Scarborough says he was prevented from reporting on Trump dementia during campaign

As Michael Wolff’s tell-all book — and Trump’s own recent actions — renew concerns about Donald Trump’s mental fitness, Joe Scarborough reveals that he was twice prevented from reporting on Trump’s mental state when it would have mattered most: during the presidential campaign.

During an interview with “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff Monday morning, Scarborough said that he had been told by “one of people closest to Donald Trump during the campaign” that the then-candidate had “early stage of dementia,” and that it was “getting worse.”

“Twice, the Washington Post hasn’t — would not let me put that in my column,” Scarborough added.

SCARBOROUGH: For the past year, we’ve had people around Donald Trump, and even during the campaign, saying he’s not mentally fit to be president. And there was such a reluctance — and certainly I’m not knocking the Washington Post, they’re actually being conservative with what they say — I’ve written twice in my column a quote about one of the people closest to Donald Trump during the campaign saying he’s got early stage of dementia, he repeats the same stories over and over again, his father had it, and it’s getting worse. And not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia.

Scarborough and Trump are on the outs now, but during the campaign and most of the transition, both “Morning Joe” hosts enjoyed a cozy relationship with Trump and his team. Then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway even felt comfortable enough with Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski during the campaign to tell them, off-camera, that she felt like she “needed a shower” after shilling for Trump.

So Scarborough certainly had the relationships with sources to have received that sort of information, which is consistent with the revelations in Wolff’s book.

Questions about Trump’s mental fitness have also been stoked by Trump’s own actions, including his recent Freudian provocation of Kim Jong Un and his weekend rant about his “very stable genius,” but as Scarborough notes, they have also been an open secret among journalists since before Trump was elected.

Unfortunately, Trump’s enablers on his team, and in the media, kept this information a secret. Even more unfortunately, the 65.8 million of us who listened to the woman who warned us that Trump was temperamentally unfit to hold the nuclear codes were not enough to prevent this disastrous presidency.

Hopefully, everyone else will listen now.