What the Hell Did Joe Scarborough Think Would Happen After Meeting With Trump?

Joe Scarborough Cultivated an Anti-MAGA Audience, Now He’s Mad Viewers Hate His Overtures to Trump

Festivus arrived three weeks early on the set of Morning Joe on Thursday, as Joe Scarborough launched into an airing of grievances against his own audience. It was a bitter and condescending diatribe directed at viewers who feel miffed or even betrayed by his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month.

For nearly a decade, MSNBC’s Morning Joe crew has been telling viewers what a horrible person Trump is. Scarborough has repeatedly called him a fascist and just this April said you can’t have a “meeting in the middle” with someone like Trump.

These observations are correct, but this is beside the point. The issue here is the shift in tone from Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski since they met with Trump after his victory last month to “restart communications.” After the meeting, they told viewers they will wait to see if Trump can approach “all sides” of the political divide and be “a leader who can bring

them together,” as if the two had not spent years explaining that such a thing is impossible. When the hosts informed their viewers of the visit last month, the viewers and pretty much everyone else were stunned for those reasons.

For his part, the man who tried to overturn the 2020 election has in fact acted like a wannabe dictator. Trump has suggested using the National Guard to deal with “the enemy from within,” which includes “radical left lunatics.” He has also gotten deeply personal with Scarborough and Brzezinski, the latter of whom he mocked for allegedly “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” More sinisterly, Trump has on several occasions baselessly insinuated Scarborough killed a young staffer while serving in Congress.

This is ugly stuff, and it’s the backdrop in front of which Morning Joe has operated. The show has cultivated a viewership that largely expects hosts and guests to criticize not only Trump, but those who boost him such as Fox News.

Speaking of Fox, on Thursday Scarborough addressed a kerfuffle stemming from his show the day before. David Frum of The Atlantic had weighed in on Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, is manifestly unfit for the job, but he sounded good on Trump’s favorite network and so here we are. Frum began by offering a throwaway line about allegations that Hegseth frequently reeked of alcohol while at work.

“Well, just given what one sees on

camera, if you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed,” Frum said in what is – or at least was – a standard dig at MSNBC’s rival network so commonplace on Morning Joe.

Later in the show, Brzezinski addressed viewers directly about the remark.

“Before we go to break, a little earlier in this block, there was a comment made about Fox News in our coverage about Pete Hegseth and the growing number of allegations about his behavior over the years and possible addiction to alcohol or issues with alcohol,” she said. “The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we are in. We just wanna make that comment as well. We wanna make that clear. We have differences in coverage with Fox News and that’s a good debate that we should have often. But right now, I just wanna say to say there are a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth and we’ll wanna leave it at that.”

Weirdly, Brzezinski’s comments seemed intended more to prevent pushback from Fox News than anything to do with Hegseth, even though the nominee was the main target of Frum’s crack. Her remark about “a lot of good people” at Fox is curious for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Hours later, in an article titled “The Sound of Fear on Air,” Frum revealed that a

producer chided him during the show.

“At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them,” he wrote. “I said something noncommittal and got another round of warning.”

He later added, “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.”

Not surprisingly, Scarborough addressed the incident on Thursday’s program. In doing so, he once again defended the visit to Mar-a-Lago.

“You can do two things at the same time,” he thundered. “You can say he had fascist rhetoric and still go in and talk to him. You know why I do that?” he went on. “To get the read of the man.”

Then in a condescending tone, Scarborough said he meets with political leaders of all kinds for this reason.

“You know why I do that?” he said, his voice boiling over with contempt. “To get the read of the leader, to get the read of where the country’s going so I can come back here and talk to you and let you know what the hell is going on!”

“For context and insight,” Brzezinski echoed.

“And give you context, insight and background,” he continued. “You know everybody we have on this show that’s a reporter! It’s what they do every day!”

This is galling. Trump is an angry demagogue

who craves power and has no regard for norms or laws. There is nothing left to “read” about this man – especially at the age of 78. The Morning Joe hosts have said as much, but not only have they now reversed themselves, they are angry for being called out on it.

Regarding the Frum dustup, Scarborough was also indignant.

“What was the headline?” he said. “The sound of fear. That wasn’t the sound of fear, that was the sound of civility.”

The host went on to lament that “civility is confused for fear” in political discourse.

About that “civility.”

In April, Scarborough slammed “women on Fox News” for calling him liberal, saying he’s been a conservative since “they were playing with Barbies.” For good measure, he deemed them “little idiots.” And just last month, he said Fox News viewers were “too stupid” to recognize bad faith comments from a Republican senator. That’s just a tiny sample of his broadsides against Fox and its viewership.

There’s speculation about why Scarborough and Brzezinski are suddenly interested in a “restart” with Trump and acting with “civility.” None of the possibilities portend anything good.

Days after the Morning Joe hosts revealed they met with Trump, CNN published a report – which Scarborough and Brzezinski deny – that they’re afraid of being targeted by Trump when he retakes office. That would be an understandable concern, but if true, this would simply mean Morning Joe is compromised. Pundits cannot credibly

cover a person if they fear that person to the point where they seek a meeting to see if they’re going to be in trouble for saying mean things.

But let’s say the hosts are telling the truth when they say they don’t fear Trump. In that case, the explanation is far worse because that would, for all intents and purposes, mean they were being disingenuous in their commentary about Trump all these years. He’s not that bad after all, they insist, after claiming he’s an irredeemable fascist for whom there is no “meeting in the middle.”

It’s worth noting at this point that MSNBC and several other networks are being spun off by Comcast into a new entity separate from NBC News. To say there is uncertainty concerning the network would be an understatement. It’s possible the hosts are moderating their tone and hoping that a less strident version of themselves would make them worth keeping or even rewarding in the next phase of MSNBC’s existence, whatever that may look like in another era of Trump.