After several years of declaring Donald Trump to be a “threat to democracy” and politically akin to Adolph Hitler, two of his harshest critics — Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe — announced on Monday that they participated in a meeting with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Friday. Trump was a frequent guest on the show until early 2016, when he was running for his first term as president.
The Morning Joe hosts and Trump have hurled insults at one another from 2016 until now, with Brzezinski calling Trump a “narcissist” and implying that he was “mentally ill.” In November of last year, Scarborough accused Trump of “going full-on Hitler” when discussing illegal immigration. Never one to back down from a fight, Trump has referred to the duo as “Crazy Mika” and “Psycho Joe,” among other things, throughout the years.
Time to Restart
But in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory on November 5, the talk-show hosts and the president-elect have announced that they will “restart communications.”
“Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate,” Brzezinski said in the show’s open on Monday. “But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, January 6th were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote.”
“Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him,” Brzezinski added.
According to Scarborough, the trio discussed many issues including “abortion, mass deportation and threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets.”
“It will come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we told him so,” Scarborough added.
Nevertheless, Brzezinski declared, “What we did agree on was to restart communications.”
Kissing the Ring?
Many on the Left were furious at what they considered a “kissing of the ring” by the Morning Joe team.
“I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth,” said The View’s Sunny Hostin.
“Look, the bottom line is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now, more than ever,” Hostin said.
“He’s the guy who ushered in alternative facts. He is the guy who attacked three black female journalists. He’s the guy that revoked Jim Acosta’s press credentials for asking him a question,” Hostin claimed. “So, I think that this president-elect, I hate to say it … would like nothing more than to have only Fox News cover him, would like nothing more than a state-sponsored media, and I don’t think he can be trusted in the way that other presidents can be trusted. This is an aberration.”
Jeff Jarvis of the BuzzMachine blog called the development a “a disgusting show of obeisance in advance.”
Leftist political pundit Krystal Ball was especially harsh. On X, she wrote, “More than any other media hosts these two [Scarborough and Brzezinski] are responsible for the Dem party’s disastrous obsession with Liz Cheney NeverTrumpers over the working class and the destruction of the … Bernie movement. Now that they’ve helped usher the fascists in they go and kiss the ring. Disgusting.”
Moving Forward
Trump, though, seemed willing to forgive and forget, saying that the duo “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books,’ which I really believe it was, but it was also a campaign where I worked long and hard — perhaps longer and harder than any presidential candidate in history.”
“Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” Trump said. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
Perhaps it’s as Brzezinski says, and the talk-show duo merely want “something different” with Trump. It’s also entirely possible that the hosts and their network are desperately grasping for some relevancy in a media landscape that doesn’t seem to want or need them anymore. Like him or not, Trump is always good for ratings.
