MSNBC’s morning couple have a lot of nerve.
Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski did more than anyone else during the 2016 GOP primary to give Donald Trump an open and friendly platform to advance his presidential campaign, and they have the gall now to mock others as being shills for the president.
Attorney Alan Dershowitz penned an op-ed recently opining that certain acquaintances treat him now as a pariah on account of his frequent defenses of the president’s “civil liberties.”
“Either you are for Trump or against him, and that is all some people need to know to make judgments about you,” he wrote in a column published by the Hill.
“For [some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard], it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard,” Dershowitz added.
On Thursday, Brzezinski and Scarborough mocked the op-ed, ridiculing it as the whining of a Trump sycophant.
“Unfortunately, the scourge of McCarthyism is back,” Scarborough snorted.
Brzezinski added with even more sarcasm, “Oh! Can you believe it? He can’t even go to Martha’s Vineyard. This is wrong.”
“He’s actually run resistance not only for Republicans abusing power but also Democrats, as he writes,” Scarborough added in a poor paraphrasing of Dershowitz’s point that he has defended both Democrats and Republicans.
Brzezinski quipped, “Yes. [Dershowitz] is equally a shill and a stooge.”
“As my grandmother would say, ‘Alan, when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas,’” concluded Scarborough.
What chutzpah.
These two would like very much for everyone to forget the role they played in getting Trump over the finish line. They think if they attack Trump and his allies enough, people won’t remember. Don’t oblige them.
Don’t forget, for example, that “fruitful relationship” between “Morning Joe” and Trump, which included multiple soft-ball telephone and in-person interviews, reversed the show’s flailing ratings in 2016, rewarding the chatty morning roundtable with the highly coveted “must-see TV” label.
Don’t forget that the chummy nature of Brzezinski’s and Scarborough’s personal relationship with Trump was sleazy enough as to prompt NBC Universal employees to complain about it to competing newsrooms. Don’t forget the time when Scarborough bragged that he’d call or visit Trump personally during the primaries to offer him debate advice. Don’t forget that the “Morning Joe” hosts’ praise for Trump was so effusive during the primary as to prompt the candidate himself to joke that they made him sound like a “legendary figure.”
Lastly, don’t forget about that Washington Post op-ed Scarborough wrote in April 2016, when he said that conservatives who opposed Trump from the get-go sounded like the “arrogant and unmoored … left-wing pundits let loose on MSNBC during the Bush years.”
The about-face on Trump will never be more ridiculous than when Scarborough penned a teary-eyed, saccharine tribute in January to the resistance. Watching them attack another person as being a “shill” for Trump, however, is a very close second.
