The View’s Sunny Hostin didn’t hold back when speaking about Morning Joe’s surprising decision to travel to Mar-a-Lago and meet with President-elect Donald Trump late last week.
Hostin slammed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski for making the trip, claiming they visited Trump’s estate to “kiss his ring” and claimed they’re “not journalists in the true sense.”
“I think that we have to be very clear eyed when we think about the president elect and cover the president elect,” she said, “and I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth and to be able to cover a story. So maybe they’re not journalists in the true sense.”
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Hostin said it was Trump who “ushered in the era of fake news” and “alternative facts.” She also hit at Trump for his attacks on journalists—like his first administration’s decision to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials.
Those comments were in response to Scarborough and Brzezinski revealing at the start of their MSNBC program on Monday morning that they’d traveled to Florida to sit with Trump—who they recently called a fascist—and “restart communications.”
“In this meeting, President Trump was cheerful,” Brzezinski told her viewers. “He was upbeat. He seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues, and for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times—especially between us—I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?”
Hostin was the only co-host on the daytime ABC show’s panel who passionately opposed the sit-down with Trump. However, Ana Navarro stated plainly that she’d never sit for a meeting with Trump. As for criticizing Morning Joe, she said she’d wait to see if their typically critical coverage of Trump remains once he returns to power officially.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are probably looking at what Joe and Mika did and find it opportunistic,” Navarro said. “There are people who change their stripes, or maybe their spots, I should say, today, depending on who is in power and what benefits them. I don’t know that that’s what they are doing, and to me, it’s a to-be-determined situation, because right now, it’s the transition. We don’t know what he’s going to do as president. We don’t know what they’re going to do if he commits abuses of power as president.”
The View’s co-hosts Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin argued the other way. They said they believed Scarborough and Brzezinski “absolutely” made “the right decision” in making the trip.
“If you’re not having conversations and winning on ideas, you’re not moving anywhere,” Haines said. “So to me, this is what the country decided... He’s not calling me—he doesn’t know who I am. [But] if he did, I would absolutely sit down and always have a conversation because I’m confident enough to sit at a table, in contrast, and disagree when I disagree. I’m not scared. I’m not afraid. You have the conversations or nothing happens.”
Griffin said she spoke with Brzezinski about the meeting, which was about 90 minutes long. She suggested the Morning Joe duo rightfully gave their ear to Trump because tens of millions of Americans voted for him.
“I’ve heard a lot of folks on the left coming after Joe and Mika saying, ‘Don’t normalize him.’ Well, 75 million plus American voters normalized Donald Trump by making him president-elect,” Griffin said.
Griffin, who worked in Trump’s White house communications office back in 2020, added that Democrats should hope that “good people” surround Trump and that “smart journalists are challenging him.”
Whoopi Goldberg, the last of the panel to weigh in, said she would rather pass on giving a hot take either way. Like Navarro, she said she’s going to give Trump some time.
“I’m going to wait and see what I’m dealing with, as I’ve said since the election, because I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to wait. I’m going to have some popcorn, and when I have something to say, I will say it.”
