Joe Scarborough keeps finding new ways to aim his morning show at Elon Musk.
His Democrat friends swear they only want to keep the midterms safe.
And Scarborough’s guest said the one thing that should have ended the segment on the spot.
Joe Scarborough Wasn’t Saying It, Right Up Until He Said It
With less than a week to go before the November 3 midterms, Joe Scarborough opened an October 28 segment of Morning Joe on MS NOW by asking Congressman Jim Himes (D-CT) whether Democrats had heard “any concern about voting systems possibly being hacked into.”
That was the soft part.
Then Scarborough read two quotes on the air and handed them to his audience like exhibits in a closing argument.
The first came from President Trump’s rally on January 19, 2025, the eve of his second inauguration. Trump said of Musk, “He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.”
The second came out of filmmaker Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk. In the film, Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, claims Musk told her before the 2024 election that he planned to unleash “an anomaly in the matrix.”
Scarborough knew how thin that sounded. “Now, this could all be wild speculation,” he admitted, conceding that “those claims obviously have not been verified.”
But he didn’t drop it. “So, not saying Musk did. I’m not saying any of that,” Scarborough said, before asking what Democrats planned to do about “these five trillionaires, as you say, trying to do what they can to hack the results.”
And a few minutes later he circled right back, wondering aloud “what is he doing now that he’s got the 4 or 5 AI companies completely in his pocket?”
Anybody who has watched enough cable news knows that dance. Disclaim the charge, then repeat it three more times. The retiree watching over his morning coffee doesn’t remember the disclaimer. He remembers the word “hack.”
The Parts of the Story Morning Joe Left on the Cutting Room Floor
Start with the Trump quote. Scarborough read it as though Trump had wandered into a confession.
But the fuller passage, as PolitiFact laid it out, shows Trump talking about Musk’s campaign work. Before he ever got to the computers, Trump said Musk “spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania and he’s a popular guy, and he was very effective.”
That’s a President bragging on a supporter who crisscrossed a swing state for weeks. Musk even joined Trump onstage at the October 2024 Butler rally, at the same spot where a gunman nearly killed Trump that July.
Even the professional fact-checkers, hardly a pro-Trump crowd, couldn’t make Scarborough’s version stick. Snopes found no evidence Trump meant that Musk’s knowledge of vote-counting computers won him Pennsylvania. NewsGuard reported that nobody has produced evidence any such fraud happened.
The documentary claim looks shakier still. According to reporting on the film, it shows a text attributed to Musk reading “I have ten thousand lasers in space,” yet Gibney’s film never establishes what Musk meant or whether the message had anything to do with the election.
Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, put Gibney on notice before the release, writing that “Starlink was not connected to vote tabulation.” Musk answered the whole production with “LMAO.”
Himes Knocked the Theory Down, and Scarborough Kept Swinging
Here’s the moment that should have closed the book. Himes, a Democrat with every partisan reason to play along, told Scarborough flatly, “We’ve never seen a successful hack of the election technology.”
And he kept going. Himes pointed out that 49 of the 50 states keep paper records of ballots, with Louisiana the lone holdout, and said that even in the wildest scenario, “It would be relatively easy to go back and check that against the actual paper.”
Scarborough’s reply? “Anything is possible.”
Funny thing about that exchange. Scarborough admitted on air that “Republicans have always wanted the paper ballots.”
For years, the cable crowd lectured Republicans who pushed for paper trails, voter ID, and proof of citizenship about voter suppression. Pundits slapped ugly labels on millions of Americans who raised questions about the 2020 election, about last-minute rule changes made under cover of COVID and private money flooding into election offices. Now the safeguards Republicans fought for are the best answer a Democrat congressman could give to Scarborough’s theory.
Nobody at the Morning Joe desk seemed to notice the irony.
Himes did lodge one complaint, saying “CISA was gutted when Donald Trump took office.” Readers with long memories may recall that House Judiciary Committee Republicans reported in 2023 that the agency spent the 2020 cycle flagging Americans’ social media posts for Big Tech to take down. Plenty of folks don’t miss that version of CISA.
How a Twitter Rumor Grows Into a Subpoena
Scarborough borrowed a line from John Heilemann during the segment, claiming “everything Donald Trump says is either projection or confession.”
Try that test on Morning Joe.
This theory didn’t start in a newsroom. It started on X the day after Trump’s January 2025 rally, when one Democrat-leaning account claimed Trump had confessed that Musk manipulated the vote-counting computers in Pennsylvania. NewsGuard counted 6.4 million views on that post in a single day.
Then the rumor climbed the ladder. Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) grabbed it almost immediately and declared, “This needs to be investigated.” A documentary from an Oscar-winning director gave it a movie poster. And now one of the most-watched morning shows on the Left has read it to viewers days before a national election.
Each rung adds a little respectability, even though no rung adds any evidence.
Maybe Scarborough just wanted a juicy segment and nothing more. Maybe this one fizzles out by Thanksgiving.
But Democrats have spent this entire campaign bragging about the investigations they plan to launch against Trump and his allies if they win back a gavel. A theory carrying a congressman’s endorsement, a film credit, and a cable host’s “I’m not saying” makes a tidy excuse for subpoenas aimed at SpaceX, Starlink, or anybody else in Musk’s orbit. No evidence required. Just “concern.”
And if Democrats come up short on November 3, the groundwork for the alibi is already poured. Morning Joe viewers have now heard that the machines might be vulnerable, the trillionaires might be meddling, and anything is possible.
Scarborough asked Himes whether Democrats were “alert” to the danger. Himes had already given him the answer that should have closed the file.
“I can tell you it hasn’t happened in the past,” Himes said.
Sources: NewsBusters, “Morning Joe Pushes Conspiracy That Elon Musk Has and Will Hack Elections”; PolitiFact, “Trump didn’t admit to rigging the election during his preinauguration rally”; Snopes via Yahoo News, “Yes, Trump said Musk knows vote-counting computers ‘better than anybody’”; NewsGuard Reality Check, “Trump Comments Spark Election Conspiracy Theories from the Left”; The Daily Beast, “Elon Musk Finally Responds to Bombshell Election Meddling Claim”; International Business Times, “Elon Musk Reportedly Texted About ‘Anomaly in the Matrix’ Before 2024 US Election”; The National Desk via KATV, “Elon Musk threatens to sue director for making a ‘hit piece’ documentary on him”; Democracy360, “Democrat Urges Investigation Into Trump’s Remarks on ‘Vote Counting Computers’”