Nikki Haley claimed that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had an ulterior motive in re-establishing communication with Donald Trump, suggesting the co-hosts made nice with the president-elect for the sake of their ratings.
The Morning Joe stars met with the president elect on Friday at Mar-a-Lago where they discussed “a lot of issues.” Scarborough and Brzezinski announced to the show’s audience on Monday they had sat down with Trump to “re-open communications” with the president elect’s team.
They had not had spoken with the former president in seven years.
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“For those asking why we would go speak with the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us… I guess I would ask back: ‘Why wouldn’t we?‘,” Brzezinski said.
According to her, she and Scarborough, both vocal critics of the president-elect, met with Trump because his decisive 2024 election victory called for a “new approach.”
“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,” she said. “And that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
Haley however, told her followers on X that the co-hosts only decided to meet with Trump after “They saw their ratings, They realized they needed Trump for their survival.”
Several other fellow Republicans also criticized Morning Joe’s Trump detente, calling the move hypocritical, considering the co-hosts, among other things, previously branded Trump as a fascist.
“It’s difficult to overstate how dishonest these two are,” former Trump staffer Steven Cortes posted on X.
While what role ratings played in Scarborough and Brzezinski‘s decision remains unknown, MSNBC, the network that airs Morning Joe, has struggled with plummeting ratings since Trump’s election.
The week after Election Day, the network saw a 39 percent drop in viewership compared to the network’s October average, and primetime ratings declined 53 percent in viewership.
