‘Morning Joe’ Meltdown Over Trump Medicaid Cuts & Spiraling National Debt

Martin Holmes June 2, 2025, 9:42 am

Joe Scarborough wasn’t holding back on Monday’s (June 2) edition of Morning Joe as he lost his cool at Republicans over President Trump‘s Medicaid cuts and the country’s national debt problem.

At the top of Monday’s show, Scarborough took aim at House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently stated the GOP spending bill was “not going to add to the debt” or cut Medicaid. The MSNBC host blasted Johnson, saying he was either “lying” or “ignorant.”

“I just want to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt here,” Scarborough said, per RawStory.com. “Maybe he just doesn’t know history, and maybe he doesn’t even know current events, because if he did, he would know that actually, 20 years ago or so, Congress balanced the budget four years in a row, and over the past eight years under the Trump administration, the first time passed the largest deficits, the biggest debt, the biggest budgets in history up to that point.”

He continued, “Donald Trump’s administration and the Republicans in the House of Representatives, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe Mike Johnson wasn’t paying attention back then, but they increased the national debt more in four years than every other Congress and every other president had in the history of the country, cumulatively.”

Scarborough took a break from his tirade to apologize to viewers. “I’m sorry to start the show this way,” he stated. “I just have to, when somebody says something that is so misleading… it’s very, very important that people know that this budget that Mike Johnson is trying desperately to pass will help increase the federal debt by $20 trillion over the next 10 years. Let me just say that again, Mike Johnson is desperately working to pass a budget that will increase the national debt by $20 trillion over the next 10 years.”

The news anchor went on to say that the United States “didn’t even accumulate that much debt over its first 220 years of existence,” adding, “Think about this: From George Washington’s term through the end of Barack Obama’s term on Jan. 20, 2016, 2017, the United States of America did not increase the national debt by as much as Mike Johnson’s budget increases the national debt over the next decade.”

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Scarborough also blasted Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) over her comments on Medicaid cuts and her subsequent mock apology. Ernst had drawn ire after she responded to concerns about Medicaid cuts by saying everybody was “going to die” anyway. After backlash, Ernst shared a mock apology video filmed at a graveyard.

“I’m sure Webster’s dictionary wants to kind of use video in the future. Put that next to ‘clueless,’ because that’s what these Republicans are right now. They’re clueless,” Scarborough said of Ernst’s video. “They’re savaging health care in their own districts, in their own states, and Joni Ernst feels confident enough not only to say: ‘Well, you’re going to die anyway.’”

“Then she feels confident enough that she can do whatever she wants to do, go into a graveyard and make jokes about how everybody’s going to die anyway,” he added.

Morning Joe, Weekdays, 6a/5c, MSNBC