‘Morning Joe’ Condemns Guest’s ‘Flippant’ Remarks About Fox News and Pete Hegseth
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski struck a conciliatory tone on Wednesday’s show after David Frum offered his take on the fraught nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
President-elect Donald Trump nominated Hegseth, a former Fox News host, to the post last month. Hegseth has been dogged by allegations of sexual assault, serial adultery, and reeking of alcohol while on the job. He denies the accusations of assault and says he does not have a drinking problem.
The nominee has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill to convince some skeptical Republican senators of his fitness for the job.
On MSNBC’s flagship morning program, The Atlantic writer asked for his take on the status of Hegseth’s nomination.
Frum responded:
Well, just given what one sees on camera, if you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed. So, that’s alarming. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for Secretary of Defense. And Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee.
And it emerged that Tower had a drinking problem. And when he was drinking too much, he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t wanna think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say, “Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership. And there’s your next Secretary of Defense for the 21st century.”
Later in the program, Brzezinski doubled back to Frum’s comments, which she rebuked as “flippant.”
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. 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.
Later, Frum took to the pages of The Atlantic to address the issue, explaining that a producer chided him over the comments.
“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,” he wrote.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
