“Morning Joe” co-anchor Joe Scarborough has responded to the criticism that followed his meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, saying there is a “massive disconnect” between “social media and the real world.”
Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski, who have been some of the most vocal cable-news critics of Trump in recent years, said Monday that they’d sat down with the president-elect at his Florida estate three days earlier, and agreed to “restart communications.”
The announcement received intense backlash, which Scarborough and Brzezinksi, who are married, addressed on their MSNBC show Tuesday.
“Yesterday I saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world,” the former Republican congressman said.
“We were flooded with phone calls from people all day, literally around the world,” he went on. “Very positive, very supportive, going: ‘I understand why you did what you did,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But once in a while, I would get a text or a call from somebody going, ‘Oh man, I hope you’re doing OK.’”
Scarborough joked that he’d had a “good day” because he is not on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. He continued: “All of us are going to do the best we can do, and we’re all working towards a better America.”
“Take it day by day, people,” Brzezinski said.
Trump was on good terms with Scarborough and Brzezinski when he entered politics in 2015, but their continued criticism of him eventually turned into a feud.
In the final weeks of his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump called Scarborough a “sick puppy” after the host warned that Trump would seek revenge on the MSNBC show if he won a second term.
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On Tuesday, CNN’s Brian Stelter, citing anonymous sources, reported that Scarborough and Brzezinski chose to meet with the president-elect due to fears that they could be targets of “governmental and legal harassment” from the Trump administration.
On Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart shared a clip of Brzezinski explaining her rationale behind the meeting, 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?”
Stewart’s answer: “Uh, because you said he was Hitler.”