MSNBC viewers expecting to see Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough were greeted with breaking news coverage Monday. Buck Sexton believes that was the right choice.
After former President Donald Trump was shot Saturday at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, MSNBC went into breaking news coverage and remained that way through its usual morning show Monday.
On The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, the duo discussed the move by MSNBC to not allow Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on the air, with Sexton arguing that while the choice isn’t a popular one, he can understand why the network’s brass made the decision it did.
“They have been telling their audience that Trump is an existential threat to the degree where it is not possible for Morning Joe to extend sympathy. It would seem like a betrayal to their audience to have even this just the most basic human decency extended toward Donald Trump in this moment,” said Sexton. “They can’t do that that morning. Joe is incapable of doing that because you can’t tell people for years. Trump is Hitler and then open your show on Monday with ‘Well, we’re glad Hitler is okay and the country should come together right now.’
“Where do you take that? Where do you go? And that’s why I actually understand why the executives over there pulled that show off the air,” he concluded.
Co-host Clay Travis argued that Monday was likely the biggest day in Morning Joe history, and for the MSNBC hosts to not be on air should give them cause to quit.
“So on the biggest news day of the year, in some ways, the biggest Democrat partisan show — on TV at least — is not able to air. It might be the biggest Monday of Morning Joe’s entire political TV existence. If we had gotten a call and they had said ‘Hey, the news is too important right now. You guys aren’t going to be on today. You and I would have lost our minds,” Travis said of he and Sexton. “I can only imagine that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and all the people that are on their show — what an incredible indictment of their entire program.”
On Tuesday morning, Scarborough addressed the situation and, in no uncertain terms, threatened to quit if a similar situation ever arose.
