‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Keep Up Media Charade Of Accountability

Longtime bedfellows and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough apparently upset many of their low-I.Q. viewers after they offered a humiliating explanation Monday as to why they crawled their way to Mar-a-Lago and met with President-elect Donald Trump. Their audience is right to reject it. Everyone should.

Very obviously reading from a script, Brzezinski said the pair were “given the opportunity” on Friday to see Trump, “The first time we have seen him in seven years.” When it was Scarborough’s turn, he said, “It’s gonna come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show … that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so.” But, Brzezinski said, they did agree with Trump to “restart communications.”

The best part, though, was when Brzezinski said she and her husband “realized it’s time to do something different,” acknowledging the nearly 80 million voters who cast their ballots for Trump in spite of “election denialism, public trials, [and] January 6.”

It must have been very painful to read the notes likely mandated by MSNBC executives who have seen the channel’s ratings cut almost in half since the election. But while I give Brzezinski and Scarborough a sliver of credit for at least admitting that the trifling issues they screamed about for three hours every weekday for the past two years didn’t have the impact they’d hoped, that’s the extent of grace they deserve.

In order to keep doing what they’re doing they need forgiveness, but they’re not asking for it. If they were, the first words out of their mouths would be, “We lied. We knew we were lying. It didn’t work and we’re sorry.”

If they’re not going to say that, I’m not interested, and nobody else should be suckered into falling for it. They did this last time around.

In the Republican primary of the 2016 cycle, Mika and Joe could hardly retain their bodily fluids over Trump. They interviewed him almost daily on set and on the phone, openly marveling at his campaign, shooting the breeze with him on national television to a degree that Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple was moved to describe as “too much fun, too much exposure.”

Then Trump became the GOP nominee and the pair did a 180, using every second of airtime to denounce his candidacy. But wait! Then Trump won and Mika and Joe did yet another about face, traveling to Trump Tower in New York to kiss the incoming president’s ring.

But wait! Then they hopped on the Russia-collusion train and once again filled their silly program with non-stop anti-Trump hysteria.

These aren’t morning news hosts. They’re hustlers hoping to pull off one final scam before they retire to France.

There’s no reason to believe Trump should be so naive as to let people like this back within a galaxy of his graces. The vote for him was every bit one against them as it was against Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party writ large. He’s been through this before. We all have.

They can’t get away with it again.