MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough downplayed a furious online response to the revelation that he met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday’s Morning Joe.
Scarborough and his wife, co-host Mika Brzezinski—who have fiercely criticized Trump since his first term—told viewers a day earlier that they’d met with the president-elect last week, explaining they agreed to “restart communications” with the Republican. Trump separately said the meeting with two of his leading critics had been “extremely cordial.”
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The bombshell news triggered an intense response from commentators variously accusing Scarborough and Brzezinski of kowtowing to Trump in the hope of improving their ratings or just simply sucking up to power.
But the online backlash didn’t correspond with what was happening offline, Scarborough said Tuesday.
“I just want to say thank you, first of all, to everybody who was so kind last night,” Scarborough said. He went on to say that on Monday, he’d seen “for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world.”
“Because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world,” Scarborough said. “Very positive, very supportive, going: ‘I understand why you did what you did,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But once in a while I would get a text or a call from somebody going, ‘Oh man, I hope you’re doing OK.’”
One such call came from academic and author Eddie Glaude, Scarborough said. The host said he’d called him back to ask: “Eddie, are you on Twitter?”
“And he goes, ‘I am,’” Scarborough said. “I go: ‘Well, I’m not, so we’ve had a good day.’”
“All of us are going to do the best we can do and we’re all working towards a better America,” Scarborough added. “And again, you can predict the future by shaping the future.”
The panel then turned to criticizing Trump’s decision to make Matt Gaetz his nominee for attorney general in light of reported testimony that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl and paid two other adult women for sex—allegations Gaetz denies. “If that is something that Republican senators and Donald Trump are OK with, there will be consequences at the voting booth two years from now,” Scarborough warned.
Responding, co-host Willie Geist also mentioned the Mar-a-Lago meeting.
“I wasn’t at Mar-a-Lago,” Geist said. “I’ve never been to Mar-a-Lago—I’ve never been invited. I guess I should be offended by that. But nothing changes for me and I think for you guys, either, from before Election Day. Which is—you know how we have criticized Donald Trump. You know about his policies. You can see it in the people he’s nominating. You’ll see it in a minute when we talk about his plan for mass deportation. None of that changes for me. None of that changes for us in the way we will criticize that. He is the president of the United States.”
A source close to the show told The Daily Beast that Scarborough and Brzezinski’s meeting with Trump “was f---ing worth it” because it might have contributed to the president-elect’s subsequent comments about the importance of a free press. “That doesn’t mean there are going to be earth-shaking changes,” the source added. “But the temperature has to come down.”
They also opined that turning down the opportunity to meet Trump would have been “journalistic malpractice.”
Speaking to Fox News Digital about the meeting, Trump did speak about the importance of a free press—for delivering his policy agenda.
“In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press,” Trump said. The president-elect—who spent his campaign calling for networks to lose their broadcasting licenses over coverage he disliked—said he expected to have more meetings with “others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile.”
He also said he feels he has “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press,” before adding: “If not treated fairly, however, that will end.”
