Joe Scarborough has reacted to President Trump’s State of the Union with profanity — and by questioning his sanity. After a sweeping denunciation of Trump’s remarks on immigration, inflation, and elections, Joe Scarborough declared the speech “extraordinary… for many reasons,” adding: “He did sh-- that no sane president would ever do. It was really, really crazy to be watching that in a State of the Union address.” “No sane president.” “Really, really crazy.” Whatever would Jake Tapper have to say at this talk?  Scarborough's language moved from policy critique into questions of presidential fitness. The insanity accusation is nothing new for Scarborough. He has previously called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump. Looks like Joe might be fantasizing about that again.  Scarborough’s broadside began with accusations of “unrelenting bigotry” and “lies,” and included this bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand: “I’m not going to talk about fascism or Nazism. You just read history and see what type of regimes will pick one or two groups and blame all of America’s ills on those groups.” Translation: I won’t make the comparison — but I just did. Somewhere, the great James Taranto might be smiling at Scarborough's sly use of apophasis. Scarborough on SOTU: Trump Did ‘Sh-- No Sane President Would Ever Do’ pic.twitter.com/wthja6ClcG — Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) February 25, 2026 As for the profanity: there was a time when Scarborough dropped an f-bomb, and in response, the suits dropped a seven-second delay on him. Now, the vulgarity has become a standard part of Scarborough's shtick. Joining the panel, Financial Times columnist Ed Luce piled on, calling the speech “boring” and so saturated with falsehoods that fact-checking felt almost absurd: “There were so many lies that at one point I thought, should we fact check whether the men’s hockey team really did win a gold?” The morning after a State of the Union used to mean policy debate. On Wednesday, Morning Joe delivered psychological diagnosis, flirtations with fascism analogies, and a gratuitous splash of profanity for bad measure. Note: When Scarborough told his guests, “Before we dig into it, I will say there are a couple things that I thought were extraordinary,” it was a clear signal to the panel: back to the green room, pour a coffee, maybe fire up a Marlboro. Joe, as is his habit, wasn’t relinquishing the floor anytime soon. Here's the transcript. MS NOW Morning Joe 2/25/26 6:02 am ET JOE SCARBOROUGH: Well, why don't we go around and give our initial thoughts before we dig into it. I will say there are a couple things that I thought were extraordinary that you wouldn't see in other State of the Unions, unless they were Donald Trump's.  The first, of course, was just the unrelenting bigotry, the lies, the attacking of one group specifically, the Somalis, Somali-Americans. That's the sort of thing that, oh, you know, I'm not going to talk about fascism or Nazism. You just read history and see what type of regimes will pick one or two groups and blame all of America's ills on those groups. That's one of the things that the president did.  Another thing that he did was just generally talking about immigration. Again, it's un-American. It goes against what the Republican party has always stood for. It's gone against what Ronald Reagan stood for.  And this continued lie, and it is a continued lie by this Republican party, and they know they're lying when they continue to suggest that immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than those who were native-born Americans. And every study, one study after another study after another study shows this is a tired lie. And yet you have an entire party that seems in large part to be based upon this lie.  Speaking of lies, it's not even a fact check. It's just a straight out lie, because everybody knows watching, everybody knows speaking, everybody knows in the audience. They understand Donald Trump is lying when he's saying that the price of meat is going down, the price of groceries are going down. They know he's lying when he says that he inherited inflation at 9%. No, he inherited inflation at about the same rate that it's at right now when Joe Biden left office. It's about the same as where it was there.  Also, the idea that you're going to have J.D. Vance who's going to investigate waste and fraud and abuse and corruption, when his family, Donald Trump's family, has made at least $1.9 to $2 trillion [?] personally since he came into office. [NPR claimed it was $4 billion.] And this whole idea about no stock trading, add up all the money. And by the way, I've always been against members of Congress trading stock. That's absolutely insane. But even add up right now, all the money that they've made. It doesn't come close to the amount of money that Donald Trump has made himself personally, put in his own pocket over the past year.  So you see that and you go, well, that's kind of interesting. And Willie, I've got to say also, the election conspiracies, he continues it. It's one thing for him to be doing it out on the campaign trail, lying day in, day out, lying day in and day out about election conspiracies. There's no way Democrats can win without this cheating. He says it all the time. He said it in Georgia all the time. You've got a Republican governor in Georgia that said, no, that's not right. You've got a secretary of state in Georgia, Republican, says, no, that's not right. The same one that Donald Trump tried to cheat and get the 11,000 votes to win Georgia back in 2020. He keeps saying that every day. And every day, Democrats are winning by 30, 40, 50, 60 percentage points in races across America. We saw it again last night while this was going on.  So yeah, there was a broadcaster that said, that speech was extraordinary. Yes, it was extraordinary. It was extraordinary for many reasons. Most of them just, he did shit that no sane president would ever do. It was really, really crazy to be watching that in a State of the Union address.  . . .  ED LUCE: Jonathan, I strongly, I mean, I had a lot of favorite moments in this speech, but I strongly agree with your comment on it being boring. Not just the length, the hour 47 minutes, but the predictability of the lies he was telling and the stunts he was putting.  There were so many lies that at one point I thought, should we fact check whether the men's hockey team really did win a gold? 

