by Joe Scarborough | May 29, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the May 29, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
“It is parallel. It is exactly the same.”
That’s what Joni Kimoto — who was 4 years old when the U.S. government threw her into a Japanese internment camp — said about what is happening in America today.
Let’s call the detention centers what they are: internment camps.
Savage, industrial-scale internment camps that may be a more extreme version than even those used against Japanese Americans.
Camp East Montana sits on the same ground in El Paso, Texas, where the U.S. government interned Japanese Americans in World War II. A crude tent camp, built behind the walls of a military base, away from public view.
A February inspection of the camp found 49 deficiencies: undocumented force used, tuberculosis cases not isolated, medical emergencies not treated.
Three detainees have died there; one ruled a homicide.
And despite that neglect, the facility still passed an ICE inspection.
The Department of Homeland Security has called comparisons to Japanese internment “deranged and lazy.” But their brutal acts say something different.
Now DHS is threatening to pull agents from Newark and other airports in Democratic-run cities, disrupting global commerce and making air travel less safe.
All to prop up this abusive system.
Think again about Rose Chiaromonte.
Taken 300 miles from home.
The mother of a U.S. Marine awarded two Purple Hearts.
The wife of a Gulf War hero, a disabled vet for whom she is the primary caregiver.
That’s who DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is fighting to persecute.
And that’s why Donald Trump’s approval ratings keep falling.
In 1942, Earl Warren championed the internment of
by Joe Scarborough | May 19, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is an excerpt from the May 19, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Source: New York Times/Siena poll of 1,507 registered voters, May 11 to 15, 2026. Margin of error: +/- 2.8 percentage points
Poll after poll shows a bleak outlook for the Republican Party. As I wrote in my newsletter:
They don’t care about affordability. They don’t care about working Americans. They only care about doing what Trump tells them to do.
And we see the result:
The Atlas poll, rated A-plus, shows double-digit losses for Republicans on the generic ballot.
The New York Times/Siena poll — which usually trends more Republican than most — now has Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot, 50 to 39.
Trump’s approval has hit a second-term low: 37%. Sixty-four percent of Americans say the Iran war was the wrong decision.
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
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Why a weak job market is one of the top economic issues facing Americans
May 19, 2026 / 04:34
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Trump holds off strike on Iran an negotiations appear to stall
May 19, 2026 / 04:53
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Morning Joe panel talks Trump’s $1.776B fund set up for his allies
May 19, 2026 / 11:12
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‘Nothing conservative about Donald Trump’: Joe slams Hegseth campaigning against Massie
May 19, 2026 / 08:13
The post Half of U.S. voters say they’d vote for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate if elections for Congress were held today appeared first on MS NOW.
by Joe Scarborough | May 11, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the May 11, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
JOE’S NOTE
In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar built a 90-foot gold statue of himself in Babylon in 600 B.C. and commanded his subjects to bow before it. For his blasphemy, God struck him mad — and he spent seven years eating grass in the fields like an animal.
This week, a 22-foot gold statue — the Don Colossus, as it’s been dubbed — went up at Donald Trump’s own golf course outside Miami. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid for it to promote their meme coin, $PATRIOT.
Pastor Mark Burns led the dedication and felt compelled to clarify that the statue was “not a golden calf.”
The sculptor who made it wasn’t even invited — and had one word for the whole thing: “clusterfuck.”
Trump celebrated it on Truth Social. “The Real Deal,” he called it. “GOLD.”
Men who worship gold monuments tend not to see what’s coming.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both bet on quick, easy victories. Both were wrong. In the Oval Office in February 2025, Trump and JD Vance looked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the eye and told him he had no cards to play.
As Anne Applebaum noted on “Morning Joe” today: “Not only does Ukraine have cards. Other people want Ukraine’s cards.”
There are Ukrainians all over the Gulf states right now — in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — teaching those countries to shoot down Iranian drones.
