Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said that they met with Donald Trump on Friday, in what they described as an effort to restart communications with the president-elect after years of criticism and warning about his rhetoric and potential return to office.
At the opening of Morning Joe, Brzezinski said that, after expressing their desire to meet with Trump, they were given the opportunity “to do just that” on Friday. It was the first time they had seen him in seven years, she said.
Scarborough said, “We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportations, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit. It is going to come as no surprise to anyone who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or the past decade, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.”
“What we did agree on is to restart communications,” Brzezinski said, noting that her father Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, would speak to world leaders with whom he and the United States “profoundly disagreed.”
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She said they had not spoken to Trump since March, 2020, other than a call Scarborough placed to him on the morning after the attempt on his life in July.
“In this meeting, Trump was cheerful, he was upbeat, he seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues,” Brzezinski said. “And 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?’ Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate. But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, January 6th were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realized it is time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”
Brzezinski said that they asked for the meeting after hearing “from so many people, from political leaders to regular citizens deeply dismayed by several” of Trump’s cabinet selections, and “they are scared.”
From time to time, Trump has lashed out at the two hosts, particularly during his first term. In 2020, he spread a false rumor that Scarborough was somehow responsible for the death of a congressional aide when he was serving in the House. The woman’s widower pleaded with then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to take down the then-president’s tweet, but the platform refused.
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