After the president took time away from finding a replacement for Obamacare to show his utter disregard for women again, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski penned an op-ed for The Washington Post, in which they explained just how long they’ve been in Trump’s crosshairs (which is about as long as the millions who stand to lose their healthcare). The pair waved off Trump’s claims that Brzezinski had a facelift around the time they were all at the Mar-A-Lago earlier this year, noting that the president’s questionable mental fitness is a greater concern. But they also detailed more vicious attacks by the president, including purported threats of a National Enquirer hit piece.
The falling-out between Trump and the morning show hosts can roughly be traced to May 2016, when, in a different WaPo op-ed, Scarborough expressed some doubts about the Republican nominee’s odds of winning the presidential election. The piece was far from defamatory, but Trump lost his temper over it anyway, saying Scarborough’s show was losing viewers, and making the first of many dubious claims of not watching the show. The president actually seems to be an avid viewer of Morning Joe, what with his frequently weighing in on their reportage and Brzezinski’s appearance. He also seemed to be a fan of Scarborough and Brzezinski, and for a while, the feeling was mutual—it wasn’t that long ago that Trump offered to officiate their wedding.
But these days Scarborough and Brzezinski are off the Trump train, a switch that’s incensed the president despite his repeat denials to the contrary. And while the Morning Joe hosts are just doing their jobs when covering the latest alarming news out of the White House, Trump has kept the attacks personal. Deadline reports that Brzezinski said on air today that she had been threatened with a National Enquirer piece about her ex-husband and daughters, with Scarborough making similar claims about a story on his alleged drinking. The pair put those claims in Friday’s op-ed, writing that “this year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.” They just don’t get why Trump is so obsessed with them right now.
Trump has already made the kind of thoughtful refutation we’ve come to expect from him, tweeting something about fake news, but in all caps.
Scarborough responded by offering to wave the receipts in Trump’s face if needed.