In a Morning Joe — once again bereft of Mika and Joe — a team led by Willie Geist opened up by dissecting the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend.

Without the primary show anchors, there was a noticeable absence of fire and fury on set, but Donny Deutsch was still there to keep it spicy.

‘What a pathetic sniveling little man our president is,’ he said reflecting on Trump’s dancing around white supremacy in his Charlottesville remarks.

— How did we get here? Let’s see.

First the vegetables.

Deutsch was set up by the sober analysis of New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor, who suggested that Trump was trying to avoid alienating his core supporters.

“The president understands that part of his base includes these people and as a result, whether or not he agreed with their actual beliefs, he doesn’t want to alienate them,” she said. “He has benefited from white nationalists being excited about him and in some ways he understands that.”

She continued

“The other pattern that we see in our president is he’s very pointed when he wants to be,” she said “He’s called out the media and said that we’re enemies, he’s called out opponents, he called Hillary crooked Hillary … in this case you see that the president isn’t being as pointed.”

All true, all fair — next up was Deutsch — who was somewhat blunter.

“What a pathetic sniveling little man our president is, a coward.”

Well then.

“The Ku Klux Klan, for decades and decades, were built on lynching African Americans. The Nazis were built on the followings of Adolf Hitler and exterminating Jews,” he said. “Mr. President can you not condemn those people .. it is so disgusting an repulsive”

Deutsch closed out his first of several monologues, by saying that Trump was a “racist.”

“He is a racist. Can we just say it once and for all?” he asked. “We have a racist as a president”

[image via screengrab]

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