Jon Stewart has joined the backlash against Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski over their meeting with Donald Trump, schooling them as to why he thinks it was a bad idea.
On Monday, the MSNBC anchors announced that they visited Mar-a-Lago on Friday to meet the president-elect in person for the first time in seven years in a bid to “restart communications.”
Following Scarborough and Brzenzinski’s “interesting announcement,” Stewart shared his disapproval on Monday’s The Daily Show.
The late night host shared a clip of Brzezinski explaining her rationale behind the meet, where she said: “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?”
“Uh…,” Stewart chimed in. “Because you said he was Hitler.”
The MSNBC duo, who have been highly critical of the president-elect, said they discussed “abortion, mass deportation, threats of… retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarbrough added in a clip aired on The Daily Show.
“Oh, I bet you really laid down the gauntlet, Joe,” Stewart mocked with a southern drawl.
“I bet you walked in there and just let him have it, didn’t you?”
While Scarborough, a former GOP representative for Florida, told MSNBC viewers that “we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” Trump told Fox News that the exchange was “extremely cordial.”
“In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago,” Trump said, adding that it is “very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press.”
Stewart wasn’t the only one calling out the Morning Joe hosts for their controversial meeting with Trump.
Fox News host Megyn Kelly also noted that just weeks ago, the pair compared Trump to Hitler.
“Go f*** yourselves,” Kelly, who endorsed Trump at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 5, said on her Sirius XM show on Monday.
“They’re grifters,” she continued, adding: “You dishonest jokes of faux journalists.”
Trump’s former presidential rival Nikki Haley described it as a stunt to bolster MSNBC’s ratings.
“Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings,” Haley posted on X on Monday. “They realized they needed Trump for their survival.”
Meanwhile, an unnamed MSNBC staffer also broke their silence, telling Fox News that it was “disgusting” that the hosts met with Trump.
“Doing exactly what [anti-Trump historian] Tim Snyder warns on our air not to do: obey in advance. It’s disgusting but frankly unsurprising,” they said.
“Journalists don’t need access to their subjects to hold them to account. None of it is believable. The obvious answer is believable: they are opportunists.”
MSNBC host Katie Phang made a more indirect jibe at Scarborough and Brzezinski. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote on X. “Period.”
Meanwhile The View co-host Sunny Hostin gave the Morning Joe duo a telling off, saying there is no need to “kiss his ring to be able to speak the truth.”
Despite the backlash, a source close to the show told The Daily Beast that the meeting was “f***ing worth it” as it may enhance Trump’s perceptions of the press.
“That doesn’t mean there are going to be earth-shaking changes,” the source added. “But the temperature has to come down.”
