enjeti: He's referencing cocaine and booze to be clear.

Joe Scarborough: By the way, that's a hell of a movie.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, it's a good movie. 

Joe Scarborough: I'm a sucker for Denzel. Book of Eli. Oh my God. Don't even get me started on book of Eli. But no, I'm really lucky. I'm a morning person. I'm not that much of a morning person, but I used to have, a nighttime show on MSNBC and doing a 10 o'clock show or a nine o'clock show is a lot harder for me than doing a six to nine show. But, the main thing is you just got to get sleep. You just, yeah. You know what? Just, things got to slow down. I used to love daylight savings time when it was dark. I think I'm going to move to like New Brunswick.

And I think I'm going to maybe move to Greenland where it gets dark at three in the afternoon. So everybody eats dinner at four and we're asleep by 5:30. Or maybe just move to Europe somewhere. Anyway, so I appreciate you guys having me and I love, I'm very intrigued by the fact that, you succeed because we piss people off.

There's like circle of life, right?

Marshall Kosloff: So this is, this is the facet. So the reason where we discover this over time is that there's this weird narrative. So a couple of things here, one. Everyone thinks they hate the news, but they don't actually hate the news.

Information's cool, personalities are cool at a fundamental level. Just like you said, politics is thousands of years old. This is hundreds of years old. But if what you do is say, this is news, but it's not like those cable people. That's what they love, because what they love is like the idea, is not being, like Saagar what's your articulation of that?

Saagar Enjeti: No, that's basically, it, people love news. They like highly produced news. They like watching people in suits and all that. They just don't want to hear what they traditionally hear on cable and the monopoly of cable on a certain type of politics and more just creates a nice big opportunity. Right. For us,

Joe Scarborough: Just for you guys. So, can you guys, can I ask you guys a couple of questions now because I got so many questions, who were your, I told you my, the people that got me in politics were Harry Truman, Bobby Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, the sort of eclectic group who inspired you guys?

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. Fascinating for me. Mine is Caro, the Caro books, LBJ. So I'm from Texas, college station and grew up really, during the Iraq war, I was one of those really annoying kids. I was watching people like you. I was like, I would get mad at you whenever you were defending torture.

That's my political ethos, how I came up. And I really thought

Joe Scarborough: By the way, it's enhanced interrogation techniques,

Saagar Enjeti: Enhanced interrogation.

Marshall Kosloff: Yeah Saagar let's watch the giggling during the word torture, which happens so many times. I'm just like, I used to be a producer at PBS, Joe, and I'm just hearing this.

I'm like, no, we're giggling because it says torture. But we'll move on and survive.

Joe Scarborough: No, but anyway, but yeah, so, no, it was LBJ books.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. It was the LBJ books. Really what it is. I came here, I was an intern on Capitol Hill and I was 18. And went to GW. And I was like, this sucks, man. I was like, this is bullshit.

Nobody here is actually interested in doing anything. Nobody here. The system and just so much of what I ranted it to you, bipartisan consensus and all of that. And I just felt more and more as I stayed. And as saw it, that we weren't accomplishing anything that people actually wanted.

And so I just started talking about it, writing about it, critiquing it more and more man, you know, God bless the internet, right?

Joe Scarborough: No, exactly. Marshall, what about you?

Marshall Kosloff: Yeah, mine's a total set of cliches because it's tough because there's already so many people in this 20th century to pick from. So RFK is huge for me.

I'm from Oregon. I actually have a great poster of him in my room, a bunny. W with the dog. Yeah. With the dog. Yeah, the dog. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It's, a great poster. And so RFK and then Theodore Roosevelt. And this is just  the part that. And there seems like there's a bit of a TR resident, right?

There's a bit like a TR Renaissance, even on the right, but it's, if you think to like nineties and two thousands, Theodore Roosevelt, he's a big government Republican, Glenn Beck's railing against him. But the part that gets young conservatives excited about TR is just how confident he was, how aggressive he was.

If I were to critique. My critique of Obama, style of rhetoric is the lack of confidence in it. And when he's talking about his new book, which I'm halfway through,  he's saying, why was I too optimistic about American race relations? Was I too forward-looking and there's distance, there's this in today's era sounding and confidence sounds smart.

And we all felt the need to say, well, I guess Joe, you're saying that, but on the other hand, but I just like how confident he was. And I think that. That's what we definitely need more of in the political system.

Joe Scarborough: Yeah. I've got to say at the end of the day, RFK, actually the end of the day, I can still read it and I go back and I reread, Schlesinger and I reread other books about RFK and there are times.

