Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple encouraged the remaining viewers of MSNBC’s Morning Joe to turn off the show after hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week.
Scarborough and Brzezinski have faced blowback over their Trump meeting and seen declining ratings, which Wemple and others chalk up to the fact that the pair were so quick to meet with Trump and discuss a “new approach” after selling him to viewers as a threat to democracy for months leading up to the election.
Wemple called Scarborough and Brzezinski’s explanation a “remarkable spectacle” in a column for The Washington Post.
“What are you getting from this staple of morning TV ‘news?’” he asked readers.
Wemple wrote:
The explanation was a remarkable spectacle, one that’s sure to play on a loop in the eventual Smithsonian Museum of Cable News History. Scarborough and Brzezinski alternated with scripted elements of their spiel, a presentation heavy on preemptive strikes. “Don’t be mistaken,” said Scarborough, “we&
#8217;re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him.”
“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,” Brzezinski told viewers after the pair revealed the visit.
Wemple provided five reasons to ditch Morning Joe, all of which boiled down to reading a newspaper instead. Wemple argued even their election analysis was way off, mocking the show for focusing so much on Vice President Kamala Harris’s “ground game.”
“Think about this turn of events for a moment: ‘Morning Joe’ spent years denouncing Trump’s authoritarian plans and actions to its faithful audience. Then, one day, its hosts arrange a meeting that allows Trump to make that claim,” Wemple wrote.
Trump previously said the Morning Joe hosts “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books.”
Wemple ultimately called Morning Joe a pointless endeavor with an aging audience. He also blasted Scarborough and Brzezinski’s talk about the meeting, arguing we’ve seen how the pair are around the former president, citing his many appearances on the show in 2015.
Scarborough’s friendly behavior with Trump helped normalize him, Wemple argued.
“Historians will one day look back at the various opportunities this country has had to stop Trump. Election Day is clearly one of them;
Scarborough “yukked it up” with Trump, Wemple added, and the exchanges are everything you need to know about their latest meeting.
“The median age of the MSNBC audience is 71, so viewers who watched Monday’s disclosure are likely old enough to remember the onset bonhomie of those days,” he wrote. “They know too well what a Trump-Morning Joe meeting looks like.”