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Mika Brzezinski Tag

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?"

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."

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."

The MSM is hating President Trump's foreign trip. Why? Because it takes the spotlight off what they'd much rather be covering: the investigations back home into Russian involvement in the election. Yesterday, we witnessed a CNN host fretting that President Trump's successful speech in Saudi Arabia might be "normalizing" him. Now it's Mika Brzezinski's turn to insist that she won't let Morning Joe be distracted by the foreign trip. On today's show, when HuffPo's Sam Stein said that despite the investigations, people are "going about our business," Mika jumped on him.

On his Fox News show last night, Tucker Carlson ripped Mika Brzezinski for quoting, on yesterday's Morning Joe, unflattering things that Kellyanne Conway allegedly said about Donald Trump in private, off-the-air conversations. Tucker cited Mika as an example of journalists who have "degraded and humiliated themselves" out of their anti-Trump "hysteria." Tucker: "TV anchors almost never reveal what their guests have said off-camera, and for good reason. People come to TV studios so they can speak on TV. They do not come with the expectation that their private conversations will wind up broadcast to the country."

Three months ago, as we reported here, Mika Brzezinski barred Kellyanne Conway from Morning Joe, accusing Conway of propagating "fake news." Continuing her war on Kellyanne, Mika is now trying to keep Conway off the air on a rival network. Said Brzezinski on Morning Joe today: "note to CNN, sorry, I love CNN, but you've got to stop putting Kellyanne on the air. It's politics porn. You're just getting your little ratings crack, okay? But it's disgusting.

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brezezinski didn't hesitate to tell Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders "you're actually not telling the truth right now" while discussing the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mika's jab came in response to Sanders' assertion that everyone—including Scarborough—has come to the same conclusion: that there is no evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

Is Mika Brzezinski feeling empowered by her recently-disclosed engagement to Joe Scarborough? On today's Morning Joe, Mika confidently proclaimed that "I know my little meltdowns make you all laugh. They're always right." Mika went on to predict, "I'm telling you right now, these guys [in the Trump admin] are going to find themselves fumbling on their own lies, to the point it brings them down. And it's going to start with the press secretary but it's going to end up on the president's desk."

This isn't the first time that Mika Brzezinski has said something critical about Clinton world. So maybe it was just a coincidence that on the day it became public that she and Joe Scarborough have become engaged, Mika took a real shot at the decision not to go after Huma Abedin for forwarding classified emails to her husband Anthony Weiner, ostensibly for the purpose of having him print them off. Said Mika, "I don't understand how Hillary Clinton's e-mails are forwarded to Huma Abedin's husband so he can print them out. What? What? I don't know. Maybe there's no law against it. Seriously, maybe there's no law against it . . . It's incredible. It's everything that was wrong with the campaign." When Joe said that in fact there was a law against it, and suggested the Clinton campaign thought it was playing by different rules, Mika concurred: "totally different rules."

"Pathetic." "Arrogance." Those were the key words that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski used on today's Morning Joe, respectively, to describe Hillary Clinton's excuse-making for her loss. As our Mike LaChance—the artist formerly known as Aleister—has noted, Hillary was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour yesterday. Clinton paid lip service to her own mistakes, but ultimately concluded that "the reason I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days," citing the Comey letter and Wikileaks. Scarborough: "So who's going to say it on the set? Who's going to say it? Anybody going to say it? That was pathetic. I'll say it. Let me go out, I'll get killed." Mika went on to repeatedly speak of the "arrogance" of Hillary and the Clinton campaign. Sample: Hillary's comments show "this arrogance, and this sense that this was a coronation was so engrained in her."

There's a wall being built on the Mexican border. You just can't see it. But Mika Brzezinski could feel it. On today's Morning Joe, Brzezinski mimed an invisible border wall. Mika's shtick came in the course of a discussion suggesting that the Trump administration might settle for less than a 2,200 mile-long wall, substituting surveillance of various types. Joe Scarborough helpfully suggested "wild coyotes wearing cameras."

Last month, Mika Brzezinski in essence banned presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway from Morning Joe. Saying she doesn't believe in "fake news," Mika declared that Conway has tried to book herself on MJ, but "I won't do it." Brzezinski took things a big step further this morning, seeming to call for Conway to quit the Trump administration. In the context of discussing the criticism of the White House by the Office of Governmental Ethics for not disciplining Conway for her endorsement of Ivanka's clothing line, Mika said "it's probably time for [Conway] to pack it up."

As far as Mika Brzezinski is concerned, Kellyanne Conway should not be permitted to appear on Morning Joe. Said Mika this morning: "Joe was just saying that she books herself on these shows, we know for a fact she tries to book herself on this show. I won't do it. Because I don't believe in fake news or information that is not true." Later, Mika laid down a personal marker, a virtual ultimatum. Warning Conway not to contact the show, Mika said: "I will say, Kellyanne Conway does not need to text our show. At least, as long as I'm on it. Because it's not happening here."

An extraordinary first half-hour of Morning Joe today. The thesis was that President Trump had gotten off on a seriously bad foot by failing to look back at history in his inauguration speech, sending a first and ungracious tweet about the Women's Marches, sending Sean Spicer out to berate the press over crowd-size reporting, and above all for a self-referential, boastful, angry speech, referencing crowd size, given while standing in front of the wall of fallen heroes at the CIA. And the message, delivered repeatedly and in the starkest terms, by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, was that those aides who abetted President Trump, who counseled him to adopt a combative tone, should be fired and leave immediately. View the video to see the myriad ways in which Joe and Mika pummeled the presidential aides who did not advise President Trump to moderate his remarks.

Mika Brzezinski is an unabashed liberal, someone who pushed Elizabeth Warren to run for president and subsequently became a Bernie Sanders fan. But she has also proved herself willing to criticize her own, be they politicians or, as this morning, fellow members of the MSM. On today's Morning Joe, Brzezinski first criticized CNN's Jim Acosta for his pro-John Lewis speech in the guise of a question to MLK III after his meeting with Donald Trump. A bit later, she expanded on the point in a very pointed way: "we [in the MSM] decipher Democrats and make them sound great. And we make Republicans sound like complete—the word we won't use."