White House threatened ‘Morning Joe’ hosts with critical tabloid story, pair say
The White House tried to silence criticism of President Donald Trump by threatening MSNBC cohosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski with an unflattering story in a supermarket tabloid, the two alleged Friday, as the Twitter war between the television personalities and the president escalated.
“Donald Trump is not well,” declared the headline of a Washington Post op-ed column the two wrote and then used as talking points during a lengthy segment of their show, “Morning Joe.”
In the column and on the program, the pair, who are engaged, said the White House used the threat of a National Enquirer story about their relationship as leverage to extract an apology for on-air criticism of the president.
Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski were scheduled to be on vacation but went on the air to address the president’s behavior. They denied allegations Mr. Trump made about them in tweets on Thursday and condemned his 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,” Ms. Brzezinski said on the program.
In messages on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Trump called Ms. Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and Mr. Scarborough “Psycho Joe.” Mr. Trump also claimed that he had at one point seen Ms. Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”
Dozens of members of Congress, including many leading Republicans, criticized Mr. Trump for those tweets Thursday, saying they were beneath the dignity of his office and undermined his agenda. Even some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters in the media, including conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and Fox News host Sean Hannity, said the tweets were illadvised.
Seemingly undeterred, Mr. Trump returned to the fray Friday with a new tweet about the pair.
In Thursday’s tweets, Mr. Trump also said 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 refused to see them.
“That is laughable,” they wrote in the op-ed. Mr. Trump had invited them to dinner on Dec. 30, and Mr. Scarborough attended because Ms. Brzezinski did not want to go, they wrote.
“After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night,” they wrote.
“She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.”
The claim that Ms. Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift is also a lie,” they wrote.
“Putting aside Mr. Trump’s never-ending obsession with women’s blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal,” 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. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching ‘Morning Joe’ on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.”