Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough is leaving the Republican party. The political commentator made the announcement during The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, July 11.
“I am a Republican, but I’m not going to be a Republican anymore. I’ve got to become an Independent,” he said.
“It was well before Donald Trump was elected president that my party betrayed their core values,” he said, referencing when Trump supported a Muslim travel ban in December 2015. “I said I could never vote for anybody in my party that said they were going to ban people because of the god they worship.”
The news comes two weeks after POTUS, 70, slammed Scarborough, 54, and Mika Brzezinski, who got engaged in May, via Twitter. The former Celebrity Apprentice host claimed that “psycho Joe” and “low I.Q crazy Mika” went to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida three nights in a row and that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly” from a face-lift.
Brzezinski, 50, who also was a guest on The Late Show, revealed that she was on the Morning Joe set and Scarborough was in his office when the tweets were posted.
“It was no big deal. Personally it doesn’t bother me one bit. I think it’s very sad for the country that this is where we are,” she told Colbert on Tuesday, adding that cohost Willie Geist appeared uncomfortable to show her the texts at the time.
Brzezinski believes that Trump tweeted the controversial remarks after she poked fun at his fake Time magazine cover that reportedly hangs in one of his country clubs. “It’s that kind of thing that gets under his skin,” she said.
Scarborough added: “Showing anger towards Donald Trump, letting him know that you’re outraged, that’s what he wants. When you mock him, when Mika was joking about the Time magazine, that’s what really makes him the angriest. He watches the show and it drives him absolutely crazy.”
