MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took aim at his liberal colleagues in the legacy media over their ongoing outrage over the meeting he and his co-host Mika Brzezinski had last month with President-elect Donald Trump.
Scarborough kicked off Thursday’s “Morning Joe” with a 20-minute response to a piece written by The Atlantic’s David Frum, a frequent “Morning Joe” guest who suggested the MSNBC duo are now living in “fear” as Trump returns to the White House.
“Let me tell you something, you can talk to anybody that’s worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years tell you I’m not fearful. You talk to anybody who served with me in Congress, they will tell you- not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful,” Scarborough said.
“We went down to talk to the president-elect, and people wrote articles that were just false. But you know what we did? We did the corporate thing. Corporate said, ‘Don’t say anything. Just keep your head down.’ … We did that. We enjoyed our Thanksgiving. We’re like, ‘Eh, you know what? People are upset with some of our guests, some of our friends. Maybe we snuck up on them too fast. Maybe we should have given them more of a warning. Whatever. It’s fine.’ But guess what? The main complaint was that we called Donald Trump’s rhetoric ‘fascist’ during the campaign. And then we went down to have an off-the-record comment with. Guess who else does that? The New York Times. The Washington Post.”
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“You know what? I even think folks from The Atlantic, I think, might be doing that,” Brzezinski interjected.
“If they have a chance to talk on the background with the incoming president and president-elect, they would do it,” Scarborough continued. “In fact, as somebody wrote during this outrageously stupid, immature series of articles that lied time and time again about us, reporters said ‘I’d be fired if I had the opportunity to go in and talk to somebody who’s the incoming president of the United States and I didn’t do it.’ Ask any journalist at The New York Times and New York Post- and this is a funny thing. People at The Washington Post, especially, hair on fire! Media report, ‘how dare they, how dare they.’ At the same time that The Washington Post is doing the same thing, trying to speak to the president on background, trying to speak to people around the president on background. That’s what reporters do!”
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“The only difference between what we did on that visit and what The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, everybody else is doing is we were transparent. We actually told you,” Scarborough later said. “And so I understand if you don’t know how the media works,day in and day out, and you’re just like watching this show day in and day out, I’d understand I would be like, ‘Wow, okay, man, man, that sudden.’ But for media reporters to lie, to pretend that this is a shock, to try to get [clicks], the Washington Post reporters and columnists saying ‘How dare they go see him after they said he was a fascist.’ And that’s exactly what The Washington Post is doing. That’s exactly what The Wall Street Journal is doing. That’s exactly what The New York Times is doing. Yeah, you know what you call it? You call it their job.”
Scarborough went on to argue that “you can do two things at the same time,” that he can still call Trump a “fascist” and go to talk to him in order to get “the read of the man” “so I can come back here and talk to you and let you know what the hell is going on!”
“You know, everybody we have on this show that’s a reporter? It’s what they do every day. They speak on background,” Scarborough reiterated. He later said, “I’m sick and tired of the nonsense and I wish we’d all just get to work, doing the things we need to do, which is our job, which is talking to people who are going to determine where this country goes over the next four years.”
Brzezinski denied that she and Scarborough’s private sit-down with Trump was not “kissing the ring” or “bending the knee,” insisting it was a “serious meeting.”
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“To those that you were talking about here who are still kind of pushing this narrative and saying this article is so sad and ‘Oh my God, fear has taken over.’ Good job. Good job,” Brzezinski told their critics. “Because you’re so stuck in your hatred. You’re so stuck in your hatred mode that you can’t see that you are doing exactly what negative forces at play here want, which is causing us to fight. We should not be fighting for doing our jobs, for doing what The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, they are doing right now. And if they are not meeting with the president-elect and talking to him, then they are not doing their jobs. But we know they are.”
“CNN is doing it. Do we judge CNN for doing it? No. You know why? It’s their jobs! Grow up! It’s their jobs. The only thing we did that caused this Twitter storm is we told you. Now, if you prefer that we don’t tell you everything that we do, that’s fine. But we just saw it in this case, transparency was best,” Scarborough added before moving on.
The dust-up between Frum and the “Morning Joe” stars began Wednesday after Frum made a joke on their program about Fox News and Trump’s Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, the former “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host. Brzezinski later told viewers Frum’s comment was “a little too flippant for the moment we’re in.”
In response, Frum penned a piece titled “The Sound of Fear on Air,” calling Brzezinski’s gentle rebuke of his quip an “ominous sign” as the country faces a second Trump presidency.
“It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease,” Frum told readers. “I write these words very aware that I’m probably saying goodbye forever to a television platform that I enjoy and from which I have benefited as both viewer and guest… I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious. Let it spread, and it will paralyze us all.”
Scarborough made clear to viewers that Frum remains invited to “Morning Joe” and said Frum is expected to appear on Friday’s program.
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