Joe Scarborough didn't sugarcoat it this morning, and he called out Fox News by name. More of this, please:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: It's one thing to look at this president as a bumbling idiot who tweets and says stupid things and is inappropriate, misogynistic, racist and embarrassing, that's one way of looking at it. But my question is, when is it okay to say that what we are witting before our eyes are the rudimentary beginnings of the destruction of a democracy? When should we be worried that this is happening? I say now.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You said it, and Willie Geist, when you have Fox News "declaring war" in their words on the FBI and the Justice Department, the deep state there, when you have people talking about secret societies inside of the FBI, that's, that is out of what Erdogan's playbook -- Erdogan's playbook that he used in Turkey to undermine that democracy. And to go after political rivals in his government. They're doing it here in America. Right now.

Bob Goodlatte, a Republican congressman, talking about a conspiracy of the texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the two FBI agents. Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, to come out on tv and throw out there irresponsibly that an informant told him about a secret society, and that proves there's so much smoke here and there's a conspiracy, a secret society he said, of FBI agents who meet off-site, away from government buildings, to theoretically, I don't know how the argument goes. Plan the takedown of Donald Trump and his presidency? What a terribly irresponsible thing to say without presenting any evidence to defend it.

SCARBOROUGH: You know, it's interesting, hold on. Mike, it is interesting there was another senator from Wisconsin, that would hold up pieces of paper and throw out allegations. Wasn't there?

MIKE BARNICLE: Yeah, Joe McCarthy, 1952, '53, the McCarthy Army hearings, the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, quite late in the game,stood up the way he should have stood up and it fell to a lawyer, Joseph Welch, to stand up and say "Senator, have you no sense of decency?" But Ron Johnson's comments as Willie pointed out, are deeply irresponsible. And we're talking about tampering with the institutions of government that have always been independent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Department of Justice, they do not belong to the Office of the President. They belong to the United States of America.

PS. Malcolm Nance predicted in at least December that Fox News would use an imaginary plot to overthrow Trump as a distraction against Mueller: