MSNBC host Joe Scarborough frequently disagreed with President Barack Obama during his White House years. However, Scarborough said he would gladly vote for Obama again over the current president, whom he accused of inspiring far-right violence.
In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Scarborough said he would "cheerfully champion" a change in the Constitution allowing Obama to run for two more terms.
While relentlessly criticizing Obama's foreign and domestic policy during his time as president, Scarborough said his spell in office would be remembered as the "most transformative of our lifetimes," while Donald Trump's would be compared to the Dred Scott decision, which inflamed racial tensions and helped push the country toward civil war.
"Like that pre-Civil War Supreme Court case, Trump will forever be condemned as a racial reprobate whose words and actions inspired white supremacists and neo-Nazis," Scarborough said.
Scarborough said Trump's failures to fully denounce white supremacy after the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017 and the recent New Zealand mosque terror attacks are the latest in a long line of tragedies Trump has not condemned.
In the wake of the Christchurch mass shootings, in which 50 people were killed, Trump dismissed the rise in far-right attacks as not a real threat and merely a "small group of people that have very, very serious problems."
According to the Anti-Defamation League, right-wing extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S. in 2018, more than any year since 1995 and an increase of 35 percent from 2017.
A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in November 2018 also found that the number of far-right terrorist attacks had more than quadrupled in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017.
"This troubling chapter in U.S. history has one author—and his name is Donald Trump," Scarborough wrote.
"That's why any policy differences I had with Obama now seem so insignificant. Americans who still have faith in the upward arc of King's moral universe should be grateful for Obama's presidency and the way his election exposed the white racism that is still at large in our land," he said.
"If changing the Constitution and re-electing Obama two more times would break the fever that now ravages Trump's Washington, I would cheerfully champion the passage of that constitutional amendment, slap a 'Hope and Change' sticker on my shirt and race to the nearest voting booth to support the man historians will remember as the most significant president since Abraham Lincoln," Scarborough concluded.
