Joe Scarborough wants viewers to know that we are living in very different times. How different?

While the political landscape may have seemed particularly divided in the past, Mr. Scarborough reveals that he would always calm the frayed nerves on either side of the aisle — whether it was his mother or his friends on the Upper West Side. But things are different now under President Donald Trump.

Scarborough opens the clip above by soberly, and sadly, stating that can no longer tell his friends and family that things will be okay because he holds the sitting president in such low esteem. “Donald Trump is not a kind man. He’s a mean man. He’s crude. He’s brutal. He says horrible things. He’s insulting.”

In other words, everyone freak out.

It’s not terribly surprising that Morning Joe would provide such hyperbolic and harsh criticism of the sitting president, which has become something of a hallmark of his show in the past year. And most of the criticism has been fair.

What is surprising, and bears repeating, is that Joe Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski enjoyed a especially symbiotic relationship with then candidate Trump in he run up to the general election. And it seems fairly clear to anyone paying attention to Morning Joe programming over the past couple years that Scarborough’s over-the-top critique of President Trump is also an admission of his really poor judgment in 2016 when he and Mika enjoyed such a cozy and mutually beneficial relationship with Mr. Trump.

So either Scarborough is employing that time-honored chestnut of hyperbolic criticism, or this is an admission that he was completely off the mark during the presidential campaign. And if it’s the later, then why would viewers give the Morning Joe host any credibility to believe what he’s saying now?

Watch the clip above courtesy of MSNBC.

–image via screen capture–

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]