Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz hit a bit below the belt as he attacked MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski over their recent visit with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida after bashing Trump for years on the air.
“You have Joe and Mika going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and suck up to Donald Trump. You can’t make that story up,” Sean Hannity told Cruz on his Fox News program.
Cruz smirked: “I’m not even sure they were kissing the ring. I think they were kissing a little bit lower than that.”
He added: “I mean listen, they’re desperate. There are three viewers that watch Morning Joe and two of them are blood relatives to Joe and Mika. They’re desperate for relevance.”
Cruz insisted that now, with Trump elected, “There’s an excitement in Texas ... People are excited about a Republican administration.”
Cruz has gone from Trump critic to staunch ally, previously referring to Trump as a “pathological liar” and a “sniveling coward.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski faced criticism for their visit to Mar-a-Lago “to restart communications” with Trump even after comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“It’s hard to believe. I mean, I wouldn’t go and meet with Hitler, but that’s just me. Maybe it was all nonsense all along,” Donald Trump Jr. said about the visit. “Maybe I’m just a rational being, but it would be nice to bring some common sense back to Washington, and hopefully, we get some of that finally.”
According to a Puck News report published last month, Scarborough and Brzezinski allegedly met with Trump over fears that then-attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz would investigate the death of an intern in Scarborough’s office during his time as a Florida Republican congressman.
After the meeting with Trump, Brzezinski told viewers: “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?’”
She added: “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
Their mostly liberal audience dropped by 17 percent in the hour after they made the revelation about the Trump meeting, and their ratings were down 38 percent the following day compared to the average for the year.
Scarborough and Brzezinski have reportedly told friends since the election that they’re concerned about retribution from Trump over their consistent criticism of the president-elect since they last met with him seven years ago. Those worries grew when Trump nominated Gaetz to be his attorney general. But Gaetz stepped aside after only eight days as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice amid allegations of sex trafficking and illicit drug use, claims Gaetz has repeatedly rejected.
The Morning Joe hosts told friends and allies before the departure of Gaetz that they were concerned that he and Trump would bring back baseless conspiracy theories regarding the death of 28-year-old intern Lori Klausutis, who died from complications from a heart condition in 2001, Puck News noted. The concerns were linked to worries that Gaetz and Trump would use the conspiracy to put legal pressure on Scarborough.
A source told Puck that the hosts were “petrified of retribution” and concerned that Gaetz, who represented the same Florida congressional district as Scarborough once did, would probe the intern’s death. The source said the fears had “nothing to do with ratings or Comcast.”
A separate source told Puck that Scarborough and Brzezinski thought that by meeting Trump, they could lessen his desire for revenge.
A spokesperson for MSNBC told Puck that this characterization of the motivations for the meeting was false and inaccurate.
