Never waste an opportunity to trash Donald Trump by dragging him into a story, no matter how tenuously related. That could be Joe Scarborough’s motto, given his performance on Tuesday’s Morning Joe.
Scarborough managed to exploit the acquittal of Daniel Perry in his New York City trial to suggest that Trump was fairly convicted by a jury there.
He boasted:
“A jury of his peers found him not guilty. A lot of people that were also screaming when a jury of peers found Donald Trump guilty, of course. They [the jurors] were dismissed as hacks. Well, in the same Manhattan jury pool, a jury of Daniel Penny’s peers found him not guilty.”
Scarborough suppressed the glaring differences between the two cases. Unlike the Penny case, Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg boasted during his campaign that he intended to go after Trump, much like New York Attorney General Letitia James did.
As for the jury pool, Penny had never run for office. In contrast, Manhattanites gave Trump only 12 percent of the vote in 2020. So the odds were high that the jury was stacked with people who were, going in, opposed to Trump. And if any jurors were Morning Joe viewers, they would have been immersed in years of Scarborough branding Trump a fascist, and a mortal threat to American democracy.
Even liberals like Jonathan Chait and Ruth Marcus had criticized Bragg’s indictment of Trump.
The Penny and Trump cases are apples and oranges. Although, Scarborough’s attempt to drag Trump into the Penny case was bananas.
The Penny case gave all members of the panel the chance to describe their experiences on the New York subway. When it was his turn, Eugene Robinson let his elitism show. He said:
“I’m not a New Yorker. I’ve ridden the subway on occasion. I usually get lost. I take an express when I should have taken a local, or vice versa. And I end up — [snickers] I’ve seen parts of Queens and the Bronx that I really never intended to see.
As someone who was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Queens, I’m so sorry, Gene, that your delicate eyes were subjected to seeing parts of New York of no interest to you. Stick to the tony parts of Manhattan, and leave us Outer Borough types alone.
The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
12/10/24
6:11 am EDTMIKA BRZEZINSKI: A verdict has been reached in the case involving Marine veteran Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely, a homeless man, that Penny — who Penny put into a chokehold on a New York City subway that resulted in Neely’s death.
Penny has been acquitted of criminally negligent homicide after Neely’s final moments were captured on video by a bystander that set off weeks of protests and drew national attention. The decision came on the fifth day of deliberations after the jury was deadlocked last week on manslaughter charges, which the judge later dismissed.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: And, and, Tom, a jury of his peers found him not guilty. A lot of people that were also screaming when a jury of peers found Donald Trump guilty, of course, they were, they were dismissed as hacks. Well, in the same Manhattan jury pool, a jury of, of Daniel Penny’s peers found him not guilty.
. . .
EUGENE ROBINSON: But the New York subway, you know I’m not a New Yorker. I’ve ridden the subway on occasion. I usually get lost. I take an express when I should have taken a local, or vice versa. And I end up —
SCARBOROUGH: That happens to us all. You wind up in Flushing Meadow when you were trying to get to Macy’s in midtown. It’s terrible.
ROBINSON: Exactly. I’ve seen parts of Queens and the Bronx that I really never intended to see.
Discussion about this post