First, this happened....
Then, this happened....
Then, this happened....
Then, this happened...
“Why don’t you turn off the television and why don’t you start working, okay?” Scarborough responded on-air Tuesday morning
In an incendiary and baseless tweet early Tuesday, President Donald Trump suggested Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was a murderer, prompting the news host to pause his program and ask Trump to stop watching "for the sake of America" and himself.
“You need to stop watching our show, okay? It’s not good for you," Scarborough, 57, said during the broadcast after being told about Trump's tweet labeling him a "psycho."
Scarborough continued: "I think that might be why you go out and, like — you’re distracted. You’re tweeting so much."
Trump, 73, had implied on Twitter that Scarborough, a former member of the House of Representatives in Florida, was to blame for the 2001 accidental death of one of his congressional aides, Lori Klausutis.
According to the Associated Press, a coroner's report showed Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition and died after passing out and hitting her head while at the office in Florida; Scarborough was in Washington, D.C., at the time.
The president — who for years has feuded with Morning Joe's Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski after he felt they turned on him, with Scarborough previously saying he thought Trump was mentally unstable — has tweeted about Klausutis and Scarborough before.
But his latest tweet was his most brazen accusation.
“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so," Trump wrote just before 7 a.m. local time on Tuesday. "Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”
Scarborough responded in real time, being alerted to the president's tweet during his show.
“Why don’t you turn off the television, and why don’t you start working, okay?” he said, addressing the president. “You do your job, we’ll do ours, and America will be much better off for that. Just go. Turn off the TV, Donald.”
Last week, Trump tweeted that "'Concast' [his derogatory nickname for MSNBC's parent company] should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough."
Scarborough similarly responded on-air to that claim by the president, reportedly saying then that Trump's accusation was "extraordinarily cruel" and that he was bringing attention to a conspiracy theory that's "lived in the gutters of the internet for some time now."
“You, once again, drag a family through this and make them relive it again. ... As if losing a loved one the first time isn’t enough,” Scarborough said, telling Trump: "You don't understand the pain you cause to families who've already lost a loved one. Not me."
The White House did not respond to PEOPLE's request for comment on Tuesday.
Trump's attacks on Scarborough over Klausutis' death have drawn the ire of journalists and lawmakers, including Republicans.
“Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said in 2017.
“Look, what we’re trying to do around here is improve the tone, the civility of the debate, and this obviously doesn’t help do that,” Ryan added.
On Tuesday, CNN host Jake Tapper tweeted out his disgust with the president's repeated accusations.
"Her name was Lori Klausutis. She was 28. And her family deserves far better than the president and his minions using the tragedy of her death as a crude cudgel to attack a critic," Tapper wrote. "It’s indecent and inhumane."
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