‘Morning Joe’ and the media reckoning under Trump 2.0

In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, it would be hard to find anyone more critical of Donald Trump than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
Hosts of the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” the husband-and-wife team repeatedly likened the former president (now president-elect) to Adolph Hitler, with Brzezinski calling Trump a “dark, dismal fascist” and Scarborough saying Trump will imprison and execute “anyone he’s allowed to imprison and execute.”
Of his analogies of Trump and Nazi Germany, Scarborough has said, “I do it without any concerns whatsoever.”
Despite the couple’s professed belief that Trump’s election would destroy America — and that anyone who voted for him is ignorant — they went to Mar-a-Lago last week and met with Trump, prompting derision from both sides of the political aisle.
Trump haters accused the pair of selling out and some are calling for a boycott of the show; Trump supporters lambasted the pair as opportunists and hypocrites. Conservative commentators such as Megyn Kelly said that the visit — as well as other about-faces in the media — are evidence that Democrats never really believed the vilest things they said about Trump, else why would they be softening that stance after the election?
“Hitler getting more meeting requests than I would have thought,” CNN pundit Scott Jennings posted on X.
Indeed, the hoopla is reminiscent of “Springtime for Hitler,” the cringy musical at the center of Mel Brooks’ Oscar-winning film “The Producers,” in which two men devise a scheme to produce the world’s most terrible play — one that celebrates Hitler — betting that it would fail.
Many critics have suggested that Scarborough and Brzezinksi were inauthentic, both in their outreach to Trump and their announcement. Citing anonymous sources, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Tuesday that the two “were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration.”
But the dark picture that Stelter painted in his report was more of the same villification of Trump and his supporters that Americans saw from the media throughout the campaign — and that arguably helped get him elected. As Stelter put it: “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 sources told CNN.”
Whether the “Morning Joe” team was “kissing the ring,” as many commentators snidely put it, is besides the point. In fact, Scarborough and Brzezinksi were doing something they probably should have done long ago, as Trump himself pointed out. They were, in fact — finally — acting like grown-ups.
Scarborough and Trump were once friends, to the point where in 2016, CNN had reported that their closeness was becoming a problem at NBC. But a year later, the relationship had deteriorated to the point where Rolling Stone wrote about it. The couple said on Friday that they had not talked with Trump in seven years. While they still fundamentally disagree with the president-elect on many issues, Brzezinksi said, “What we did agree on was to restart communications.”
“For those asking why we would speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” she added.
Trump later told Fox News Digital: “I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication. In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
Haters gonna hate, as Taylor Swift assures us, and this appears to be a fragile peace that could dissolve faster than an Easter egg coloring tablet. But it’s rather astonishing that the meeting happened at all, and the optimists among us should be granted the space to believe what we believed before the election, that maybe democracy isn’t ending after all, and that maybe, under another Trump presidency, some things could actually get …. better?
There are some small signs that they could, at least in the landscape of a freshly chastened media. The New York Times published an essay, written by a doctor who did not support Trump, suggesting that as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure might lead to “constructive reforms.” And it was only a month ago that Jeff Bezos, in explaining his decision to not endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, wrote that “increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves” and that journalists must work to regain the public’s trust and credibility.
To be fair, there is still plenty of hate and distrust emanating not only from partisans on social media, but also in the news media. And Trump, with his rallying cry of “fake news!,” has fomented this culture of mutual disdain. But in the aftermath of his meeting with Scarborough and Brzezinksi, Trump’s remarks about the media were surprisingly conciliatory, with the president-elect telling Fox News Digital, “In order to make America great again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press.”
In a thread on X, Stelter wrote that a “reckoning” is under way in the media, saying “The election results put an exclamation point on pervasive concerns about distrust and dissatisfaction with the news media.” It appears that endorsements from podcasters like Joe Rogan may matter more than newspaper coverage. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pronounced the mainstream media “2024’s other biggest loser.”
Such headlines could spell disaster for legacy media — or could signal a period of growth, change and renewal. If “Morning Joe” can go to Mar-a-Lago and all parties report a cordial interaction, anything’s possible.
Hopers gotta hope, after all.