Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was absolutely apoplectic on Thursday over a column written by The Atlantic’s David Frum, opening the show with a 22-minute tirade over Frum’s complaint about the program apologizing for a “flippant” joke about Fox News.
Besides directly addressing Frum’s column, which featured the conservative pundit alleging that Morning Joe was displaying “fear” in the face of a new Trump administration, Scarborough and co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski also took the opportunity to lash out at critics of their recent fence-mending visit to Mar-a-Lago.
Appearing on Wednesday’s broadcast, Frum – a vocal critic of President-elect Donald Trump and frequent Morning Joe guest – discussed the latest allegations about Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s excessive drinking while he was a host at Fox News. “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed,” Frum said at the top of his remarks.
According to Frum’s column, he was warned twice by a producer during the following commercial break to not repeat the comment. Furthermore, Brzezinski followed up by issuing an on-air rebuke of Frum while apologizing to Fox News. “The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in,” she stated.
“We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often,” she added. “But right now I just want to say there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we want to leave it at that.”
With Frum not only taking issue with the reprimand but also writing that the reaction suggests Morning Joe is “already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease” Trump, Scarborough launched into an over-the-top rant at the top of Thursday’s telecast that served to double as a justification of the recent Trump meeting.
“What was the headline? ‘The Sound of Fear.’ That wasn’t the sound of fear, that was the sound of civility,” Scarborough groused. “In saying that Mika had apologized, she didn’t apologize. She simply said it was too flippant.”
Claiming other critics who celebrated Frum’s piece were having a “meltdown,” Scarborough insisted that he and Brzezinski weren’t being “fearful” of Trump and instead just doing their jobs as journalists by opening lines of communication with Trump, who they had spent the past years describing as a “fascist” and comparing to Adolf Hitler.
“Let me tell you something, you can talk to anybody that has worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years. I tell you, I’m not fearful,” he exclaimed. “If you talk to anybody who served with me in Congress, they will tell you, he’s not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful!”
While Frum had stated in his column that his observation of Hegseth and Fox News was appropriate based on recent reporting, including by NBC News, Scarborough insisted that editors at other outlets wouldn’t let comments like that fly.
“Let me tell you, something they wouldn’t certainly never let in the pages of the Atlantic or the Washington Post or the New York Times. They would never do that,” he declared. “I actually asked an editor over at the Atlantic, and he was so shocked.”
Meanwhile, Frum took the fiery monologue in stride, tweeting on Thursday morning that he was “very sympathetic to the predicament faced by TV hosts” and that these are “worrying times.”
Scarborough’s righteous indignation moved on from Frum, who he reiterated remained a “friend of the show,” and onto the widespread backlash the couple has received over their detente with Trump.
Since announcing they had gone to Mar-a-Lago last month to “restart communications” with the incoming president, the show has seen its viewership plummet – though MSNBC as a whole has also seen a ratings drop post-election.
Additionally, other media personalities have accused the hosts of hypocrisy and “kissing the ring” with their Mar-a-Lago trek. At the same time, it was reported that the impetus being their Trump meeting was driven by concerns of retribution by the incoming president, whose nominee to lead the FBI has said he’d “come after” Trump’s media critics — specifically Morning Joe.
“You know what? People are upset with some of our guests, some of our friends. We snuck up on them too fast. We should have given them more of a warning. Whatever,” Scarborough said. “The main complaint was that we called Donald Trump’s rhetoric fascist during the campaign. And then we went down to have an off-the-record comment.”
While Brzezinski highlighted a number of other prominent news outlets that have reporters plugged into Trump world, Scarborough described the criticism their visit has received as “outrageously stupid,” adding that they’re doing “exactly” what media organizations like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are doing.
“What do you call it? You call it their job,” he huffed.
