Dukakis, Deval Dish on ‘Screwball’ Donald Trump at DNC

Photo via AP

Two former Massachusetts governors dished on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week.

Deval Patrick, who arrived in Philly on Wednesday in time for President Barack Obama’s speech, addressed the Massachusetts delegation’s breakfast Thursday morning, the State House News Service reports.

“I’m not particularly surprised that the Republicans chose the nominee they did,” Patrick said. “What surprises me a little bit is the kind of pearl clutching that some in the establishment on the Republican side have been doing when their nominee is just saying out loud what they’ve been saying in code for many, many years.”

Patrick, who has kept a low-profile at Bain Capital since leaving office in 2015, said he’s never met Trump, but described him as a “coarser, more divisive representative” of the GOP, leaving more moderate members of the party “appalled.”

“We reap what we sow. We reap what we sow and if the best we have are seeds of division, seeds of separateness, seeds of fear and hate and hurt then we reap that in our politics and in our government,” Patrick said. “We have better seeds to sow than that. We are better sowers of seeds than that. Not just as Democrats, but as Americans.”

Michael Dukakis, taking a brief intermezzo from extolling the virtues of turkey carcasses and the North-South Rail Link, compared Trump to Wisconsin’s Sen. Joe McCarthy, architect of the country’s anti-communist paranoia in the early days of the Cold War.

“I mean the guy’s a screwball,” Dukakis said.

The 1988 Democratic presidential nominee cautioned fellow Democrats that every state will be in play this November, “both ways.”