How did Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Lindsey Graham miss what the entire intel community
by Joe Scarborough | May 8, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the May 8, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
This Mother’s Day, I’ll be thinking about my mom, Mary Jo Scarborough, just as I do every day.
I wrote about Mom in the Washington Post the week she died in 2019:
My first memory of Mom was her comforting presence at my side while a late night thunderstorm roared over our neighborhood in suburban Atlanta.
Mom softly sang “Where Is Love?” from the musical “Oliver!” and then told me how reciting the 23rd Psalm aloud would bring peace.
I may not have felt that blessed assurance as a 4-year-old, but my mother’s presence always brought peace.
Mom and I were emotionally inseparable for 55 years, and as she lay dying, I wanted her life to end the way my memories of her began. I quietly told her she would continue living on in the hearts of those she loved, and that more importantly, she would soon be reunited with Dad.
I knew Mom could hear my quiet words, just as I knew what she would whisper back if she could:
“Joey, be more careful with your words. If you keep talking down Republicans, you might just elect a Democrat.”
That was Mom. A steel magnolia. A Southern Baptist. A traditional Republican.
She would scarcely recognize her church or party seven years later, and would tell me to keep up the fight she helped me begin 32 years ago when I first ran for Congress.
“Judge yourself by your enemies, Joey,” she would say when things got tough. Then she’d say, “Don’t let
by Joe Scarborough | May 5, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the May 5, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
JOE’S NOTE
A revolution in warfare is happening right now — and not in Iran.
The historic shift is occurring instead on the front lines of Ukraine’s war to push back its Russian invaders.
Fifteen months ago, President Donald Trump did his best to humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy inside the Oval Office, pressing the freedom fighter to make a bad deal with Trump‘s ally, Vladimir Putin.
“You have no cards left to play,” Trump bellowed to Ukraine’s president.
The American president promptly slashed U.S. military aid to the Ukrainians. His vice president — who yelled at Zelenskyy in the same White House meeting — later said his proudest achievement was abandoning the Ukrainians to Putin’s evil designs. And both Trump and JD Vance worked feverishly to pressure the Ukrainians to surrender land at the negotiating table the Russians could never win on the battlefield.
A year later, Ukraine is holding all the cards, striking down waves of Russian invaders with drone technology that is rewriting the rules of modern warfare.
Retired Gen. David Petraeus said recently, “The future of warfare is happening right now in Ukraine.”
As Russia’s economy teeters on the brink of collapse, it is now the former KGB agent who has holed himself up in secure bunkers — afraid of being assassinated by Russian oligarchs or Ukrainian drones.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy strolls freely through the streets of European capitals once aligned with Russia — not as a refugee, but as a conquering hero.
European and Canadian leaders now line up to provide his warriors
by Joe Scarborough | May 1, 2026 | Morning Joe, News, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the May 1, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
As Nazi divisions blitzed across France, Winston Churchill warned Britain of difficult times ahead, telling Parliament he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
Franklin Roosevelt also warned Americans in the early days of World War II that things would get worse before they got better.
Americans deserve the same kind of straight talk today. Gas prices are going up, health care costs are unaffordable, and the rent is too damn high.
Americans need leaders who will tell it like it is. Unfortunately, Republicans are choosing instead to lie to workers.
Jonathan Lemire writes in the Atlantic that a lasting peace will not come any time soon. Projections range from two to nine months. Like these experts, I could predict that the war will be over in two months, 14 days, and two hours from now. But no one knows. We are looking through a glass darkly, and only time will tell whether Iran’s terror regime will survive the next week or last another 47 years.
Jon points out that none of the administration’s goals have been met. An emboldened terror regime remains in power, Iran’s nuclear program is still alive, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Iran has greater control over the strait than ever before.
Richard Haass, a former senior official at the State Department, tells Jonathan: “Even if Iran does not have explicit control, there is now always an implicit measure of control.” They’ve shut the strait once. Now they know they
