In the latest obscene example of the media personally blaming President Trump for coronavirus deaths, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, The Atlantic’s George Packer touted his latest article for the liberal magazine in which he claimed that America has become a “failed state” and even went so far as to accuse the President of “collaborating with the virus.”

Welcoming Packer on the show, co-host Willie Geist eagerly cited the screed: “George is out with a new piece, entitled: ‘We Are Living in a Failed State; The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.’” Geist continued:

George writes this, quote, “When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills – a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public – had gone untreated for years.”

Moments later, Packer blasted the Trump administration response: “But I can never forget those weeks in March, and they really are continuing now in April, when we looked to our national government for guidance, for instructions, for basic information, and it wasn’t there....our national government was in chaos and was dissembling and was deceiving us and was unable to provide either information or help when we desperately needed it.”

Geist wondered if there was “something unique about this particular problem and the way this government has handled it?” That gave Packer the chance to double down on one of the most offensive claims in his piece:

Our government has been demoralized by constant attack from within and without. It’s been defunded. And our economy, in some ways, is more unequal now than at any time in the last 40 years, when inequality has been a growing problem. So all of those symptoms made us an easy target for coronavirus to really wreak havoc in our society....And now, with leadership in Washington that almost seems at times to be collaborating with the virus. I compared Trump, who has called himself a wartime president, to the French General Marshal Petain, who was the – in charge when the Nazis invaded and who essentially gave up and allowed them to occupy the country, and created his own Vichy Republic. It’s a harsh comparison but, at times, Trump seems to be collaborating with the virus and doing its work for it.

Even Geist seemed somewhat taken aback by the nasty remarks: “That’s an extreme comparison, obviously.”

Despite that, the anchor decided to turn to left-wing Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude, who recently blamed coronavirus deaths in minority communities on “structural racism.” Predictably, Glaude fully endorsed Packer’s “extreme” argument:

You know, I really enjoyed George’s piece in The Atlantic, Willie, because on one level, what he said and what he argued is that what we’re witnessing is the collapse of an entire or a whole way of governing. Because the virus has revealed the growing gap, and I’m quoting him, “The growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor”....And so, part of what I want to say, as the President and all of his minions talk about opening the society, to folks who are in my community particularly, I want you to understand this as an invitation to the grave....as George has brilliantly laid out in his piece, in some ways, he’s inviting, creating the conditions for more death.

At the top of the show, co-host Joe Scarborough launched into a screaming tirade against the administration and a certain competing cable channel regarding the response to the pandemic.

MSNBC no longer has any business calling itself a news channel, let alone passing judgment on any other media outlet.

Here is a full transcript of the April 23 segment: