MSNBC host Joe Scarborough opened “Morning Joe” on Thursday with a 20-minute rant that claimed to a recent guest on the show that he and co-host Mika Brzezinski fear President-elect Donald Trump.
“Let me tell you something, you can talk to anyone who has worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC for the past 22 years. I’m telling you, I’m not afraid,” Scarborough said. “If you talk to anyone who served with me in Congress, they’ll tell you, no fear of leadership. Now? Not scared.”
“I’m going to do my show the way I want to do my show!” added the former GOP congressman turned liberal commentator.
Scarborough was responding to comments made by David Frum, a political commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
On Wednesday morning, Frum joined Scarborough and Brzezinski to discuss Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and reported that his heavy drinking had worried his colleagues at Fox News.
“If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re really, really drunk,” Frum joked on “Morning Joe.”
During a commercial break, a producer spoke in Frum’s ear, warning him not to repeat his comments about Hegseth’s allegations of alcoholism, Frum wrote in a column for The Atlantic.
“The comment was a little too weird for the moment we’re in,” Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe” during the next segment. “We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say that there are a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will we want to leave it at that.”
So Frum wrote an article for The Atlantic tearing apart what he called Brzezinski’s “apology.”
“It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussing public affairs are already feeling the chill of fear and reacting with appeasement efforts,” he wrote.
Scarborough lectured viewers for 20 minutes Thursday morning as he entered Frum’s column.
“The sound of fear? The search? None of this is true,” he said.
Scarborough said Frum’s accusations were similar to the backlash MSNBC contributors faced after going to meet the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago mansion — after years of fierce criticism of Trump, even compared his rhetoric to fascists.
“The main complaint was that we called Donald Trump’s rhetoric fascist during the campaign, and then came down to make an off-the-record comment, but guess who else does that?” Scarborough said.
“Ah, let me see, from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street — you know what, I think even people from the Atlantic,” Brzezinski said cheekily.
Scarborough defended the meeting and said it is common practice for journalists to have background conversations with political figures with whom they disagree.
“That’s what journalists do,” he added. “The only difference between what we did on that visit and what the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, everybody else is doing is that we were transparent. We actually told you.”
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