Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, announced Monday morning that they’d visited Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida over the weekend. The visit was out of fear that Trump would attack them in some way after he is sworn in as president again in January, according to a report from CNN. And MSNBC viewers are pissed. How pissed? The account for Morning Joe has disabled replies on X and stopped posting video clips in an apparent attempt to stop the drumbeat of negative feedback online.
Scarborough, who until Trump was re-elected on Nov. 5 would refer to the former president quite correctly as a “fascist,” said on Monday’s show that he talked with Trump about topics like abortion, mass deportation, and threats of retribution against his political opponents. That last point seemed to be the most pressing, as CNN reports that people close to Scarborough and Brzezinski claim they only went to Mar-a-Lago because they’re concerned about what Trump may do to them.
Brzezinski positioned the meeting as “restarting communications” and invoked her late father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to insist that diplomacy was important. The elder Brzezinski was National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, of course, and not ostensibly a reporter covering an incoming president.
“In this meeting, President Trump was cheerful. He was upbeat. He seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues,” said Brzezinski in one of the least convincing monologues ever put forward on MSNBC.
“And for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?” Brzezinski continued.
You can watch the embarrassing rationalization from Monday’s show below.
Well, the backlash was swift, with social media users inundating the Morning Joe accounts with negative comments. “Morning Joe going to mar a lago was not a good start to the week,” fellow anti-Trump conservative Adam Kinzinger wrote on Bluesky. Other accounts flooded X, formerly known as Twitter, with complaints about their switch to becoming more Trump-friendly.
“Joe Scarborough @JoeNBC and Mika Brzezinski are two of the biggest frauds on #MSNBC,” reads one tweet that was typical on X. “He’s on his high horse again acting like he saved journalism by kissing the ring of a man he called every name under the sun last week before going down to Mar-a-Lago.“
But Scarborough and Brzezinski held their ground on Tuesday’s show, insisting that all the negative attention online wasn’t representative of how most people felt about them meeting with an incoming fascist president.
“Yesterday I saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world, all very positive, very supportive,” Scarborough said.
That’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s completely understandable when you remember that Scarborough has long been an anti-Trump Republican without much in the way of principles. He’s an entertainer above all else, and clearly a coward. That’s not to say that Trump wasn’t actually going to come after him with the full force of the U.S. government. Trump has promised to seek retribution against many folks in the media and has even suggested Gen. Mark Milley should be executed. We need to take him at his word.
But Trump’s enemies list is long, and people like Scarborough have resources to fight. Many other journalists and media figures don’t have the backing of large organizations and huge sums of cash to resist Trump’s onslaught. The so-called “resistance” embodied by fair-weather liberals like Scarborough and Brzezinski was never going to stick it out if things actually got tough. Because when the stakes get real, people like the Morning Joe crew are ready to collaborate to preserve their comfortable lives.
Scarborough and Brzezinski aren’t the only media personalities doing a fascist-friendly pivot right now. Vice’s editor-in-chief Shane Smith seems to be signaling that he’s friendly to the incoming Trump regime as the media brand has produced social media content like “Is Elon a genius?” referring to billionaire Elon Musk, who’s been picked to head some kind of commission to slash the federal budget.
Things are going to just keep getting weirder as we get closer to Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. And we’ll almost certainly see more defections to Trumpland as the weeks and months drag on. Those folks can lock down their social media accounts. But the public isn’t going to forget their betrayal.
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