MSNBC host Joe Scarborough opened “Morning Joe” on Thursday with a 20-minute rant trashing claims made by a recent guest on the show that he and co-host Mika Brzezinski are fearful of President-elect Donald Trump.
“Let me tell you something, you can talk to anybody that has worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years. I tell you, I’m not fearful,” Scarborough said. “If you talk to anybody who served with me in congress, they will tell you, not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful.”
“I’ll do my show the way I want to do my show!’” the former GOP congressman-turned-liberal commentator added.
Scarborough was hitting back at comments made by David Frum, a political commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
On Wednesday morning, Frum joined Scarborough and Brzezinski to discuss Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth and reports that his heavy drinking had worried his Fox News colleagues.
“If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed,” Frum joked on “Morning Joe.”
During the ad break, a producer spoke into Frum’s ear, warning him not to repeat his comments on Hegseth’s alcoholism allegations, Frum wrote in a column for The Atlantic.
“The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in,” Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe” during the next segment. “We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.”
So Frum penned a piece for The Atlantic tearing apart what he called Brzezinski’s “apology.”
“It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease,” he wrote.
Scarborough lectured viewers for 20 minutes on Thursday morning while he ripped into Frum’s column.
“The sound of fear? The apology? None of that is true,” he said.
Scarborough said Frum’s accusations were akin to the backlash the MSNBC co-hosts faced after they went to meet with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago residence – after years of viciously criticizing Trump, even comparing his rhetoric to fascists.
“The main complaint was that we called Donald Trump’s rhetoric fascist during the campaign, and then went down to have an off-the-record comment, but guess who else does that?” Scarborough said.
“Um, let me see, from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street – you know what, I even think folks from the Atlantic,” Brzezinski said cheekily.
Scarborough defended the meeting and said it is a common practice for reporters to have on-background conversations with political figures with whom they disagree.
“This is what reporters do,” he added. “The only difference between what we did on that visit and what the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, everybody else is doing is we were transparent. We actually told you.”
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