The married MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough drove half an hour from their Florida home on Friday to meet with an old friend-turned-frenemy-turned-enemy: President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Their relationship has been complicated. Mr. Trump was once a regular guest on their talk show, “Morning Joe,” and the couple rang in 2017 at a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Then things deteriorated. Mr. Trump called Mr. Scarborough a “psycho” and Ms. Brzezinski “crazy,” claiming that he had once seen her “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” “Morning Joe” became a redoubt of the anti-Trump resistance. This year, the couple repeatedly warned that a second Trump presidency would threaten democracy’s future.
Even for talk show hosts, it turns out, elections have consequences.
“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Ms. Brzezinski told viewers on Monday, disclosing the meeting for the first time. “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
The meeting, at Mar-a-Lago, was their first in-person encounter in seven years. Mr. Scarborough said that the group had discussed “abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” and that there had been plenty of disagreement to go around.
“What we did agree on,” Ms. Brzezinski added, “was to restart communications.” She compared the summit to the diplomatic work of her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.
“My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed,” she said. “That is a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.”
How viewers of MSNBC — generally a media safe space for the anti-Trump left — perceive this reunion is an open question. Viewership of the cable network collapsed last week in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Trump’s victory, although a similar decline in November 2016 was short-lived.
There were hints of dissent within the network on Monday. Shortly after “Morning Joe” aired, Katie Phang, who hosts a Saturday show on MSNBC, wrote on X that “normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period.”
Mr. Scarborough had seemed to anticipate that objection. “Don’t be mistaken: We are not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump,” he said during Monday’s broadcast. “We are here to report on him and to hopefully provide you insight that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.”
Mr. Scarborough reported that Mr. Trump was “upbeat” and “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”
Mr. Trump issued his own perspective on Monday, describing his meeting with the MSNBC stars as “extremely cordial.”
“Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” Mr. Trump told Fox News. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
The president-elect, whoclosely tracks his coverage in the news media, said he felt “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
But, Mr. Trump added, “if not treated fairly, however, that will end.”
Besides his relentless demonization of the news media on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of major television networks, filed lawsuits against outlets that published reports or commentary that displeased him, and barred specific reporters from his election night party.
On Sunday, the president-elect accused a respected pollster of “ELECTION FRAUD” because she had predicted a Trump defeat in Iowa that did not materialize.
The post ‘Morning Joe’ Stars Reveal a Mar-a-Lago Reunion With Trump appeared first on New York Times.
