Many times over the last nine years, we have asked ourselves the big question: Is our media finally learning its fucking lesson about Donald Trump? We regret to inform you that the answer still appears to be “No.”
Take Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of the execrable “Morning Joe.” The couple’s inexplicably popular morning show has long been a festival of anti-Trump grievance, much like everything else on MSNBC, where almost an entire decade of programming has mostly consisted of outraged liberals and Never-Trump Republicans sitting around TV studios asking each other, Can you believe this fucking guy? Like so:
NICOLLE WALLACE: Good afternoon, I’m Nicolle Wallace. Today on “Deadline: White House”, we will ask the most important question of our times: Can you believe this fucking guy? With me in our studio is Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican Party. Michael, can you believe this fucking guy?
MICHAEL STEELE: Nicolle, I absolutely cannot believe this fucking guy.
WALLACE: Also here with us is Philip Bump of The Washington Post. Philip, thanks for being here. Can you believe this fucking guy?
PHILIP BUMP: Nicolle, I also cannot believe this fucking guy, and I even wrote a post today with data and a cool chart to illustrate exactly how much I can’t believe this fucking guy.
But we digress.
Scarborough and Brzezinski have been at odds with Trump since early in his first administration. And they have been remarkably consistent about it, repeatedly and correctly calling Orange Julius Caesar a fascist, unmoored, mentally unstable, a liar, and an insurrectionist who committed treason by sending mobs to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For starters.
But ratings are ratings. So Monday morning the toothsome power couple told their audience that last Friday, they traveled to Mar-a-Lago and met Donald Trump face-to-face for the first time in seven years. Scarborough was quick to tell the audience that they certainly still disagree with Sweet Potato Suharto on so, so many things, and told Trump that to his face. Great, we’re already shining up your Pulitzer.
Then Brzezinski added:
“My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. This is a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.”
Her father was Zbigniew Brzeziński, and he was not a reporter or a commentator. He was the national security advisor under Jimmy Carter. It is, quite frankly, vastly more important for him to talk to despots and authoritarians in other countries than it is for the hosts of a cable morning show to talk to the one leading our own.
But okay, fine, you want to “restart communications” with the White House. You sound less like members of the media and more like a couple of exes who parted on bad terms but then years later run into each other at the gym, have a great conversation, and wonder if maybe the relationship is salvageable after all. (Take it from us, it’s usually not.)
Brzezinski added of the meeting:
“In this meeting, President Trump [Ed. Note: not yet!] was cheerful and upbeat, and he seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”
Holy hell, these two have the memories of concussed goldfish. Trump has never been interested in finding “common ground” with Democrats. He blew up more attempts by Democrats to approach him in his first term than we can count. He spent his four years out of office convincing Republicans in Congress to do all they could to obstruct any Democratic effort at forging a compromise on anything. Even when, like the immigration bill he got the GOP to kill, the policies were the sorts his party had been trying to pass for years.
Said Scarborough:
“Of 150 million votes cast, Donald Trump got about 50%. Kamala Harris got about 49%. So I don’t know. It seems to make sense for leaders of both parties to seek common ground.”
In 2016, out of nearly 140 million votes cast, Hillary Clinton got about 48 percent and Trump got about 46 percent. We do not recall Trump spending the next four years trying to seek common ground with leaders of the other party. If anything, he went out of his way to antagonize them. Antagonizing people is his entire personality! There is zero reason to even pretend to believe that he has suddenly changed his tune at the age of 78.
For his part, Trump said this in a Fox interview, as summed up by The New York Times:
Mr. Trump issued his own perspective on Monday, describing his meeting with the MSNBC stars as “extremely cordial.”
“Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” Mr. Trump told Fox News. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
The president-elect, who closely tracks his coverage in the news media, said he felt “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
Trump also told Fox that the world’s two most credulous dipshits also “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books,’” and also that he worked “longer and harder than any presidential candidate in history.”
And it wouldn’t be a Trump interview if he didn’t end it right back where we started:
Trump added, “I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile.”
The president-elect said he feels he has “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
“If not treated fairly, however, that will end,” Trump said. “The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”
Yeah, he’s turned over a new leaf, all right. This is Trump’s version of magnanimity: Be nice to me and maybe I’ll consider not putting you or your news organization under criminal investigation for the offense of being mean and nasty to President Trump.
About all we can say to the hosts of “Morning Joe” is that we never watch their show anyway, so at least we can’t be disappointed.
We can also say we give it until Christmas before Trump proudly announces on TruthSocial that Scarborough and Brzezinski have committed the unforgivable sin of not sucking up to him lavishly enough, so now he hates them again.
OPEN THREAD.
[YouTube / New York Times / Fox News]
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