MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Monday mocked Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) for criticizing “elites” during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), noting that all three senators attended Ivy League schools.
“They obviously didn’t have acting school at Harvard or Princeton,” Scarborough said at the beginning of “Morning Joe.”
“It’s so funny these anti-elitists, as they like to call themselves … you had Ted Cruz, Mr. Anti-elitist who went to Princeton and Harvard. You have Josh Hawley who went to Yale and then Stanford.”
“You lie so shamelessly,” Scarborough, who attended the University of Alabama, said of the senators. “You’re all Ivy League brats.”
Scarborough played clips of the two senators, along with Cotton, speaking at this year’s CPAC gathering in Orlando, Fla., where they told conference attendees that they will not stop fighting for conservative beliefs and against those on the left.
Scarborough criticized Cruz for saying the far-right wing of the party does not consist of “country club Republicans.”
“You are,” Scarborough said. “In fact your guy, who you kowtow to, who insults your wife, that insults your father’s memory … your guy not only lives at a country club, he lives at his own country club,” Scarborough said, referring to former President Trump, who now resides at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Scarborough continued: “I don’t know, but I’ve heard that Ivy League people can really be elitist … I don’t know because I didn’t go there.”
Scarborough, a former GOP congressman who was later a visiting fellow at Harvard, also bashed Cotton’s comments at CPAC, with the MSNBC host calling the senator a “Harvard boy.”
“For the first time ever, CPAC is not in our nation’s capital,” said Cotton, who attended Harvard as an undergraduate before graduating from Harvard Law School. “That’s because they won’t let us anywhere near our nation’s capital. Maybe if CPAC would have promised to burn down buildings and tear down statues they would have let us up there.”
“Oh no, you do tear things up,” Scarborough said. “In fact, 300 of your supporters are in jail now. Three hundred Trump supporters are in jail now.”
Cotton, Cruz and Hawley are all considered potential 2024 presidential contenders.
–Updated on March 2 at 5:56 a.m.