‘Donald Trump’s Hero’: Scarborough Nukes Trump For Meeting Hungary’s Authoritarian Leader Who Just Met With Putin

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough nuked former President Donald Trump on Thursday morning for his planned Mar-a-Lago meeting with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban – a longtime ally of Trump and Vladimir Putin.

“You have Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Two completely different views of the world you have Donald Trump, who was hostile for so long to NATO. Right. Still is. Who embraced authoritarian thugs in North Korea. You know, communists in North Korea, Communist leaders in China. Vladimir Putin, who wishes his country was still the Soviet Union. And the least democratic and the most authoritarian leader in Europe, Viktor Orban, who has actually bragged about the fact that he killed Western democracy in Hungary,” began Scarborough on Morning Joe.

Co-host Mika Brzezinski added, “So think about this contrast as we talk about the campaigns as President Biden hosts the NATO summit in Washington, former President Donald Trump will reportedly meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Florida today. It comes less than a week after Orban met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and visited with Chinese leader XI Jinping in China.”

“That’s the picture. I mean, that is the picture. Donald Trump, throughout his first term, hated democratically elected leaders, whether it was Britain’s democratically elected Theresa May, whether it was Germany’s democratically elected leader, Angela Merkel, whether it was France’s democratically elected leader, Macron, and who did he love?” replied Scarborough, turning to BBC correspondent Katty Kay.

“Well, he talked about his love letters to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He talked about how brilliant President Xi was and how much respect he had for President XI for being able to drop the hammer on billions of people. And of course, Vladimir Putin. We know how much he loves and respects Vladimir Putin. And Orban, a guy who has attacked an independent judiciary in Hungary, a guy who is attacked, the press, who has, who has arrested leaders, who has bugged the phones of journalists on and on and on. And this is this is Donald Trump’s hero in Europe. It’s who he says he wants to be like,” concluded Scarborough.

Kay replied, “Yeah, I had a conversation with a senior European diplomat, recently and asked him what would be the benefit of Donald Trump being reelected. And that was a kind of awkward pause and then a laugh and then silence. And literally this diplomat said, I can’t think of anything.”

“There’s a realization that America first means Europe last, except for this weird anomaly of Viktor Orban. And when you look at what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary, particularly when it comes to the judiciary and for the press, freedom of the press and independence of the press. And then you look at what Donald Trump is planning to do with Schedule F and with Project 2025. I know he’s distanced himself, but you go through it and it’s pretty clear it actually looks strikingly similar to the kinds of restrictions on the DOJ, on the judiciary in Hungary and on the press in Hungary as well. And it’s that limiting of democratic freedoms that we’re starting to see play out in the kind of playbook for a Donald Trump second term,” she concluded.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.

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