Where, when new books come out about RFK, I have to stop before June the sixth, 68. Cause it breaks my heart so much. I still, it's one of these things that was really before my time. But if you look at the arc of his life from 66 to 68, there was just extraordinary growth. And he, I mean, he was, for me a leader, like no other, it's funny, of course, LBJ, nobody hated Bobby more than LBJ.

We have a clash. Yeah. They hated each other and we have a clash and again, and I think with Bobby, that's a good example. You talked about Bush, I'm not comparing Bobby to Bush at all, it's a good example with Bobby of, people that hate Bobby loved, to throw all of his human failures at me and all the mistakes that he made.

And yes, he made a lot of mistakes, but I prefer to look at what he did on April the fourth, uh, 1968, when he went into Indianapolis, when everybody told him not to go in inner city Indianapolis, and cities across America burned that night.

Marshall Kosloff: MLK had just been assassinated.

Joe Scarborough: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Saagar Enjeti: Just for everybody's context, we'll put a link to that video in the show notes.

It's one of the most incredible videos, like you said, speaking to an inner city audience quoting like Greek poetry, if I recall. And he was like Aeschylus. Yeah. Yeah. There's nobody in America who could have done that. No, it's just extraordinary.

Joe Scarborough: Talking about the awful grace of God. And yes, Bobby was involved in a lot of bad stuff.

And yes, we have to recognize that. But at the same time, like a lot of leaders, there were extraordinary moments and that's what I look to. Not only to inspire me, but to try to inspire my children and other people as well. Yeah, that would be a great link that, and also his speech in Cape town.

Actually two years to the day, when he died June the sixth, 1966, when he talked about, a few, have the greatness to bend history itself. But it's when each of us cast a pebble onto the water from a million different sources of energy and together, the ripples, I don't have the exact words, but they build into a mighty tidal wave that can break.

They can knock down the greatest walls of oppression, et cetera. It's just, he just an extraordinary leader. It's interesting. You say T R. I, TR was for me at least, and I know after I said what I said about Bush, which by the way, I can't wait for you to, I can't wait and you'll have to forward some of the emails, people writing up your way,but I always thought TR was a little, not a little, a lot too militaristic. For me.

Marshall Kosloff: So the key thing about my case there, it's not necessarily about his policies. It's more just about the energy, I'm not going to look at Kennedy cliche and say vigor, but there's something there. There's something there that come on.

This is Morning, Joe. Like you see these people, there's something just deeply terrible and boring watching traditional politicians with the red tie and the blue tie. And there's just nothing there. There's the dead eyed look and TR is just the entire opposite of that.

And that's what that's, what's exciting. Yeah.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, look, he's one of the only great presidents to not be forged in crisis. And their only reason is because of his sheer force of will. Like the stories of him staying up at night reading a book and tearing out the pages and his aides would come in and just see torn out magazine pages, and then having dinner after a full day and reciting a full German poetry, obscure thing to a guest while having just debated Western expansionary policy.

There is nobody else like him. So I agree.

Joe Scarborough: By the way, gets shot. Finishes the speech.

Saagar Enjeti: Finishes the speech.

Joe Scarborough: Yeah. There's something Churchill-ian about him, Churchill who basically lived drunk for like 80 years of his life. I'm not sure how he did what he did, but yeah, there's something really inspiring about that as well.

By the way, let me just be clear, not inspiring about living drunk for 80 years of your life. Not inspiring.

Marshall Kosloff: Do not follow the flight morning routine. Don't be drunk. There's a set of bad career advice here.

Joe Scarborough: Exactly. But I love this. I hope you guys will invite me back and we can go over some of the hate mail together.

Saagar Enjeti: One hundred percent. You have an open invitation here on The Realignment. Joe. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. We really appreciate it.

Joe Scarborough: Can I say one  more thing?

Saagar Enjeti: Please. The floor is yours.

Joe Scarborough: And they're going to say, see, I hate him too, because he won't shut up. But you had talked about how Washington was frustrating. It was boring.

That's the thing about Washington, like Madison made it that way. He did. I,it's,as Tom Ricks said in First Principles, which is a great book about the first four Presidents in their education, that frustration, that's not a bug, that's the feature. It's tough. That's why we need to elect people to Washington who actually know how Washington works.

That's why. I'm hopeful that Joe Biden and some Republicans can get together and actually pass meaningful legislation, not for the purpose of passing legislation, but I just think, you know what, it would be a nice thing for us to do, for the first time in 10 years to actually move the ball forward on healthcare, move the ball forward on immigration, move the ball forward on student loans, move the ball forward on a lot of issues.

Yeah, that's all I have.

Saagar Enjeti: I do hope something happens. We'll see.  Anyway, Joe, l really appreciate you, man. Thank you.

Joe Scarborough: Thank you guys so much.

Saagar Enjeti: Thanks so much.