MSNBC’s Ari Melber on Thursday turned to the hit 1983 movie Scarface during analysis of the GOP’s embrace of Donald Trump’s election denialism.
Parroting of the former president’s false claims that he won the 2020 election “has actually hurt the party’s ability to listen and get anywhere near competitive,” said Melber, noting GOP losses in Tuesday’s 2023 elections.
“The Republican Party, under Trump’s election denialism, has been lying to itself, and that doesn’t work, which brings us to an iconic and true lesson from Scarface,” he continued.
Melber showed the scene in which Al Pacino’s drug lord Tony Montana is warned, “Don’t get high on your own supply.”
“You could be dealing, you could be lying, you could be giving in to others, but when you start dealing to yourself, when you and your own team are getting high, losing your sense of reality, losing your sobriety politically and otherwise, well, well you really played yourself,” said Melber.
“Trump pushed the party into spending years high on its own supply, demanding it, making it a kind of a litmus test that future candidates running in unrelated elections had to get high on his supply and lie and pretend he didn’t even lose the race he lost,” the anchor added, referring to the type of Republicans aligned with Trump’s Make America Great Again, or MAGA, message.
Melber asked if things could be about to change, though, as some in the “shall we call it, the product distribution center of this ‘Scarface’ part of the party ... are starting to worry that they have been too high on a very bad supply for too long”.
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