Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough has responded to backlash over his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump alongside Mika Brzezinski, his co-host and wife.
Scarborough said the backlash on social media to the meeting demonstrated a “massive disconnect” between the internet sphere and the real world.
“Yesterday we saw for the first time what massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world,” Scarborough said on Tuesday. “Because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world, very positive, very supportive, going, ‘we understand why you did what you did.’”
“But once in a while I would get a text or call: ‘Oh man, I hope you’re doing okay…’ I’d call them back… ‘Are you on Twitter?’ And he goes, ‘I am.’ I go, ‘Okay, well, I’m not.’ So we had a good day,” he added.
Scarborough and Brzezinski revealed they visited Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump on Monday, meeting with him for the first time in four years to “restart communications.”
The MSNBC hosts were highly critical of Trump leading up to the election. The pair called him “erratic,” criticized his election fraud efforts and warned “how dark of a place” the country could be under a second Trump presidency.
“We talked about a lot of issues including abortion, mass deportations, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” Scarborough said on Monday. “It’s gonna come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show…that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we told him so.”
“We had not spoken to Trump since March of 2020, other than a personal call that Joe made after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania,” Brzezinski added.
As Scarborough mentioned, the pair received heavy blowback following the meeting – even from their coworkers.
MSNBC reporter Katie Phang posted on social media just after the announcement, telling her followers that “normalizing Trump is a bad idea.”
Democratic political consultant Chuck Rocha told CNN the pair could be doing it to avoid targeting once Trump takes office.
“I think Joe and Mika just don’t want to be audited,” Rocha said.
Media critic Jeff Jarvis also told CNN the move was “a betrayal of the staff at MSNBC who do still criticize Donald Trump, who now feel that they are in some jeopardy because of that, because he has threatened the press.”
Trump has routinely slammed national and local media outlets that aren’t entirely sympathetic to him, and has even threatened to jail reporters who refuse to reveal their anonymous sources.
