Reliably supportive Republicans in Congress haven’t rushed to amplify the Scarborough theories—and some in the party have spoken out against them. Senator Mitt Romney was unsurprisingly the first to denounce the controversy. “I know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine. I don’t know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already,” Romney tweeted Wednesday. After House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stayed neutral on Trump’s Scarborough murder claims, telling reporters that he doesn’t “know the subject well,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-highest ranking House Republican, stepped in to condemn them. “I do think the president should stop tweeting about Joe Scarborough,” she said on Wednesday while answering an unrelated question, which suggests she was attempting to correct McCarthy’s dodge. “We’re in the middle of a pandemic. He’s the commander in chief of this nation. And it’s causing great pain to the family of the young woman who died.” The Washington Post reached out to Florida’s top GOP members, including Rep. Matt Gaetz, who holds Scarborough’s old seat, and Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, to comment on Trump’s accusations, but received no response.
In the past, when the president has waded into waters so unhinged that he loses Fox, the network’s fringier and more zealously pro-Trump competitor One America News is almost always there to provide the comfort TV coverage he craves. But in a remarkable change of pace, Trump’s low blow is too much even for OANN. “The president has been very critical of the coverage taking place on MSNBC’s Morning Joe,” noted OANN host Alex Salvi last week, adding that Trump’s disdain for the cable-news show has resulted in him “raising conspiracy theories” against its host.
While the Scarborough theories are clearly too hot for TV, they are fair game for Fox News Radio, where several of the network’s top personalities host daytime programs and occasionally let their masks slip off. During his May 20 show, Hannity, an unapologetic Seth Rich conspiracy theorist, cheered on Trump’s Klausutis murder claims. “Maybe those questions should be asked! There seem to be irregularities as it relates to certain people involved in that case,” he said of the intern’s death while mocking the “total psychos” at Morning Joe with his producer. “I mean, should I go there, or should I take the weekend off?” Hannity then insisted he “can win this fight” against Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, his cohost and wife, because he doesn’t “mind going there…. It’s not a matter of winning, it’s just a matter of how hard I’ll hit them, because I can hit them both so hard, you know, their mothers will feel the vibrations.” Earlier in the show, Hannity discussed the matter with Bill O’Reilly, asking the disgraced former Fox News star if he should “go full-on Hannity” against the MSNBC hosts, to which O’Reilly—of all people—advised, “In this case, I would ignore it.”
Outside of Trump’s Twitter account, which boasts more than 80 million followers, the Scarborough conspiracy theories have continued to spread among C- and D-list conservative pundits, including Sinclair contributor and Salem Radio host Sebastian Gorka, Newsmax host John Cardillo, right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, and on Alex Jones’s Infowars network, according to Media Matters. One of the biggest names in conservative media, Rush Limbaugh, said on Wednesday that Trump has a “clever” way of peddling conspiracies. “Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts,” said Limbaugh. “He’s simply passing them on.” Trump, he said, “is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames.”
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