Desperate times call for desperate measures. But in today’s bitterly divided political world, the desperation is in the eyes of the beholder.

With the midterm elections less than a week away, Joe Scarborough took a tough look at the troubling trend of fear-mongering and otherization of undocumented immigrants from the Republican side of the aisle.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump floated the idea of using an executive order to end the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which would ostensibly end birthright citizenship for anyone born in the United States by parents who are not legal citizens.

This comes after weeks of fear-mongering rhetoric that has described a group of Central American migrants currently on the Mexico-Guatemala border who are described as “invaders” despite the fact that they are almost 1,000 miles away and are traveling by foot.

If you see Trump’s hard-line rhetoric – gleefully amplified by many pro-Trump programs on Fox News — as a craven and dangerous ploy to gin up support for the midterms, well then you’d be in accord with the assessment of Scarborough.

But the Morning Joe host went one further, comparing (though not by name) the scary political tactics to how Nazi Germany treated “gypsies and jews.”

“He’s been playing the racist card” he opened, adding, “He said I’m a nationalist. David Duke comes out the next day saying thank you. Thank you so much for finally admitting that you’re a white nationalist.”

Scarborough then listed the rhetorical supporters, saying “Then you have some Republican benchers that are linking George Soros and these anti-semantic threads to the caravan. You’ve got Fox News talking about smallpox and leprosy coming up.”

Apologizing, he then made this approach to an unnamed “regime from the 20th century” saying “might as well be certain countries talking about gypsies. It lines up historically with what people were talking about when they talked about gypsies and Jews.”

Nazi Germany included Gypsies as part of the Holocaust that led to the death of 6 Million Jews.

Now if you feel that comparing Trump to Nazi is unfair, please return to the lede of this blog post. Some are sure to see Scarborough’s line of thinking as the true desperation on display here.

Even if the rhetorical evidence supports his claim.

Watch the clip above, courtesy of MSNBC.

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