Image 01 Image 03

Morning Joe Tag

On today's Morning Joe, Willie Geist was making the point—in the context of the controversy over President Trump's tweets about Mika and Joe—that presidents need to have a thick skin. To illustrate, Geist recounted the story of President George W. Bush being informed by a communications aide that Keith Olbermann had made a nasty attack on him that was being picked up in the press. Responded W: "Keith Olbermann? Why is he talking about me? He does Sports Center: I love that guy!"

President Donald Trump took to Twitter to unleash his anger on Morning Joe and its hosts Mika Brzezinki and Joe Scarborough. He wrote that he heard the show "speaks badly" of him, but wants to know why "I.Q. Crazy Mika" and "Psycho Joe" went to Mar-a-Lago for three nights around News Year Eve and asked to meet with him. Then Trump claimed Mika "was bleeding badly from a facelift" so he said no. Of course Mika didn't let this stand and responded on Twitter.

How to become an MSM hero? Publicly confront the Trump administration. At yesterday's White House briefing, Playboy White House correspondent Brian Karem got into a testy exchange with Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders over CNN's fake Russia story and the broader issues involved. Appearing on Morning Joe today, Karem received a hero's welcome. As he was introduced, someone exclaimed "well done!" and there was even a smattering of applause. At the end of the segment, after Karem pleaded for the media to "stand up" to the Trump admin, Mika Brzezinski concluded, "and stand with you. Brian Karem: amen—to everything you said."

Appearing on today's Morning Joe, law professor Jonathan Turley noted that Chief Justice John Roberts teamed with Justice Anthony Kennedy to devise an exception to the Court's ruling of yesterday that permitted President Trump's travel ban to remain in place. Under the exception, the ban does not apply to foreign nationals with a "bona fide" relationship with a person or entity in the United States. Turley said that as of late, Roberts has been "swimming a lot in the middle of the pool," has become very Anthony "Kennedy-like," and would become the new swing vote should Kennedy retire.

For months, we've been chronicling Joe Scarborough's increasingly anti-Trump statements, as the Morning Joe host Scarborough called the president a "schmuck" and a "jackass," and repeatedly questioned the president's mental health, as here and here. Scarborough now appears to have hit rock-bottom [excuse the pun], with his release of a music video portraying Joe with co-host and fiancée Mika Brzezinski observing a nightmarish anti-Trump mash-up.

One of our categories here at Legal Insurrection is "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Over at Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski provides a prime example of the malady. We noted yesterday how Mika was pushing poor Jon Meacham into drawing parallels between President Trump, the Nazis, and North Korea. Brzezinski ratcheted things up a notch this morning, suddenly blurting out that it "feels like a dictatorship developing." Joe Scarborough tried to talk his partner off the ledge, saying "that's an inside voice saying what you just said. You want to be like Greta. Greta pulls back before she says things like that."

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski strongly suggested that President Trump is in cahoots with the Russians, saying "it's kind of hard not to think that [Trump] might be in on some sort of scheme." Earlier, Mika recycled the Trump/Nazi card. She invited Jon Meacham to draw a historical parallel to President Trump. When she asked him "what this is reminiscent of if you had to make a parallel," Meacham drew the comparison to President Nixon at the end of his tenure. That wasn't what Mika was looking for, so she tried again: "what is this reminiscent to, even outside of the United States?"

If Dems were smart, they'd watch and learn from the opening segment of today's Morning Joe. In his item of last night, Prof. Jacobson noted how Dems were taking the wrong lesson from the election, claiming that a close loss was a win. The message from Morning Joe was starkly different. As Mark Halperin put it this morning, this was an "unmitigated disaster" for the Dems. Joe Scarborough said that "all the chips were pushed to the middle of the table here. This was a winner take all and it was a huge win for Republicans and a big loss for Democrats."

Yes, let's all come together, hold hands, unite . . . and blame President Trump for the shooting of Steve Scalise and others yesterday. Morning Joe opened today with predictable pieties, Joe Scarborough saying, for example, that "the heated rhetoric in this country has to calm down." But before the show's first hour had ended, Mika Brzezinski turned the heat up to 11 by pointing the finger for the Scalise shooting in part at the president. An emotional Mika, after accusing President Trump of "promoting violence on the campaign trail," continued:
"I'm not putting anything squarely on the president, but I have to say that this is the new added dynamic to what is a very dangerous climate."

In the wake of the Kathy Griffin severed-head fiasco, and the Central Park play depicting the assassination of President Trump, you'd think that pundits might have the good sense to lay off metaphors invoking the violent death of the president. But today comes law prof Jonathan Turley with yet another sanguinary simile. Appearing on Morning Joe to discuss President Trump's executive order on travel, Turley suggested that President Trump's tweets on the subject are undermining his case. Then Turley went there: "it's like a presidential version of death by cop. Every time you seem to make advances, the president seems to stand up and say 'shoot me, shoot me.'"

We get it. Joe Scarborough doesn't approve of Donald Trump. Two weeks ago, we noted the Morning Joe host calling the president a "jackass." Things are escalating, and there appears to be no sense of decorum left on Morning Joe. This morning, Scarborough called Trump a "schmuck" - a term that literally means penis in Yiddish, and is used as a pejorative to express contempt for a person.

Two months ago, we reported on Morning Joe going "Crazy over Trump's Mental Health." The show was back on that beat today, with two variations on the theme. First, panel members were able to cite a Wall Street Journal editorial harshly criticizing President Trump for his tweeting habits, describing him as a person "with a propensity for self-destructive behavior [who] can’t seem to help" himself and who is his own "most effective opponent." That same Wall Street Journal editorial reports that a recent Trump Twitter burst came in response to a Morning Joe segment on the immigration executive order.

The battle between global elitism and nationalism was on display on today's Morning Joe. The panelists exposed their own elitism while Joe Scarborough declared that—at least within the Trump administration—nationalism, in the person of Steve Bannon, is winning. Scarborough reported that his sources tell him that Bannon has been leaking about Jared Kushner's Russia contacts in an effort to "sideline" Kushner and preserve his own place within the administration. A bit later, Joe proclaimed Bannon "President of the United States," given his influence over the actual president.

After today's Morning Joe played a montage various Trump administration members praising the president, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough savaged them as "robots" and "stooges" who sounded like people in countries like North Korea and Iran. Of course, President Obama didn't need people in his administration to praise him. He had the liberal media doing that for him, free of charge. Check out, courtesy of our friends at NewsBusters, this assemblage of the MSM drooling over Obama.

If, say, Greg Gutfield had held up a realistic-looking severed head of the previous president, do you think Morning Joe would have refused to cover the story? But on today's Morning Joe, when a panelist made reference to "the Kathy Griffin news," Mika Brzezinski put her foot down:

"We're not talking about it. I'm sorry, it's too gross. It's just not worth doing."

Today's Morning Joe aired a mock anti-Republican ad that its staff created. Scarborough said he told "the kids in the back that work for us" to "draw up an ad that will look like what we're going to see next year." As you'll see from the video clip, the ad is predictable campaign fare, focusing on the Republican health care bill. Pre-existing conditions coverage disintegrates. Medicaid is "slashed." And, of course, "huge tax cuts for the rich," with images of President Trump against a backdrop of yachts and mansions. The ad ends with the disclaimer: "not an actual ad, but probably will be."