President Trump hasn’t engaged with the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” over Twitter in almost six months, but that hasn’t stopped Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski from attempting to provoke a reaction from the president.
The engaged couple has not had any meaningful contact with the president in over a year, going back to when they attended a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.
Since then, they have routinely used their morning show to press Trump’s buttons, while Trump has managed to ignore them on Twitter since late November.
Scarborough on Wednesday went on for three minutes mocking Trump for declining an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has widened to almost unlimited jurisdiction.
“This makes me sad,” Scarborough said sarcastically. “Well, I mean, the lawyers — Rudy Giuliani now — there’s something about being a lawyer for Donald Trump, you get close to him and you think he’s too stupid to sit across a table from Robert Mueller III. … These lawyers’ insecure thinking that [Mueller] has a better education than Donald Trump. If I were Donald Trump, I’ve said it before, I’d be very insulted. They really do believe that Donald Trump is so stupid.”
In April, Scarborough attempted to drive a wedge between Trump and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley after the White House reversed an announcement she had made about additional sanctions on Russia. Scarborough tried to goad Trump by saying Haley could primary Trump in his re-election campaign and win.
“I think Nikki Haley would beat Donald Trump,“ he said. “I actually think if she ran in 2020 — and this is not me making trouble, it’s really not — I think if she ran in 2020, she would have a very good chance of being the first woman president of the United States.”
Trump had previously had a mutually beneficial relationship with “Morning Joe,” where he would frequently call in to get free airtime early in the 2016 campaign. But their relationship turned sour when the show became more aggressive in its coverage of him in the general election.
Tensions came to a head in June last year when Trump, seemingly at random, tweeted that he called Scarborough “Psycho Joe” and had seen Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at his property in Florida.
That tweet generated lots of shocked reaction on “Morning Joe” for the next few days, but soon after, Trump seemed to quit the show cold turkey.
Trump did say in a later tweet that Scarborough’s show should be canceled for “the ‘unsolved mystery’ that took place in Florida years ago,” a reference to an unfounded rumor that Scarborough was responsible for the death of an aide who worked in his office when he was a Republican congressman.
But that was it — Trump’s last tweet about the show was Nov. 29. Since then, the show’s coverage of the administration has grown more confrontational and, to a large extent, petty.
In February, Scarborough again pushed Trump to agree to an interview with Mueller, but with a jab at his hands.
“Mr. President, your own lawyers think you are too stupid and too much of a liar to stand up to the heat that Bob Mueller is going to send in your direction,” he said. “So if I had lawyers that thought I was too stupid to talk to Bob Mueller, I tell you what I would do, what any man would do, or any woman would do, that had any confidence in themselves — they would do that interview. And they would show those lawyers. They would show those lawyers they’re not scared, that they don’t have small hands, that they’re not timid, they have, big, beautiful hands and they have a big, beautiful mind.”
A spokesperson for the White House did not return a request for comment for this article.
