Conservative radio host Mark Levin accused Sen. Mitt Romney of defending MSNBC host Joe Scarborough from President Trump’s repeated attacks on Twitter for purely political reasons.
“Romney was silent when his friend Scarborough accused the president of the United States of being Hitler, a neo-Nazi, Stalin, and Mussolini,” Levin said Thursday. “It seems Romney’s moral outrage is situational and political.”
Romney on Wednesday condemned Trump’s tweets about Scarborough in recent days, which floated a debunked conspiracy theory that Scarborough was responsible for the death of a staffer working for him while he was a Republican member of Congress in the 1990s.
“I know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine,” the Utah Republican said. “I don’t know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations, but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already.”
Klausutis, the staffer’s widower, wrote an opinion article in the New York Times this week, pleading with Twitter to take down Trump’s tweets about his dead wife.
“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” Klausutis wrote.
“I have mourned my wife every day since her passing. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage,” he said. “As her husband, I feel that one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life.”
Trump last tweeted about Scarborough and the staffer on Wednesday, saying that “Psycho Joe Scarborough is rattled, not only by his bad ratings but all of the things and facts that are coming out on the internet about opening a Cold Case.”
Levin, a staunch defender of Trump on his daily radio program, has been critical of Scarborough and other pundits at national media outlets who say negative things about the president.
“While Scarborough, among the biggest morons on TV, is paid millions and safely employed by Comcast — despite no ratings — to relentlessly trash the president, he attacks Sen. Kennedy for wanting to reopen the economy so others can work,” Levin said of the MSNBC host last month. “He’s typical of the Democrat Party media.”
