Tweet war takes turn to tabloid
Trump, ‘Joe’ hosts trade accusations on hit piece
The astonishing war between President Trump and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” anchors entered a bizarre new front yesterday when hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski accused the White House of blackmailing them with a hit piece in the National Enquirer.
“It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played,” Brzezinski said on the air yesterday. “He is easily played by a cable news host. What does that say to our allies? What does that say to our enemies?”
Scarborough and Brzezinski alleged yesterday in a Washington Post op-ed titled “Donald Trump is not well” that “top White House staff members” told them the National Enquirer would publish a negative article about them “unless we begged the president to have the story spiked.” They claim they refused to do so.
Later, Trump on Twitter alleged just the opposite — that the two came to him about the impending supermarket tabloid article.
“Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time,” the president tweeted. “FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show.”
Scarborough took to Twitter to respond to the president: “Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven’t spoken with you in many months. Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven? What is wrong with you?”
For its part, the Enquirer released a statement denying the magazine threatened the couple or had knowledge “of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story.”
The Daily Beast, citing White House sources, reported that senior adviser Jared Kushner was among the staff members that Scarborough talked to about the Enquirer story, but denied any blackmail took place.
On yesterday’s show, Brzezinski and Scarborough used the Twitter tirade to question Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency.
“This is absolutely nothing for me personally,” she said. “But I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. ... It does worry me about the country.”
Presumably in response to their frequent mockery of the president — including ridiculing the size of his hands — Trump tweeted on Thursday that “low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Brzezinski and Scarborough deny in the Post column that she ever had a face-lift but that Brzezinski “did have a little skin under her chin tweaked.”
That prompted The Observer (formerly the New York Observer), which was owned and published by Jared Kushner until Trump won the White House, to post a story yesterday featuring a “leading cosmetic surgeon” speculating about what Brzezinski’s “chin tweak” could have been.
“A 50-year-old working mother of two, Brzezinski really does look younger than her age,” the story notes.
All of this capped a week that began with a glimmer of hope that Republicans could pass an Obamacare replacement plan. But after Senate GOPers jumped ship when the Congressional Budget Office reported 22 million fewer Americans would have insurance by 2026 under the plan, the vote was pushed until after the Fourth of July.
Making matters worse, Republicans were forced to react on the record to Trump’s MSNBC tweets and were left scratching their heads trying to decipher the logic of the cyber-lashing.