Joe Scarborough Warns ‘Blowback’ to Trump’s ‘Gut Instincts’ Always Hurts GOP — From Redistricting to Iran

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough warned Republicans that “blowback” to President Donald Trump’s “gut instinct” decisions would always hurt their party, whether it’s his redistricting fight or the Iran war.

The comments came the day after Virginia voters approved a redistricting measure that could bolster Democrats’ efforts to win control of the narrowly divided House ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

Scarborough began Wednesday morning’s show by pointing to a reaction on X by former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who warned Republicans that the Democratic redistricting push was “avoidable and foreseeable.”

Predicting more of the same from Democrats, the host said that once the president put the idea out there to redistrict, “you’ve got to start planning for their response to your great idea.”

“That’s what’s happened here,” he continued. “The Democrats are going to end up, you know, at least doing as well in redistricting.”

He added: “And then here comes the real rub for Republicans, you cut these districts too close, like they’re thinking about now doing in the state of Florida… Mark my words, Florida, you cut these districts too close in an election, that’s a bit of a landslide – like this year’s probably going to be – then suddenly you take a really bad situation and make it much, much worse. So instead of losing 20 seats, you might lose 35 or 40 seats because the margins have been trimmed down to supposedly help one party or the other.”

“And anybody that dares complain about what the Democrats are doing have to remember it’s all in response to something that was completely avoidable,” he said.

Acknowledging that some Republicans had been pushing back on Trump’s ideas, Scarbrough later unloaded on a litany of the president’s “gut instinct” decisions he said were coming back to bear on the party:

There’s so many things that, again, Donald Trump has suggested that the Senate does and that you’ve had [John] Thune and others pushing back, not because they wouldn’t like that short term gain, but they know the long term consequences are bad.

It’s like attacking the pope. They’re attacking the pope now. Maybe that feels good on Easter morning, or whenever the president decides he’s going to attack the pope, but why? That’s not going to work out well for you. It’s bad. I don’t know why that would feel good for any president to do, to be the first president, I guess, you know, he always wants to be different. So he’s thinking, ‘I’m going to do something, by golly, that no president has ever done before.’ I’m going to attack the pope. And he did. And JD Vance attacked the pope.

Rounding on Trump’s other policy decisions, he added:

And then they said, ‘we’re going to do something that is never done. We’re going to redistrict in the middle of the decade and see how that goes.’ And then the president says, ‘I’m going to do something that seven presidents haven’t done before. I’m going to attack Iran.’

There’s a reason seven presidents before him didn’t attack Iran, because while they’re all scratching their heads going, ‘the Strait of Hormuz, why? Who would have ever thought about that?’

Every president thought about that! Every national security advisor thought about that! Every secretary of defense thought about that! Every commerce secretary thought about that! Every person around a president in the national security agency thought about that! But they just went ahead and did it. And right now, here we are. Is it open? Is it closed? No, no. There there are ships that are being fired upon right now. So you can look at Iran, you can look at redistricting.

You can look at tearing down the East Wing of the White House. You can look, of course, at redistricting. And again, all of these things where the president acts just on gut instinct, there’s always blowback. And usually, usually it’s not good for the Republican party.

Scarborough also reflected on new polling that puts Trump’s approval rating underwater, warning he hadn’t seen figures like that since former President George W. Bush invaded Iraq.

“You can make the argument that if the president gets out without the strait open and without getting rid of the nuclear material there and Iran’s nuclear program, this will actually be a bigger geopolitical defeat than Iraq, because we’ve totally screwed up the entire world economy,” Scarborough quipped.

“My goodness, Tehran’s a long way from Richmond, Virginia, which is where this conversation started,” he concluded.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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