Don Lemon went on an expletive-filled rant over a Morning Joe discussion about whether or not Democrats should play nice with President-elect Donald Trump in the name of “civility.”
“Civility does not mean befriending people or forgoing your morals and your principles and your character,” Lemon said on his Don Lemon Show on YouTube. “If someone disrespects my loved one, I don’t have to smile in their f---ing face!”
The former CNN host’s comments came after former President Barack Obama was seen smiling and chatting with Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week. During a Friday panel on MSBNC’s Morning Joe, former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele took co-host Joe Scarborough to task for insisting on civility toward Trump, a man who Steele said “wants to lock up citizens” and “turn the government against them.”
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Lemon was firmly on Team Steele.
“Barack Obama is a classy guy,” Lemon said on his show. “But these are the very same MAGA people who have called—and Donald Trump has helped promote—calling Michelle Obama a man. I’m not smiling in your face if you’re calling my sister, and my mother, or my wife, or my girlfriend a man. F--- you!”
He also played a clip from the same Morning Joe panel when The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser argued that debating civility can actually play into the hands of autocrats.
“I will tell you, having lived in Russia in the first few years after Vladimir Putin took power, the questions—the debates—among those who sought to oppose him, they benefited him,” Glasser said on the show. “Because they took their own fights over their version of civility much more seriously than they took the serious structural changes that were taking place in Russia that led to the end of Russian democracy.”
Lemon argued that the 75 million people who didn’t vote for Trump have a right to be “concerned” when they see leaders like Obama joking around with Trump—who has vowed to fill the government with MAGA loyalists and threatened to jail his political opponents.
If they’re laughing with him in public just months after calling him a ‘wannabe dictator,’ it raises questions about whether they will stand up to him behind closed doors, Lemon said.
“You have to indicate to the American people that this is not normal,” he added. “Folks are tired of the behavior being normalized.”
