Mr. Scarborough Goes to Mar-a-Lago

It’s already evident that the battered forces of liberal governance will not be staging a sequel to the self-styled “resistance” movement that greeted Donald Trump’s initial elevation to the presidency. But in an additional blow to resistance mythology, one key outlet of anti-Trump punditizing—President Joe Biden’s favorite political talk show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe—has already prostrated itself to a Trump administration that has yet to take office.

Over the weekend, the show’s cohosts, green-room power couple Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, made a pilgrimage to President-elect Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, replicating the self-abasing ritual adopted by Kevin McCarthy after the January 6 coup attempt at the US Capitol and scores of other notional Never Trumpers on the right. (For grim amusement, check out MSNBC’s righteous indignation over the McCarthy episode.)

In a typically self-serious statement to their viewers, Scarborough and Brzezinski justified their obsequies before a leader they’d previously dubbed a fascist, on the threadbare rationale that propels all supine political journalism: Opening channels of communication with Trump would give them invaluable access to the upper reaches of state power. In another pet refrain of the high-Beltway hymnal, they pitched their craven capitulation to authoritarian rule as a healing gesture on behalf of a woefully polarized citizenry. “Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and this country,” Brezezinski burbled. “We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concern about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate.”

This is the sort of brain-dead rhetorical flourish that should have Susan Collins’s attorneys drafting a cease-and-desist letter. To begin with, decrying a leader who tried to seize power by overturning a free and fair election—and who has already set plans for implementing mass deportation and overturning birthright citizenship in the first days of his second term—for offenses against proper language and crimes against civility is akin to calling out Charles Manson as a mediocre songwriter. But Brzezinski, herself a pedigreed scion of the DC establishment, was just getting started. The task ahead, she explained to viewers, is “to do something different”—the show’s host would now be “not only talking about Donald Trump” but “talking with him.” Continuing with her phoned-in litany of centrist journalistic clichés, she added, “Hyperbole and personal attacks don’t work. My hair on fire doesn’t work. We’ve all seen that.”

Actually, what we’ve all seen—those of us, at least, with a memory more functional than a ferret’s—is that the spectacle of Scarborough and Brzezinski talking with Donald Trump has already proven an unmitigated journalistic disaster. Throughout the 2016 GOP primary cycle, Trump conducted so many chummy, wised-up appearances on the morally rudderless set of Morning Joe that he likely wore out a path in the green-room carpet. At a panel in Manhattan, Scarborough admitted that he’d given debate advice to the candidate, while also immodestly passing on his thoughts on potential first-term cabinet picks, both on air and off. In a February 2016 interview on the show, Trump announced, “You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it.”

Indeed, the 2016 cycle also gave us a preview of the exact moment of prime journalistic humiliation we are now living through. After Scarborough and Brezezinski elevated some campaign gossip that Trump’s then–campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, had lofted attacks at Mitt Romney, the Morning Joe team was iced out from access. So they proceeded to do what they do best: frantically suck up to power for the sake of ratings. Through the whole harrowing ordeal, Scarborough bragged that he was in regular phone contact with Trump, and Brzezinski went on a special diplomatic mission to Trump Tower to have coffee with Ivanka. This effort to get the band back together yielded this stinging critique from Brezezinski, after Trump’s performance in the second 2016 presidential debate: “My God, it was epic. No Republican in America could have done what he did last night. It was vintage Trump. He produced a daylong show that rocked the political world.” After the 2016 election, the show became a virtual random search engine for Trump sycophancy; it ended up so far in the MAGA tank that Washington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan grouped Scarborough with Mark Halperin and Sean Hannity in the pantheon of pundits who had surrendered credibility for access.

Of course, the show’s host network soon pivoted into resistance TV mode during the first Trump term, and Scarborough and Brzezinski played merrily along, touting wall-to-wall coverage of the Russiagate saga and other breathless storylines creating the illusion that the walls would soon be closing in on their former chum. Trump, naturally, went after his former Morning Joe enablers with gusto; in 2020, he revived an ugly smear against Scarborough suggesting that he played an untoward role in the death of a young staffer back when he was a House member serving on the vanguard of the Gingrichite Republican Revolution.  

The return of Morning Joe to the MAGA fold, then, is a depressing and all-too-familiar fable of power-choreographed political coverage. The only significant variation here is the report from CNN’s Brian Stelter that this latest profile in journalistic cowardice is personal as well as professional; according to Stelter’s sources, Brzezinski and Scarborough fear audits and other retaliatory moves from the emboldened apparatchiks of Trump’s second term. In an early shot across the bow last week, former Trump adviser and campaign manager Steve Bannon took to his podcast to put MSNBC personalities and producers on notice to “preserve your documents” as a Matt Gaetz Justice Department takes direct aim at them. Scarborough and Brzezinski have clearly taken note, and acted accordingly. The only wonder in the whole sorry saga is not that they’ve betrayed any principle of anti-Trump resistance; it’s that anyone ever thought to consider them actual journalists in the first place.