On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough responded to President’s Trump tweets about them in a lengthy segment of the show.
Brzezinski began by saying, “[I]t’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country. … I’m fine, my family brought me up really tough. This is absolutely nothing. But I think — for me, personally, but I am very concerned as to what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange.”
Scarborough echoed this sentiment by stating, “We’re okay. The country’s not.”
He added, “Unfortunately, we learned what we’ve always learned. And that is, that he, for some reason, takes things so much more personally with women. He’s so much more vicious with women.” Scarborough said a member of Congress told him that while meeting with members of Congress at the White House, Trump started ranting about “Morning Joe” and that the criticism got far more vicious when it turned to Brzezinski.
Later on, Brzezinski said, “The White House claims that we attack him. No, we report on his lies. we are upset when he doesn’t tell the truth and he bullies people. That is true. We sometimes mock him and have fun with things, like we did with President Obama with his bowling, and we were having fun with the TIME Magazine cover because it was hilarious that anybody would have their country club put up fake TIME Magazine covers of your boss, or maybe an employer felt they needed to do that. I thought it was hilarious. I still do. I stand by my joke. I knew in real time that the president would be tweaked by that, and I wondered, oh boy, I feel there’s going to be a response. And I’ll tell you that, think about it. it is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played. He’s so easily played by a cable news host. Now, what is that saying to our allies? what is that saying to our enemies? That this president is so easily played?”
She also said, “We did not want to go to Mar-a-Lago. Donald kept calling Joe. Joe went, and he stayed for about 30 minutes. And then he’s like, where’s Mika? I don’t know, he seemed to want me to go.”
Scarborough added that people who voted for Trump to fight for them have only gotten someone who “will fight for himself, and pick fights with people that don’t matter. Like, if you don’t like our show, and if you care about what’s good for America, turn us off.”
He later added that last summer, someone at the top of the Trump campaign told him everyone was worried about Trump’s emotional state.
Later on, Brzezinski referenced Trump’s tweet and “that spooky cabinet meeting, where everybody went around the table and complimented him.” She added, “He’s not in reality.”
The two also told about their interaction with the White House over the National Enquirer threatening to run a negative story against them and persistently calling Brzezinski’s children and close friends. They said that multiple members of the Trump administration told them Trump could use his relationship with the Enquirer to kill the story if they apologized for their coverage of Trump, something they refused to do.
Later in the segment, Scarborough said, “We show absolutely no courage here. I mean, we get paid well. We’ve got the job of our dreams. … But, there are people that are hurting out there.” He continued that work to help those people isn’t being accomplished “in an age where the partisanship is so harsh that [House Majority Whip Representative] Steve Scalise (R-LA) can get gunned down at a charity baseball practice, and yet a week later, two weeks later, the president of the United States is amping things up. And making the political environment all the more dangerous.”
Scarborough also asked, “What does this say to young women and young girls, and what does it say about the women in the White House that won’t step up and speak out against this abhorrent behavior?” He further called on Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to speak out the next time Trump does something like this.
Brzezinski said Trump’s treatment of women “has brought us back, like, 30 years. And I do think women in the White House need to know their value, and step up and understand that they need to set him straight. So do the men.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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