President’s allies recoil at smear of MSNBC host

Some of President Donald Trump’s most stalwart media defenders broke ranks with him Wednesday, aghast at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.

The backlash even spread to the senior levels of Trump’s party on Capitol Hill, where the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said the president should drop the matter and focus on leading the country through the coronavirus pandemic. “I would urge him to stop it,” she told reporters, referring to the false allegations.

The vast majority of Republican officials have kept silent about the president’s Twitter barrage against Scarborough, and the most prominent conservative voices on Fox News, like Sean Hannity, let the subject go unmentioned on recent broadcasts.

But Cheney’s criticism was a sign of stepped-up pressure on Trump from the right, reflected in this week’s unusual chorus of reproach from the conservative media platforms the president often turns to for comfort.

The New York Post, Trump’s first read in the morning, lamented in Wednesday’s paper that the president “decided to suggest that a TV morning-show host committed murder. That is a depressing sentence to type.” In a staff editorial, the Post addressed its most powerful reader directly: “Trust us, you did not look like the bigger man.”

And the editorial page of the

Wall Street Journal, a bellwether of establishment conservatism, called Trump’s unfounded accusation against Scarborough “ugly even for him.”