Lied in tweets

‘Morning Joe’ hosts question Trump’s mental state, say he lied in tweets

By LOUIS NELSON

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC hosts at whom President Donald Trump lobbed personal attacks on Twitter Thursday morning, responded Friday in a Washington Post op-ed, writing that the president “is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show.”

Trump made regular appearances on the duo’s show, “Morning Joe,” throughout the early phases of his presidential campaign, often calling into the program to talk with Scarborough and Brzezinski, claiming a friendly relationship with both hosts. But that relationship soured as Trump’s campaign progressed, with “Morning Joe” growing increasingly critical of the president’s incendiary rhetoric and Trump responding with attacks against the hosts.

Thursday morning, the president once again attacked Scarborough and Brzezinski, calling the former “Psycho Joe” and the latter “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” Of Brzezinski, the president also said she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a meeting the three had at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve.

“President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president,” the pair wrote in their Post op-ed. “The president’s unhealthy obsession with ‘Morning Joe’ does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs.”

Brzezinski and Scarborough, who were scheduled to be on vacation Friday, joined their morning show in its 7 a.m. hour to address the president’s attack on-air. Both insisted that they had not been rattled by Trump’s tweets and both said they had received a flood of calls and texts from concerned friends. Brzezinski recalled Thursday’s show, when she had joked about The Washington Post report that several of Trump’s golf properties had on display fake covers of Time magazine with fawning headlines. She said she “knew in real time that the president would be tweaked by that” and suspected that it might elicit a response.

“I’m fine. My family brought me up really tough. This is absolutely nothing. But I think for me, personally … I am very concerned as to what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange,” Brzezinski said. “It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played. He’s so easily played by a cable news host. Now, what is that saying to our allies? What is that saying to our enemies, that this president is so easily played?”

In the aftermath of Trump’s Thursday tweets, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president and said that he “fights fire with fire” and was simply responding to a program that has launched “an outrageous number of personal attacks” against him and his team.

Brzezinski disputed that her show had attacked Trump. “The White House claims we attack him,” she said. “No, we report on his lies. We are upset when he doesn’t tell the truth and he bullies people.”

Contained within his two tweets about the hosts and their show Thursday were multiple falsehoods, Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote in their Post op-ed. The two did not ask to meet with Trump on three consecutive nights at Mar-a-Lago, as Trump wrote. Instead, Scarborough had come just twice, both times at the president’s request, and Brzezinski had reluctantly joined him just one of those times.

And while the duo said Brzezinski had had “a little skin under her chin tweaked,” they wrote that she has never had a face-lift, as the president suggested in his Twitter posts. Her face does not show signs of any medical procedure in photographs from the evenings in question, the pair wrote. Brzezinski also addressed Trump’s accusation on-air Friday, remarking that she had been open about the procedure she had done on the skin underneath her chin and “had a lot of fun with it” in conversations with her friends. “I’m pretty transparent about what I do, and I think it looks awesome,” she said.

And despite Trump’s repeated insistences that he does not watch “Morning Joe,” Scarborough and Brzezinski said they are told by White House advisers that he still does. “That is unfortunate,” they wrote. “We believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to ‘Fox & Friends,’” the Fox News morning show where the president receives almost unflinchingly positive coverage.

While the president’s Twitter outburst Thursday has refocused the spotlight on his social media habits and his relationship with the MSNBC duo, it is far from the first time he has attacked Brzezinski and Scarborough online. Trump has often gone after Brzezinski in particular, writing at various points that she had “gone wild with hate,” was “very insecure” and a “neurotic and not very bright mess.”

“It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women,” Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote in their op-ed, recalling Trump’s past feuds with former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. On their morning show, Scarborough noted that Trump “for some reason takes things so much more personally with women. He’s so much more vicious with women.” Brzezinski added that the president “appears to have a fragile, impetuous, child-like ego that we’ve seen over and over again, especially with women. It’s like he can’t take it. And I saw this happening yesterday in real time.”

Scarborough also recalled a story he said he had not previously told, in which a “very well-known” member of Congress called the morning cable news host after a White House meeting that had been called for the president to pitch House members on health care legislation. In that meeting, Scarborough said the member of Congress relayed, Trump had labeled Scarborough “a joke” but was “vicious” when he turned to Brzezinski. “And this congressman said ‘I’ve been in politics for decades, and never seen anything like this,’” Scarborough recalled without naming the lawmaker. “He said, ‘I don’t know why I’m calling you, but I was just scared. I was scared for you guys, and I wanted you to know.’”

“We have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our relationship together,” they wrote in the op-ed, noting that during the campaign, Scarborough said he had heard from those close to Trump that he had become erratic.

“We, too, have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years. Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack,” they wrote. “The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.”