Scarborough, Greenwald trade insults on Twitter over rise of Trump

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and journalist Glenn Greenwald traded blows in a Twitter spat on Tuesday over the rise of former President Trump in the Republican Party and Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) impending ouster from her GOP leadership position on Capitol Hill.

The back and forth began after Scarborough, a frequent critic of Trump, shared a New York Magazine article on Cheney, highlighting a passage that said, “When Cheney’s liberal critics place her support for democracy alongside her other positions, they implicitly endorse the same calculation made by her conservative opponents: that the rule of law is just another issue.”

Greenwald responded to Scarborough’s tweet, writing, “Anyone who thinks Liz Cheney is motivated by some sort of sacred devotion to the Rule of Law – after everything she’s spent the last two decades supporting – is either extremely ignorant or extremely dishonest.” 

“In Scarborough’s case,” Greenwald said, “it’s always a shifting mix of both.” 

Comrade, wrong again but in your defense, this probably reads better in the original Russian. https://t.co/XXZykos5GA

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 11, 2021

The MSNBC host shot back at Greenwald, who is often critical of mainstream media outlets for their coverage of the Trump administration, saying he was “wrong again” before adding that his tweet “probably reads better in the original Russian.” 

Trump critics like Scarborough have been known to suggest defenders of the former president and lawmakers who have embraced his policies are soft on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. 

Scarborough also told Greenwald, “everything you write is shaded in one direction, and when all else fails, you lie with impunity.”

Greenwald shot back.

“MSNBC hosts casually and publicly accuse people of being Kremlin agents — I think this is the fourth one who has done this to me — because they’re McCarthyite trash who look at Brian ‘War Stories’ Williams & Joy ‘Hacker’ Reid & know their network has no standards,” Greenwald responded.

In a separate tweet, Greenwald shared a video clip of journalist Megyn Kelly in which the former “Today” show anchor and Fox News star criticized journalists and media executives for what she described as “pumping the Trump machine” for ratings in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

In the clip, Kelly did not mention Scarborough by name, but Greenwald did in his tweet accompanying the video.

“Not one person on TV did more than Joe Scarborough to help Donald Trump get to the White House – he slobbered all over him on TV & in person at Mar-a-Lago,” Greenwald said. “Calling everyone a Russian agent won’t erase that fact from the first paragraph of his obituary.”