Scarborough: I Think Sometimes We Forget The Possibility Of Spending His Life In Jail Is What Drives Trump
“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Friday noted the media sometimes forgets “what drives” President Donald Trump so much, adding, “he could have been in jail for the rest of his life.”
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, your colleague, Maggie Haberman, at one point was asked, why does Trump do the things Trump does? And her answer, very simple, but goes to what Bob had said there. Because he can. He will do what he can do. It’s that simple. If the Republican Party is not checking him in the House, he will do what he can do. He will do what he can do if the Senate Republicans aren’t doing their job. If the Supreme Court is sitting back like they’re doing right now and allowing him to clear everything in emergency, he will do what he can do. He will push the boundaries. He will abuse the boundaries if the Supreme Court actually won’t do their job. MICHAEL SCHMIDT, NEW YORK TIMES: But the thing that I find most interesting is that in the first term, he wasn’t able to do that because there were those containers there. There were those people who were trying to stop him from hurting himself, from attacking the rule of law, and from pushing the country further into chaos. SCARBOROUGH: So what changed? SCHMIDT: They’re not there anymore. SCARBOROUGH: Why? SCHMIDT: Because he didn’t want them there. They didn’t want the John Kellys coming back. SCARBOROUGH: I’m getting to a point here. Why didn’t he want them there? SCHMIDT: Because they were successful in stopping him. SCARBOROUGH: Also, the way he looks at it, and he hasn’t told me this, but he lost the election. He was sitting at a defense table last summer. And if he had lost that case, he could have been in jail for the rest of his life. If he lost the election, he could have been in jail for the rest of his life. I mean, I think sometimes we forget this is what drives him so much. He had those people saying, oh, you must do this. You must play by the rules, which he must. But all he does is sees that as a sign of weakness that almost got him sent to jail for life. SCHMIDT: Correct. And he basically won his freedom. He won his freedom in winning the election. But as a reporter who covered the containers, those people trying to stop him, in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, could this really be true? Could these people really be holding him back? And what we have seen now is that, indeed, the counterfactual, when they’re not there, he is different. The things they are doing, the second term is much different than the first term. And one of the reasons is because those people are no longer there.
