Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have revealed their main “takeaway” from their controversial meeting with Donald Trump.
The MSBNC husband and wife duo have been facing a backlash since they announced they had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago last Friday in a bid to “restart communications” with the president-elect.
Colleagues, media pundits, politicians and the public all criticized the hosts for the meeting and the show’s ratings took a nosedive.
On Wednesday’s show, Scarborough spoke out about the visit once again, revealing that Trump’s take on the sexual misconduct allegations about some of his cabinet picks was the biggest “takeaway” for them.
“I will say on background, in our conversation on background, there are a couple of things that surprised us,” Scarborough said.
“One of them was when [Hegseth’s] name came up, there was not a flinch, but a noticeable, ‘We got problems here.’”
He added: “Those weren’t the words, but I will just tell you that that was the takeaway.”
After Trump tapped Fox contributor Pete Hegseth to be his defense secretary, it emerged that he had been investigated by police for an alleged sexual assault in 2017. No charges were filed and Hegseth insists the incident was consensual.
Scarborough also claimed that Trump’s attorney general pick Matt Gaetz appeared to be a concern to the transition team.
Gaetz was the subject of a DOJ investigation and House Ethics Committee report into allegations he paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has not been chargesd and denies all allegations against him.
“I will just tell you that was the takeaway,” Scarborough said of Gaetz, before adding: “Because obviously Gaetz is a problem. But I think there must be more.”
He added of Gaetz, Hegseth, director of national security pick Tulsi Gabbard and Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F Kennedy Jr: “I think they were just shocked, maybe, blind sided, because there has been no vetting process for these four.”
The Morning Joe hosts have been widely criticized for meeting with Trump, with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show pointing out that they had recently compared the president-elect to Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s former presidential rival Nikki Haley also described the sitdown as a stunt to bolster MSNBC’s ratings, adding that “they realized they needed Trump for their survival.”
MSNBC host Katie Phang made a more indirect jibe at Scarborough and Brzezinski. “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea,” she wrote on X. “Period.”
On Tuesday, Scarborough defended the trip and claimed that there is a “massive disconnect” between what has been written on social media about it “and the real world.”