One of CNN’s most notorious TV egoists surprises viewers every once in awhile by displaying a modicum of common sense in the face of leftist politicians running economies into the mud. His recent repudiation of blue city spending is no exception. CNN host Fareed Zakaria actually ripped how Democrat strongholds like New York City were “out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off fiscal problems to some future day,” in an X post promoting a February 23 segment of Fareed Zakaria GPS. In a stunning display of red-pilling, Zakaria directly called out the newly minted communist NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani for being the poster child for radical Dems steering their cities into economic brick walls: “Zohran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York affordable.” However, rebuked Zakaria, “Last week, he unveiled a budget that is — in a word — unaffordable.”  Mamdani’s gargantuan $127 billion budget is being bolstered largely by massive tax hikes (including a 9.5 percent property tax increase). This economically inept agenda even reportedly left many members of the Democrat-controlled city council “shaking their heads,” thinking that “Mamdani should be slashing city spending before even considering spiking taxes on their constituents,” according to the New York Post. Zakaria analyzed that NYC has already been “fiscally profligate” for so long, and Mamdani’s latest scheme was “similar to the annual expenditures of a mid-sized nation” like Greece or Thailand. Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off fiscal problems to some future day. Democrats in city halls should stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work. My take: pic.twitter.com/kwYkA4XEjx — Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) February 22, 2026 Zakaria further rebuked in his X post that “Democrats in city halls should stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work.” Bless his heart for actually arguing like efficient government can be a real thing. It’s unclear what’s causing this 180-degree turnaround for Zakaria, given that he was on record fawning over the abomination of Bidenomics. In July 2024, Zakaria praised President Joe Biden for allegedly using “the resources of the federal government to make large investments in infrastructure, child care, manufacturing, and energy.” “Large investments” is a funny way of describing Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending that helped launch the United States into the worst inflation crisis it experienced in 40-years. Isn’t Mamdani just adopting a similar playbook? We guess even Mamdaninomics is a bridge too far for the Biden-loving CNN host.

As we’ve documented recently at NewsBusters, CBS’s flagship newscasts have shown little wholesale changes under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss that we both initially saw and as had been reported. Instead, it’s been more of the same liberal drivel. But ironically, there have been a few moments at NBC where it’s come across as this was the network she actually leads and such was the case on Wednesday’s Today in reacting to President Trump’s State of the Union address. While NBC was far from perfect, they were devoid of the negative descriptors and bellyaching we usually see elsewhere at ABC and, as we’ll see in a future post, CBS. Hoda Kotb and co-hosts Craig Melvin were straightforward in the opening tease with Kotb stating “President Trump delivers his State of the Union” and Melvin finishing her sentence by saying “with his eyes on the economy and the next major election.” “President Trump uses the longest state of the Union in U.S. history to tout his policies, take shots at Democrats and the Supreme Court and send a warning to Iran...And in a lighter moment, celebrating the triumph of American athletes at the Winter Olympics...We’ll break it all down,” Melvin added amid a number of clips. Later tossing to senior White House correspondent Garrett Haake, Kotb said Trump’s address was “the longest ever clocking in at one hour and 48 minutes, heavy on patriotism, claiming a new golden age for America while also sparring with Democrats in real time on a host of issues.” Haake accomplished the balancing act of painting the bipartisan messages as well as Trump’s jousting with Democrats. Right off the top, Haake framed it as “as a patriotic pep talk, with the President boasting about his economic record and highlighting the service and achievements of American warriors and champions.” However, he added, Trump “also lashed out at Democrats repeatedly on immigration and other issues, creating some tense moments and stark reminders of our polarized union.” Which network is Bari Weiss running? If you had been in a coma the last year and asked me to pick which one she took over, I would bet NBC with segments like this on Wednesday’s @TodayShow from @GarrettHaake about the #SOTU “[T]he speech seemed designed as a patriotic pep talk,… pic.twitter.com/8KgKtgvP1p — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 