Joe and Mika’s ‘Fears of Retribution’ As Motivation for Trump Meeting Feels a Lot Like Clean Up on Aisle Mar-a-Lago

Screenshot

Amid the stunning and immediate backlash caused by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s revelation of a private visit with President-elect Donald Trump last week at Mar-a-Lago, a new report is shedding some light on the affair.

In Tuesday morning’s Reliable Sources newsletter, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that part of the motivation behind the controversial visit was due to real concerns that Trump might go after them in his next term in the White House.

Stelter wrote:

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration. Knowing that Trump has threatened retribution against his perceived political opponents, and that Trump has promoted lies about Scarborough and Brzezinski in the past, the MSNBC hosts decided to reach out to the president-elect.

The two sources generally agreed with Joe and Mika’s impression of the situation at hand – namely, that the incoming Trump administration could use its wide-ranging powers to punish people deemed enemies. Trump ally Elon Musk wrote on X overnight, in a post supporting Matt Gaetz for attorney general, that America needs Gaetz to “put powerful bad actors in prison.”

Given Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, in addition to comments from some of his more extreme surrogates, concern from the MSNBC hosts is certainly not unfounded. NPR’s David Folkenflik neatly summed up some of Trump’s threats last month:

Last year, Trump called for NBC News to be investigated for treason over its coverage of criminal charges he faces. After his lone debate with Vice President Harris this summer, it was ABC’s turn to face Trump’s wrath. Trump expressed anger over moderators’ decision to fact-check him. He popped up on Fox & Friends the next day with a warning.

“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” Trump said. “I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They oughta take away their license for the way they do that.”

This month, Trump has been back at it, slamming CBS repeatedly over its handling of the vice presidential debate and of the network’s interview with Harris on 60 Minutes. He pointed to two versions of an answer Harris had given — one that aired on 60 Minutes and the other on the show Face the Nation — to argue CBS was deceiving viewers to aid the Democrat.

There is no question that Scarborough and Brzezinski have been among the most vocal — and influential — voices sounding the alarm about a second Trump administration, sometimes resorting to shouting at the camera or holding back tears. Charlie Spierling recently unearthed a video of Scarborough shouting at an audience that “there is no meeting in the middle” with anti-democratic Trump.

The sudden pivot to making nice with the guy they were ill-afraid to compare to Hitler certainly undermines the ferocity of their former criticism. It also raises the question of whether those criticisms were fueled by opportunism rather than a principled position: are these just pundits who lost the fight and are now toadying up to the winner, because that’s where the power lies?

It’s hard to imagine an MSNBC audience steadfastly convinced that the end days brought by electing Trump they’d been warned about will make the same pivot that Morning Joe appears to have made. A recent death spiral of ratings suggests that their problems are far from over. Similarly, it’s impossible to see a hardened Trump supporter suddenly interested in this show’s point of view.

While Scarborough addressed the backlash Tuesday morning, mocking the online criticism as drastically different from the real-world feedback he’s getting, it’s difficult not to have a jaded point of view. Morning Joe stepped in a pile of dog doo by admitting to this private meeting. How best to rationalize it in hindsight? A story about “credible concerns” they may end up in the pokey.

If that concern is true, then that’s an even more humiliating scenario for them to own up to the sole purpose of bending the knee to an all-powerful president who can direct them straight to an imaginary Trump-branded Gulag. But if that was the real motivation, then why not reveal that on Monday morning, and not the day after, as an expedient and apparent explanation-cum-excuse to get the pitch-fork-wielding MSNBC viewers off their backs?

The enormous hole in their sudden explanation is this: Trump-led retribution against Scarborough and Brzezinski would not only entirely validate their past seven years of dire warnings but would also bring out near-universal support from across the partisan spectrum, save the most loathsome extremists like those who pay heed to Steve Bannon.

The threat of retribution, if serious, would increase their standing, influence, and, I dare say, ratings. And, presuming that these two still think it was a “credible threat,” what does that say about how they value the guardrails of First Amendment rights and the Justice Department? I might be naive, but I think that even the most partisan Fox News pundit would run to defend Morning Joe. 

The visit to Mar-a-Lago is evidence of Scarborough and Brezinski’s quest for relevance, ratings, and power, which ultimately backfired. The fact that MSNBC executives were not informed tells you precisely who is in charge at that network, now in political peril post-election.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.