One of the left's biggest beefs against Donald Trump has been his claim that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him.
But when the left preemptively accuses Trump people of planning to "rig" the '26 midterms and even the '28 presidential election, well, that's different. Those warnings must be taken seriously. It doesn't matter that journalists warned for months that Trump would deny the 2024 election results. Oops...
On Friday's Morning Joe, the self-impressed Joe Scarborough boasted that he has warned senior people in three or four presidential administrations to remember that they will not be in power forever, and will ultimately be held accountable for all their actions.
But Jonathan Lemire, who hosts the show's fourth hour, claimed that people in the Trump administration are unafraid of taking allegedly improper actions in the prosecution of James Comey because, unlike those warned by Scarborough that their hold on power will be temporary:
"People around Trump think this won't be temporary, and they're taking steps. We should listen to some Democrats, Gavin Newsom, J.D. Pritzker, and the like, who think they're trying to rig things, set up situations around the midterms and maybe beyond in 2028, to ensure those elections are not free and fair. Therefore, they'd stay in power and not suffer the consequences."
Hilarious how Lemire cites as people whose warnings we should "listen to" about Trump's nefarious rigging plans are those utterly objective guys: Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker. After all, it's not as if they're hyper-partisan Democrats angling to run in '28!
Note: Over the years, we've identified Danny Cevallos as MSNBC's most fair-and-balanced legal analyst. For example, in 2019, three years before the Dobbs decision, we noted Cevallos on Morning Joe saying that Roe v. Wade was "ripe to be overturned" because "even if you are pro-choice, the right to privacy [upon which Roe was based] does not exist either in the history or the text of the Constitution."
But on today's show, Cevallos offered perhaps the most stinging criticism of President Trump having pushed out of office the sitting US Attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, who had declined to prosecute Comey. Trump replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had been Trump's personal lawyer in the case brought against him by Jack Smith regarding the handling of classified documents.
Cevallos described the situation as:
"The new [Watergate era] Saturday Night Massacre. And for all the reasons that everyone's been talking about this morning, in my view, it may be worse."
Firing a prosecutor is not a "massacre." But liberals love to exaggerate the actions of Republicans.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
9/26/25
6:14 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: A Trump prosecutor said, no, I'm not going to bring this case. I'll quit before I bring this case. She couldn't get anybody to go in and help her yesterday try to get an indictment. Barbara Quade, it's pretty simple. And I talk about this all the time.
You know, there's so many people in Washington, D.C. And it's not just with the Trump administration. I've seen this for years. They get into the White House, or they get into the administration, and they think what's happening is going to last forever.
I will not name names, but I have told people running White Houses. One instance where a president was at the height of his popularity and I leaned over to one of his top aides and I said, you know, you're only renting this office. You know, you're going to be gone [snaps a finger] in a blink of an eye. People come in here, they think that they're here forever. They aren't.
And you have to be held accountable for everything you do in here. Never forget that. I've had that talk probably with three, four administrations through the years.
And you get a sense that the prosecutors that are refusing to take part in this understand there are lawyers who did what Donald Trump wanted them to do against their better wisdom, against their legal training, against the code of ethics, against legal norms, and they're disbarred now.
So, I wonder, I wonder if that's a lot of what was going on when you had Donald Trump's own prosecutor say, no, no, no, I'm out of here because I'm going to be held accountable either next year when the Democrats take over. or I'm going to be held accountable when a Democratic president's elected. I'm not going to bring a scam case because of Donald Trump's orders over Truth Social.
I wonder if they already understand the consequences are coming legally in terms of disbarment or even something worse down the road.
. . .
JONATHAN LEMIRE: I know we say a lot on this show, and Joe is right in terms of the temporary nature of being in power.
But I will say those people around Trump think this won't be temporary, and they're taking steps. We should listen to some Democrats, Gavin Newsom, J.D. Pritzker, and the like, who think they're trying to rig things, set up situations around the midterms and maybe beyond in 2028, to ensure those elections are not free and fair. Therefore, they'd stay in power and not suffer the consequences.