“Morning Joe” hosts
Both sides trade accusations over article in tabloid
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.
NEW YORK — “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, a couple onscreen and off, say the White House told them a damaging National Enquirer story about their relationship would “go away” if they called President Donald Trump and apologized for harsh commentary.
Trump and Scarborough each traded accusations that the other was lying as the bizarre feud between the president and two cable television hosts persisted Friday.
The clash with the MSNBC hosts is the latest flare-up in the fraught relationship between Trump and the news media. Earlier this week, the White House portrayed CNN as a source of “fake news” after the network retracted a story about an alleged tie between people close to Trump and Russia. Three CNN journalists resigned after the online story was withdrawn.
The fight between the president and the MSNBC hosts seemed to take on a special venom, perhaps because the three have a long, personal relationship. Trump appeared many times on “Morning Joe” during his presidential campaign, and he and the show’s hosts sometimes socialized together.
Trump’s refusal to let the quarrel drop Friday came despite widespread pleas by Republican members of Congress and even some of his staunchest backers in conservative media, who saw the Twitter battle as beneath the dignity of the White House and a distraction from White House efforts to push an agenda forward.
Trump, who said he watched “Morning Joe” on Friday, insisted on Twitter that it was Scarborough who had sought him out in an effort to have the Enquirer story spiked.
“Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” read the tweet. It was Trump’s third posting about the pair over the course of two days.
Scarborough later tweeted that he had phone and text messages from presidential aides to prove his point, and that he hasn’t spoken to Trump in months.
“Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven?” Scarborough tweeted. “What is wrong with you?”
The fight began with Twitter messages Thursday in which Trump called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and Scarborough “Psycho Joe.”
Trump claimed that he had at one point seen Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift” and alleged that the pair had invited themselves to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., over the New Year’s holiday and that he had refused to see them.
Scarborough and Brzezinski were scheduled to be on vacation Friday, but appeared on the air to address the president’s behavior at the top of the second hour of their program. They denied the allegations and condemned Trump’s behavior.
“He appears to have a fragile, impetuous, childlike ego that we have seen over and over again — especially with women. He can’t take it,” Brzezinski said on the program.
The president is “unmoored” and has “a disturbing obsession with Mika,” they wrote in a op-ed column Friday in The Washington Post.
In the column and on the program they said the White House used the threat of a National Enquirer story about their romantic relationship as leverage in an unsuccessful effort to extract an apology for on-air criticism of the president.
The claim that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift is also a lie,” they wrote.
“And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift,” they wrote. “If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching ‘Morning Joe’ on their highdefinition TV.”
Brzezinski and Scarborough, both divorced, revealed their engagement in a May 4 Vanity Fair article. Their relationship was even spoofed on “Saturday Night Live,” with a skit depicting the lovebirds horrifying coworkers with their behavior.
The Enquirer article was published June 5 under the headline “‘Morning Joe’ Sleazy Cheating Scandal.”