Morning Joe panelists aghast at Trump's 'worrisome' new lies: 'Really sucks for democracy'

Panelists on MS NOW's "Morning Joe" sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's latest election fraud lies.

The president had proclaimed that GOP candidates in the Los Angeles mayoral race, including former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, have been "cheated" after losing last week's primary election, and "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski was aghast that House Speaker Mike Johnson and other high-ranking Republicans are going along with his claims.

"It's diabolical," Brzezinski said. "Unless you are waiting to become speaker of the House, and then you patiently wait for California to come in, that is hypocrisy at the highest extreme, performative hypocrisy ... Explain for us how California's slow vote-counting process, which Mike Johnson is fine with when it benefits him, is now diabolical, even though it's driven by the state's heavy reliance on mail voting, and it delays the final results for 30 days. I don't get it."

California is a large and populous state that relies heavily on mail-in voting that can take longer to count, and The Dispatch's David Drucker said Trump was exploiting that laborious process and the conservative social media bubble for his own political purposes.

"The city of LA is seven points more democratic than the state of California, so you tell me how a Spencer Pratt is supposed to win this race," Drucker said. "It's just exceedingly unlikely, and even though he mastered the attention economy of this campaign and had people all over the country and particularly in Washington thinking, 'How can this guy lose? Look at his ads.'"

Trump's false claims about California's election have also been echoed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and the panelists lamented that Republicans are too afraid to challenge the president even when he's clearly lying.

"It really sucks for democracy," said Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei. "This is the stuff you see happen in a broken country, in a third-world country where they've not been able to govern effectively. Every time you call into question whether or not our elections are valid, you weaken the soul of the country, and that's why this is damaging."

If the president or his GOP allies had evidence of fraud, VandeHei said they should present it, but he warned they appeared to be laying the groundwork to challenge potential election losses this fall – just as Trump attempted to overturn his own election loss in 2020.

"This is the 250th year of this country," said veteran diplomat Richard Haas. "Here we are, we're meant to be honoring celebrating the Declaration [of Independence], and we probably right now are facing, in some ways, the most concerted assault, potentially, hopefully it won't happen. But these rumblings, this is really worrisome stuff. This is preparing the ground, as you say, for serious pushback against, I think, the a free and fair election this November. So people ought to take this seriously."

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