President Donald Trump took to Twitter yesterday to suggest that perhaps he should have left those three UCLA basketball players to rot in a Chinese prison. This came after LaVar Ball, father to one of the players, seemed to dismiss Trump’s role in the release.

Yeah. LaVar Ball and Donald Trump are beefing. Welcome to peak 2017.

You know Morning Joe got in on this squabble, suggesting that Trump practiced “blatant racism” by asking for fealty from a black man, noting that he went as far as to call Ball “very ungrateful.”

“This is our president,” host Mika Brzezinski said, as co-host Joe Scarborough loudly sighed in the background.

“There’s racist overtures here,” Scarborough added. “The black man was not appreciative of what the white man did for him and it’s a dog whistle to say the least.”

“A lot of times you have latent racism and it is hard to actually connect all the dots because it’s circuitous,” Scarborough added.

Scarborough took out a piece of paper and drew a line that attempted to connect Trump’s many points of racism. It didn’t make that much sense, but whatever. It’s Monday.

Scarborough also suggested that Trump often says shocking things on Twitter to “distract from all of the Russia stuff going on. From the Roy Moore race. To numb people. It’s a great propaganda tool.”

Brzezinski became annoyed that the panel wanted to discuss Trump’s Ball tweets any further, noting that they were simply playing into the president’s long game of distraction.

“When the president tries to use racism to distract from bigger things I think that’s when we should always make it a moment to talk about Russia,” Brzezinski said. “We should not be distracted by blatant racism in a tweet that is just pathetic.”

“I’m just bored.”

[image via screenshot]

—

Follow Lawrence Bonk (@sidescrollers) on Twitter

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]