25, 2026 He didn’t set off an economic doom loop, instead telling viewers Trump “us[ed] his nearly two hour speech to highlight successes of his first year, touting falling gas prices and a rising stock market” and “[tried] to put [Democrats] on defense over affordability.” On the border, Haake simply said Trump “attempt[ed] to goad Democrats into standing up and clapping.” The back end of his story — much of which he repeated in the second hour — found time to mention both the moments of unity such as the men’s Olympic hockey team as well as the left’s verbal outbursts and stunts about the Epstein files (click “expand”): The biggest bipartisan cheers of the night coming for the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic hockey team...Mr. Trump adding that he plans to present goalie Connor Hellebuyck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and later awarding two Medals of Honor to military aviators of different eras: a helicopter pilot wounded in the recent raid to capture Nicolas Maduro, and a Korean War fighter pilot. Viewers may have noticed two moments of disruption during the speech, with one Democrat escorted out of the chamber early after unfurling a sign on the House floor. And that exchange about immigration, which led to a brief but heated back and forth between the President and several Democratic lawmakers. Most of the protests against the President inside the chamber was silent, though, with dozens of Democrats skipping the speech entirely or inviting guests like survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein meant to send a message just by showing up. If Haake played good cop, senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson was the sort of bad cop. On the economy, Jackson insisted Trump lacked the “I-feel-you-pain moment” at a time when “Americans — make no mistake, they don’t feel good” since his speech instead “celebrated what he sees as good news on the economy[.]” “Polls consistently show that people say they’re not happy with how the President has handled issues like the cost of living. We didn’t hear much new on what a number of Trump voters before the speech told me. They wanted to hear about how to make their lives more affordable right now,” she said. On immigration, she conceded the baiting of Democrats, but suggested this too was ill-advised because “the President is under water on this issue” and “[m]ore Americans say[ing] they disapprove of his handling of border security and immigration, and interestingly, the number of people who say they strongly disapprove is up double digits since last year[.]” All that being said, she closed with fairly vanilla answers about Iran and the midterms which, if we were to summarize it, boiled down to a fluffy way of saying who wins will come down to turnout (click “expand”): KOTB: All right, let’s talk about foreign policy. He brought up Iran later in the speech, right, Hallie? JACKSON: Yeah, this was a back half topic for him late into the night, and one that a lot of people had been listening for. Hoda, what kind of case would the President make for possible military strikes on Iran as he’s building up military firepower in the region? This is a region on edge. The answer to that came down to Iran’s nuclear capabilities. You heard the President trying to square his previous claim that that has been obliterated with why he would need to take action now to prevent Iran from building it up. This is delicate for him politically. He ran on a pledge remember to avoid foreign entanglements, but, in office, he really hasn’t been shy about those. Just look at that raid on Venezuela, which he also, of course, highlighted in his speech.  MELVIN: So, Hallie, all of this, of course, coming with the first — first primaries, actually just a few weeks away. Now, how does last night’s speech tee up Republicans? How does it tee up Democrats as we head into the primary season? JACKSON: Craig, I think that’s the right frame to look at this, because this is, in many ways, a tone setter here, the coalition that propelled the president to victory back in 2024 has started to crack. Now, of course, the President is not on the ballot himself in the midterms, but Republicans are hoping that his voters are going to show up at the polls to turn out to help keep seats in the House and Senate even with the Republican Party facing some historical headwinds here. So, in many ways, the State of the Union was setting the tone for the rest of the party in this key year. But far and away, the biggest issue in the midterms is going to be affordability and while there was some red meat for Republicans in the speech, not as much meat on the bone on how to make people’s lives less expensive. Now, with Craig and Hoda, the first midterm primaries coming up already next week. It was a change of pace from the last two years when NBC was rather uninterested in Trump’s joint address in 2025 and then were ebullient over Joe Biden’s final address in 2024. To see the relevant NBC transcript from February 25, click here.

