Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said on Thursday morning that people close to President Donald Trump told him during his campaign that Trump had “early stages of dementia.”
Scarborough and fellow host Mika Brzezinski addressed Trump on Thursday, saying that the president was “completely detached from reality.” They also urged Trump’s cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows for members of the administration to declare that the president is unfit for office, as tensions escalate between Trump and North Korea.
“We are facing a showdown with a nuclear power and you have somebody inside the White House that the New York Daily News says is mentally unfit, that people close to him say is mentally unfit, that people close to him during the campaign told me had early stages of dementia,” Scarborough said.
Brzezinski jumped in, adding that some people might say suggesting Trump has dementia is “not OK to say,” but added: “But at this point, it’s reality.”
Scarborough wasn’t finished.
“When are we supposed to say this? After the first nuclear missile goes? Is that when it’s proper to bring this up in polite society?” Scarborough said, later adding: “Everybody around Donald Trump knows he’s not stable. Everybody.”
Scarborough, Brzezinski, and Trump have had an ongoing feud for months—including earlier this year when Trump made sexist and crude remarks about Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a facelift” during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, a claim that was quickly debunked.
The feud was reignited on Wednesday when Trump called out Scarborough on Twitter, trying to sow confusion about the death of a Scarborough staffer when he was a congressman in 2001, calling it an “unsolved mystery.”
There is no mystery, as a medical examiner determined shortly after the staffer’s death that Lori Klausutis, the staffer, “lost consciousness because of an abnormal heart rhythm and fell, hitting her head on a desk.”