‘Morning Joe’ hosts fire back at Trump’s Twitter barrage
NEW YORK — “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said Friday that President Donald Trump lied about their December encounter in a tweet and that his “unhealthy obsession” with their program doesn’t serve his mental health or the country well.
The two MSNBC personalities postponed a vacation in order to respond to Trump’s tweet, which drew broad condemnation a day earlier because he called Brzezinski “crazy” and said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw them at his Florida estate.
“It’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country,” Brzezinski said on their program.
“We’re OK,” said Scarborough, her co-host and fiance. “The country’s not.”
Trump tweeted Friday that he watched “Morning Joe” for the first time in a long time. “Bad show,” he wrote.
The hosts, who also co-bylined a column that was posted on The Washington Post’s website on Friday, said they had known Trump for more than a decade and have “fond memories” of their relationship, but that he’s changed in the past two years. They were at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida shortly before the New Year in December to encourage Trump to give them an interview.
Brzezinski, who said she’s alarmed at how the president deals with women who disagree with him, said she believed her teasing about a Post story about fake Time magazine covers with Trump’s face hanging at his golf facilities is what precipitated the latest Twitter attack.
“It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played, he is easily played by a cable news host,” she said. “What does that say to our allies? What does that say to our enemies?”
They said Trump was lying about Brzezinski having a face-lift, although “she did have a little skin under her chin tweaked.”
Scarborough said that the National Enquirer had been working on a story about him and Brzezinski and that he was told by White House aides that if he called Trump and apologized for his show’s coverage, the story would go away. He said he refused and the story ran.
Trump, in his Friday tweet, directly contradicted that claim. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article,” Trump wrote. “I said no!”
A recent New Yorker magazine article detailed a close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of the Enquirer’s parent company, and how the supermarket tabloid has lauded Trump and printed damaging articles about his political opponents.