‘Take a rest’: MSNBC’s ‘Morning’ Joe Scarborough responds to Trump’s ‘extraordinarily cruel’ murder conspiracy theory

President spent World Press Freedom Day complaining that he gets worse treatment from media than Abraham Lincoln

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told Donald Trump to “take a rest” and suggested that Mike Pence handle the nation’s coronavirus response after the president fired off an ”extraordinarily cruel” message invoking the false idea that the presenter and former congressman should be investigated for murder.

Mr Trump said: “‘Concast’ should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough ... I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is “nuts”. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE”

The “cold case” to which Mr Trump refers is the death of 28-year-old Lori Klausutis, a former intern of Mr Scarborough’s who was found dead in his district office while he was still serving as a congressman in 2001. Her death was not ruled suspicious; she sustained a fatal head injury when she fell thanks to a heart episode.

Mr Scarborough responded directly to the president on his Monday show, saying: ”I know you meant to be extraordinarily cruel to me by attacking me, by bringing up a conspiracy theory that has lived in the gutters of the Internet for some time now. But just like the Seth Rich conspiracy murder that was pushed by your allies, you don’t understand the pain you cause.”

He told the president ”you need to take a rest” and said he should let his vice president ”actually run things for the next couple of weeks” amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Morning Joe host criticised the president for spending a “working weekend” away from the White House tweeting conspiracy theories and other attacks against media colleagues and former president George W Bush.

“Really?” he said. ”You have time for this? ... Come back when you’re feeling a little better and when you can really actually focus on your job. You just can’t do that right now. Americans are dying every day because of it.”

He said that the president’s accusations drudge up pain for “the families who’ve already lost a loved one. Not me. Not my children. Not anybody that knows me. They know the truth. You once again drag a family through this and make them relive it again, just like Seth Rich’s parents, as if losing a loved one the first time isn’t enough.”

Morning Joe and its presenters have been among the president’s most frequent targets on Twitter since his presidency began. This has increasingly included labelling Mr Scarborough “psycho Joe”, though Mr Trump has also applied the epithet to his co-host and spouse Mika Brzezinski on occasion.

Ms Brzezinski was herself the target of one of the most aggressive Twitter attacks of the president’s early administration, in June 2017, when he claimed to have turned her away from his Florida resort on the grounds that she was still haemorrhaging blood after plastic surgery.

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Mr Trump’s latest attack on Mr Scarborough comes the day after Press Freedom Day, which he did not acknowledge. Instead, he started his morning with another vent of rage directed at the media: “The Fake News doesn’t show real polls. Lamestream Media is totally CORRUPT, the Enemy of the People!” At a Fox News town hall that evening, he complained that “94 or 95 per cent of the press is hostile”, and that he is treated worse by the press even than Abraham Lincoln, beside whose memorial he was being interviewed.

Mr Scarborough’s supposed involvement in a suspicious death is seemingly not the only conspiracy theory on Mr Trump’s mind. The same night he railed against the media on Fox, the president retweeted a blog post from a far-right conspiracy theorist claiming that “Barack Obama was the one running the Russia hoax”.