‘Hardball’: Anti-Trump Books Are Like the Gospels, Kerry Book Is Great, and Trump Doesn’t Care About 9/11

September 12th, 2018 5:28 PM

1. Yes, That Headline Is Correct

MSNBC’s Hardball was in rare form on Tuesday, featuring host Chris Matthews and his various guests perpetually stepping in it. 

It started with Matthews comparing anti-Trump books to the synoptic Gospels and it snowballed from there, ranging from Matthews touting John Kerry’s new book as being so monumental, panelists the President lacking empathy for hurricane 9/11 victims, and ending with Matthews dubbing the First Family “un-American.”

You’ll find all that and more in the following slides. 

Without any further adieu, let’s get started.....

2. Matthews: Omarosa, Wolff, Woodward Books Are Like Matthew, Mark, and Luke

Matthews: Omarosa, Wolff, Woodward Books Are Like Matthew, Mark, and Luke

While discussing in the A-Block the release of the Bob Wooward book Fear, Matthews responded to comments from the Associated Press’s Jonathan Lemire about Fear having similar “themes” as the Omarosa and Michael Wolff books by hailing them as a modern day version of the first three Gospels.

Matthews prefaced his weird comment by admitting that he was doing it “at the risk of blasphemy,” but then proceeded to do it anyway:

[A]ll these authors do have sort of a rhyming aspect to them like the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They do tell the same story and it’s ironic that Omarosa from her different background, from Bob Woodward, from Michael Wolff and from this person we don’t know inside the administration, they all sing the same song and if I were the President, I would worry about the one that’s out of tune.

For those not aware, the first three Gospels on the life of Jesus Christ contain many of the same stories and even similar wording. They were each also written before the John.

3. Matthews: Kerry Book Will ‘Have Longer Impact’ Than Woodward’s, Presidents Should Have Served

Matthews: Kerry Book Will ‘Have Longer Impact’ Than Woodward’s, Presidents Should Have Served

Speaking later to former Secretary of State John Kerry, Matthews swooned that he loves Kerry’s dull memoir “[b]ecause I think your book’s going to have a longer impact than Bob’s book, because I think it’s about America and it’s about warfare” and that he witnessed both the death of American soldiers in Vietnam but also “the cruelty a lot of American service people toward the Vietnam allies we had, and how they — they seemed to be cold about it.”

Seemingly forgetting about how his beloved Barack Obama didn’t have any military service, Matthews floated the idea that presidents should have been in the military (which Kerry pushed back against): “I — don’t you think presidents ought to have that experience if they’re going to be commander in chief? Isn’t it valuable to have been there and seen what war is?”

4. Glaude: ‘Narcissist’ Trump ‘Lacks the Capacity’ to Emphasize with Hurricane Victims

Glaude: ‘Narcissist’ Trump ‘Lacks the Capacity’ to Emphasize with Hurricane Victims

Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude reiterated his hatred for the President during the Hardball Roundtable segment, responding to a Matthews statement wondering “[w]hy would the President brag about” the government’s response to Hurricane Maria when it’s “something that makes him look like a fool.”

“Because he lacks the capacity for empathy. He can only see suffering through the eyes of his own self interest and purposes and so, he can’t see the bodies at his feet because he’s constantly looking up,” Glaude replied.

Matthews followed up by harping on Trump’s paper towel throwing incident last year in Puerto Rico and thus it gave Glaude the chance to pile on:

Because he views his role as a charitable one, as a philanthropic one. He doesn’t see himself as a commander-in-chief and to the extent to which that’s true, then because he lacks empathy, he lacks the capacity for self-reflection, for self-critical self-reflection. So, in the midst of failing with regards to Puerto Rico, now you know that close to 3,000 people died. You know you failed logistically. You can’t self-correct because you’re too much of a narcissist.

5. Panel Questions Whether Trump Cares About 9/11 Remembrances, Victims

Panel Questions Whether Trump Cares About 9/11 Remembrances, Victims

If Glaude’s personal attacks weren’t enough, the discussion moved to the 17th anniversary of the radical Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001 and falsely accusing Trump of treating the day like it was one of fun focusing on attacks against his political opponents.

“Well, President Trump started his day by tweeting about Russia and Hillary Clinton. Moments before delivering a speech commemorating those who had died, the president greeted supporters at the airport [in Shanksvill, Pennsylvania], at a moment which was caught by a photographer, quickly went viral. It looks, Susan, like a campaign event,” Matthews complained to faux Republican Susan Del Percio.

Del Percio responded that “he looks at everything” like it’s a campaign event and “[h]e assumes that people are there for him and that he knows are his people.”

Matthews appeared to question Trump’s empathy or respect for the heroes on Flight 93 while Del Percio and Glaude agreed (click “expand” to read more):

MATTHEWS: What’s the rah-rah about that? I mean, there was courage on that plane, Flight 93.

DEL PERCIO: Of course.

MATTHEWS: It was courage, let’s roll, it’s one of — actually the thrilling moments of a terrible day in our history and the world history where the people on the plane who knew it was going to happen, said no.

DEL PERCIO: And what’s interesting is Donald Trump knew the speech he was going to give and he actually delivered, in that window, the speech quite well for Donald Trump, but he woke up and tweeted about Hillary Clinton and in going against Jeff Sessions, he completely turned the tone of that event and that’s what he woke up doing, wanting a fight, and that’s what you see with the fist pumps and everything else and he really just turned a day — two times today, once with that and once again when talking about Puerto Rico. The man just cannot get out of his own way and stop thinking about himself.

GLAUDE: He’s not a decent human being, Chris. He’s simply not a decent human being in my view and here, everything he says about 9/11 is overshadowed by the fact that he lied and said he saw Muslims cheering in New Jersey. He’s — he lost hundreds of friends that he could never, he never verified, right....I think he’s so preoccupied with himself that it’s a clinical narcissism. I’m not a clinician. He’s so preoccupied with himself that he can only see suffering through his own interests.

6. Matthews Again Tags ‘Un-American’ Trump Family as Modern-Day ‘Romanovs’

Matthews Again Tags ‘Un-American’ Trump Family as Modern-Day ‘Romanovs’

The MSNBC pundit has an obsession with comparing the Trumps to the Russian royal family the Romanovs, who met a bloody demise when a communist state arose (aka the Soviet Union). 

But he took it a step further on Tuesday by reupping another old phrase by denouncing the entire Trump family as “un-American” in “the way this Trump family arrived in Washington” with “the President, of course, but bringing with him his daughter, a pair of sons who seem to be very much in the financial picture, and a son-in-law to boot.”

Matthews fretted that the Trump family and their circle of advisers “isn’t the brain trust FDR brought in to fight the Great Depression or Jack Kennedy’s beloved Irish mafia, or even Jimmy Carter’s Georgia Mafia,” but instead “[t]his is the Romanovs, a family held together by blood and the assurance of presidential protection, most assuredly of presidential pardon once it comes to it.”