'What's going on, man?' Morning Joe hammers Trump for being 'scared of the fact check'
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough ridiculed Donald Trump's refusal to sit down for an interview with "60 Minutes" like his rival Kamala Harris.
The Republican nominee is the first major party presidential candidate not to take part in a sit-down with the CBS News institution since 1968, the year it first aired, and correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers the Trump campaign had offered "shifting explanations" for his refusal to participate.
Trump had initially agreed to be interviewed last Thursday, but pulled out. First, he bristled at the revelation he would be fact-checked. Then he said he needed an apology relating to an appearance on the show years ago before he would consider sitting down with its hosts again.
"I love when people fact-check me, I really do," the "Morning Joe" host said. "If I make a mistake, I want to know what I said that was wrong. People can disagree with me. Opinions are one thing, but I want to be fact-checked. If I say something wrong, I want to know that. Like most adults that I know, they're the same way.
"The fact that Donald Trump and his vice presidential nominee are so horrified at the prospect of being fact-checked suggests — well, it's the tell. They're still lying this week about the 2020 election. They're lying in a way that's very destructive for the people of North Carolina and South Carolina about hurricane relief, in a way that's getting in the way, in a way that Republican governors who are pushing back against them. They're lying about dogs and cats being eaten in Ohio, when the Republican governor there is saying that's a lie, as well. The lies continue over and over again, but he doesn't go on because of the fact-check."
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"Why are they scared of the fact-check?" Scarborough added. "Because they lie all the time. You literally can see every day them lying on the campaign trail. Then he says he doesn't go on for an apology. He wants an apology from Lesley Stahl for something that never even happened. Again, deranged, disconnected, deluded, whatever you want to call it, or maybe just scared."
The former president had abruptly cut short his last interview with "60 Minutes" in October 2020 because Stahl said the program had not covered the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop because they could be "verified" at the time. Trump inaccurately accused her of claiming the data was part of a Russia disinformation campaign
"Finally, he says Kamala Harris — this is bizarre — can't sit down on interviews because she doesn't know the issues," Scarborough said. "As [political analyst John] Heilemann always says, it is either projection or confession. Here, Donald Trump is the one who skipped the ''60 Minutes' interview, first time a candidate did that, and even refused a debate on Fox News. Even on Fox News, who many hosts on that network are echoing Donald Trump's disinformation. One of the most popular hosts suggests that civil war is better than voting, and that they need to move past voting. Yet she's willing to debate him there, and he refuses to do it.
"So last night, as I was watching this, I started asking, like, what's going on, man?"
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