Joe Scarbrough Confronts Doug Emhoff With Trump’s ‘Incredibly Lewd and Crude Suggestions’ About Kamala Harris
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, husband of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, dismissed former President Donald Trump’s “lewd and crude” personal attacks on he and his wife as a “distraction.”
At rallies and in interviews during the campaign race Trump has questioned Harris’s racial identity, attacked her over her previous relationships and amplifying claims that Emhoff had an affair during his first marriage.
Emhoff appeared in an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough on Monday who pressed him on the former president’s tactics.
“You talk about the debate. Why do you think Donald Trump won’t debate her again?” the host asked.
“Well, you saw the first debate, didn’t you?” Emhoff replied.
“Yeah,” Scarborough said.
Emhoff added: “Yeah, that’s why. Got his ass kicked. And so he’s afraid that that’s going to happen again. Rather, he’s spreading this fog, this fog of misinformation and disinformation and gaslighting, rather than face her again so we can see this flip screen.”
Scarborough then dug in on some of the personal attacks Trump has leveled at Emhoff without explicitly detailing them. Most recently a report by the Daily Mail alleged he struck his then-girlfriend in public in 2012, a claim that the Harris campaign denied.
The host said: “And he’s spreading it about you, [repeating] tabloid stories about your personal life, saying it should be front and center. He’s saying it about your wife and making incredibly crude and lewd suggestions about her past life.”
He continued: “I’m just curious. I know I seem like a very zen, mindful person, but I think I’d be pissed off. And I’m just wondering, how do you all stay centered? How do you stay disciplined and not really go off and not really push back hard at these things?”
“We don’t have time to be pissed off,” Emhoff said. “We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”
“Does it get you off your game?” Scarborough pressed.
“No,” Emhoff replied bluntly. “All we are doing, all we talk about is this election. We understand the stakes. We understand the responsibility.”
“What are the stakes?” Scarborough pushed.
The second gentleman replied: “Our very country, our future, what kind of future are we going to have? Who would you like picking the next two or three Supreme Court justices? The guy who picked the three who overturned Roe v. Wade and want to take away more and more freedom? Or do you want Kamala Harris picking those Supreme Court justices? I mean, this is, you know, she said it, it’s not just the most important election of our lifetimes, it’s the most important election of our nation’s lifetime.”
He continued: “So right now, you’ve seen us in the before times, a lot of happy couple talk. We love each other dearly. We love being around each other. We enjoy it. We have fun together. Right now, we’re deferring that kind of happy couple time because everything we talk about right now is what else can we be doing to win this election, where else can we go, how can we make sure that we are getting the word out and that’s it because like i said the stakes are are too high.”
He added: “So all that other stuff you’re talking about bounces off. It’s just a distraction, we’re not gonna let it distract us.”
Watch above on MSNBC.