The Epstein files released by the Department of Justice last month painted Microsoft co-founder and vaccine champion Bill Gates in a particularly unfavorable light.Amid uproar over her ex-husband's repeat mention in the files — including in a 2013 email wherein Jeffrey Epstein alleged that he procured for Bill Gates "drugs, in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls" — Melinda French Gates told NPR's "Wild Card" podcast, "It's personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage."'Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse.'While French Gates indicated that she has "been able to move on in life," her ex-husband is alternatively still dealing with the consequences of his long-standing association with the notorious child sex offender.Gates reportedly apologized to the staff of the Gates Foundation for the fallout of his Epstein ties during a town hall on Tuesday, stating, "It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein," according to a recording reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.Gates, who has not been accused of wrongdoing by any of Epstein's victims and whose spokesperson characterized the claims in the 2013 email as "completely false," reportedly stressed, "I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit."The billionaire reportedly had an explanation for the photographs in the files featuring him in the company of women whose faces are redacted. Epstein asked to take pictures of his assistants with Gates after meetings, Gates claimed, according to the Journal.RELATED: Epstein-friendly lesbians managing fraud-plagued Manhattan club in hot water — again Photo by Leon Neal - WPA Pool /Getty Images"To be clear, I never spent any time with the victims, the women around him," said Gates, according to the Journal. He noted, however, that he "did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities."Gates reportedly suggested further that despite his ex-wife expressing concerns about Epstein in 2013 — five years after he pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor for prostitution — Gates continued meeting with Epstein."Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior," Gates reportedly told staff.Gates, apparently recognizing that his relationship with Epstein helped boost Epstein's reputation, reportedly apologized "to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake I made."Gates also recognized the negative impact his Epstein ties have had on the organization previously known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which became the Gates Foundation last year following the couple's divorce and previous revelations about Bill's ties to Epstein."It definitely is the opposite of the values of the Foundation and the goals of the Foundation," said Gates, who has directly and through his foundation worked to shape public health, the news landscape, education policy, AI, American farmland, the energy sector, foreign policy, and the Earth itself."And our work is very reputational sensitive," continued the billionaire. "I mean, people can choose to work with us or not work with us."When asked about the recording and Gates' remarks, the Gates Foundation told Blaze News in a statement, "This was a scheduled townhall with employees, which Bill does twice a year. In the conversation, Bill answered questions submitted by foundation staff on a range of issues, including the release of the Epstein files, the foundation's work in AI, and the future of global health."The foundation added, "In the townhall, Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions.""The harm Epstein inflicted on women and girls was horrific, and no one should ever have to experience what they did," the foundation said in a statement earlier this month. "The foundation regrets having any employees interact with Epstein in any way."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Messaging app Discord assured its users that they will not have to show their faces, unless they live in certain places.In certain regions, users will still be subject to face scans or government ID submission.'We'll give you options, designed to tell us only your age and never your identity.'This comes after a data breach in October that saw at least 70,000 images of government-issued IDs stolen through one of Discord's third-party verification services. Proton reported that passports, driver's licenses, names, and IP addresses were stolen, along with user transcripts from conversations they had with support agents.Still, in February 2025, Discord told users that their profiles would promptly be reverted to teen-level accounts by default, unless they submit to "facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to its vendor partners."This means that without verification, users could not get message requests, join political chats, or unblur a wide variety of sensitive content.After some intense backlash, though, Discord is now rolling back its requirements, but only for now.RELATED: Gamers REVOLT over age-verify scheme subjecting users to 'suspicious entity detection' Photo by Thomas Fuller/NurPhoto via Getty Images It seems obvious that Discord still has plans to roll out user verification eventually, but at this time it is leaning toward requiring less intrusive means. However, in some jurisdictions, giving up one's identity is still required by law."Where we have legal obligations, we will continue to meet them," the company wrote in a blog post. In "the U.K., Australia, and Brazil, the law may require platforms to use approved methods like facial age estimation or ID checks," Discord continued, adding that it will be exploring alternative methods of verification in other jurisdictions."If you're among the less than 10% of users who do need to verify, we'll give you options, designed to tell us only your age and never your identity."Simply put, Discord will still be enforcing age restrictions on the user experience.RELATED: Digital tyrants want your face, your ID … and your freedom Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP via Getty Images Discord floated different verification options like credit card verification, while putting limits on companies that use facial age estimation."Any partner offering facial age estimation must perform it entirely on-device. If they don't meet that bar, we won't work with them," the company said.One company that "did not meet that bar" was Persona. Discord ran a "limited test" with the company customer verification service in the U.K. but has since decided not to move forward with it. It is unclear whether this relates to a recent report that showed Persona was not only performing almost 270 cross-reference checks on user face data, but the platform was allegedly set up for, and compliant with, parameters that allow for government access.While Discord has promised ongoing transparency, it is still moving toward user data collection and will still be using facial scans to do so.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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