The “Morning Joe” crew set their sights on Wednesday’s Senate debate out of Florida, praising Democratic nominee Val Demings and calling Republican Sen. Marco Rubio “sophomoric,” “tart” and “sweating.”
He’s “like a frustrated little boy,” said co-host Mika Brzezinski.
Brzezinski said of his rival, “You can really see the experience that Val Demings has as a police chief, dealing with a lot of characters that can frustrate him.” “She really had her facts ready, but she was also prepared to confront him with some of the kinds of things that the Republican Party has done of late to win.”
Still, for better or worse than he anticipated, co-host Joe Scarborough thinks Rubio will win—though it “could be a tough race.”
“We’ll see how it goes. Florida Republicans are trending, obviously, firmly in 2020. But Val Demings did a great job last night,” he said.
Scarborough then went on to explain how, watching Tuesday’s debate, he was on and off the phone with various callers who were shocked by Rubio’s performance.
“People I spoke to said, ‘Something happened to him in 2016.’ Like, Donald Trump got into his head. Donald Trump happened to him, got into his head, and he never recovered,” Scarborough said.
“He seemed balanced last night, he’ll have the answer,” the co-host continued, pointing to the senator’s examples of yelling about Second Amendment rights. “It’s just these pat answers that you’d hear someone in a middle school debate where they were pretending to be in a Senate debate. He sounded tart, he looked sly, he looked sweaty, and I Don’t know he was ever recovering from Donald Trump in 2016 beating him so badly in Florida.”
As Scarborough sees it, Rubio is a case study of how some powerful people have fallen.
“And I have one more thing to say: Marco Rubio was once seen as the future of the Republican Party. There was a Time magazine cover about him being the future of the Republican Party, and last night I What I saw was a shadow of the man… Maybe I’m wrong and people will yell at me on Twitter now, but I don’t think he’s always been that bad.”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
