Megyn Kelly Is Right About Joe Scarborough and Mika's Disingenuous 'Morning Joe' Pivot

Last Friday, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the husband-and-wife duo behind MSNBC’s Morning Joe, took a baffling step: they visited Mar-a-Lago, at their own request, to meet with the incoming president. This move is especially striking given their eight-year run as some of Donald Trump’s most vocal critics. Day after day, they warned of the dangers a second Trump presidency posed to democracy and the free press, often singling out The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos for what they described as “anticipatory kowtowing” to an autocrat when the paper declined to endorse Kamala Harris.

Scarborough and Brzezinski’s decision to “kiss the ring,” as it were, leaves little room for charitable interpretation. They justified the visit as an effort to “restart conversation” with the president-elect. Brzezinski framed it this way: “For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, I guess I would ask back: Why wouldn’t we?”

The kindest explanation is that they traded their integrity for access and their courage for temporary respite from social media attacks by Trump’s followers. But even that olive branch of an excuse is farcical. If they intend to report on him with any level of honesty, the truce won’t last. And after this stunt, their criticism of him will carry no weight.

Scarborough and Brzezinski’s credibility initially stemmed from their proximity to Trump before his first term. They normalized him early on—friendly chats, insider access. When Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and Trump ally, eventually turned on him, it felt significant. Viewers thought, Here’s a Republican and someone who knows Trump calling him out. This matters. That perception, built on personal ties, lent weight to their show’s anti-Trump narrative for years.

That became the defining narrative of their show for the better part of eight years. They called the President out, and we knew the President heard them because he’d attack them daily on social media, mocking Brzezinski’s plastic surgery and accusing Scarborough of murdering an intern.

But their visit to Mar-a-Lago now casts all of that in a cynical light. It’s hard not to feel now that it was all, in some way, an act. It was a disingenuous ploy for ratings. Was it ever genuine? Or was it all a strategy — a convenient charade to cash in on outrage?

Either way, their latest pivot smacks of desperation, a disingenuous ploy to stay relevant in the post-Trump media landscape. Unsurprisingly, the backlash has been fierce. From both sides of the aisle, they’ve faced condemnation, but perhaps the loathsome, detestable Megyn Kelly put it most succinctly and accurately: “Go f**k yourselves, you dishonest jokes of faux journalists.”

This is exactly why trust in mainstream news continues to plummet. Cable news is a joke. Support independent journalism (which does not mean one of those Blue Anon outfits that tells you not the truth but what you want to hear). Cut the cord. Scarborough and Brzezinski already did, only they tied it into a noose for their credibility.