"Don't use Hillary Clinton as an excuse, as your blank check to say racist things about people born in Indiana," Joe Scarborough says. | Getty Scarborough rips Trump: Prove you're not a bigot

Donald Trump needs to prove once and for all that he is not a bigot, former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday.

“Donald, guess what, I’m not going to support you until you get your act together. You’re acting like a bush-league loser, you’re acting like a racist, you’re acting like a bigot,” Scarborough said during the first hour of “Morning Joe.” “This is called art of the deal. I’m taking my deal off the table. Until you come to the table and get on the other side of the table and prove to me you’re not a bigot and you don’t take my party down in the ditch, you don’t have my endorsement.”


Scarborough continued, telling the presumptive GOP presidential nominee that he and other Republicans “can’t use Hillary Clinton as a gun against my head” to march him into supporting his campaign for the general election.

“I’m taking the gun away from my head, I’m putting it on the table, and now it is in your hands on whether you are going to prove to the Republican Party and me personally that you’re not a bigot,” he said. “So don’t use Hillary Clinton as a threat against me. Don’t use Hillary Clinton as an excuse, as your blank check to say racist things about people born in Indiana. No, Donald, you don’t get to play it that way. I’m not scared of you and I’m not scared of the base, because they are just as pissed off as me. Walk away. It’s called the art of the deal. It’s what Donald Trump has been preaching all his life. They are — I can’t say the word they are. They’re, they’re weak.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in, noting that Trump might have used the word Scarborough was looking for at a February rally in New Hampshire, when a woman in the crowd called Ted Cruz “a pussy” and Trump repeated the remark.

“Paul Ryan, you can’t use Hillary Clinton, either,” Brzezinski said, “in your pathetic, weak kind of meandering around this problem, because [panelist] Willie Geist, you know what we have here with these Republican leaders who are like, ‘Can’t have Hillary Clinton.’ Really? You hate her that much you’ll take a racist. You hate her that much we’re going to have eight more years of the Republicans we had who said from the get-go with Obama, we just want him to fail. You’re going to have more of the same. You are more of the same.”

The speaker of the House reiterated his support for Trump as superior to Clinton while remarking Tuesday that Trump’s comment on federal judge Gonzalo Curiel represented the “textbook definition” of a racist remark. For his part, Trump released a statement later Tuesday in which he called it “unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage.”

“It’s the worst of all worlds, Willie, because if they embrace the racist to beat Hillary, they lose to Hillary and destroy the party,” Scarborough said. “Listen to me guys, you embrace a guy making racist comments —”

“Why do you have to say this?” Brzezinski interjected. “Because they’re stupid,” Scarborough said, continuing, “You lose the presidency, right? And then you lose the Senate and you lose the House and then we small-government conservatives, we’re screwed because you’ve destroyed our party because you’re running scared.”

“Stop running scared. You’ve got to stand up to Donald Trump and say, prove to us that you deserve our support. When you do that, then maybe we’ll consider giving you our endorsement back,” Scarborough said. “But right now, Willie, they are running scared, and Donald smells it, so he can say whatever the hell he wants to say.”

The smart move, Scarborough suggested, would be for Republicans to hold a news conference “today” and declare that they are going to “quarantine the racist on that side of the campaign stage.”

“I swear to God, it’s the smart political move. Paul Ryan, if you want to be speaker of the House next time; Mitch McConnell, if you want to run the Senate next time — the odds should be pretty good,” Scarborough said, as Brzezinski remarked, “Go with your gut.”

“That’s your smart move, to stop running scared,” he went on. “Stop running scared. Stop running scared. The rules have changed.”

Trump responded to Scarborough’s barbs, as he has in the past, by putting down the show’s “bad ratings” on Twitter and saying he is no longer watching it.

“Nobody is watching @Morning_Joe anymore. Gone off the deep end - bad ratings. You won’t believe what I am watching now!” Trump wrote.

