By Dustin Rowles | Politics | June 30, 2017 |
By Dustin Rowles | Politics | June 30, 2017 |
I woke up super early this morning to watch Morning Joe from the gym at 6 a.m., because I am that pathetic, but I was thwarted when I learned that Joe and Mika were on vacation, but had decided to come back and do one segment on Trump’s tweets, which wouldn’t air until 7 a.m.
So, I stuck around, and the segment included a lot of what Joe and Mika have been saying for months now: The President is unfit. He is unstable. He is thin skinned. Impetuous. Childlike. He’s emotionally fragile. That he is so much more vicious with women, that he takes things more seriously when it comes to women. That Trump’s mind has mentally degraded in the last year, etc.
WATCH: “The guy that’s in the White House now is not the guy we knew 2 years ago.” @JoeNBC says of Trump on @Morning_Joe pic.twitter.com/Rwnzs3J7WM
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 30, 2017
Mika mostly blew it off — she was unbothered, it’s part of the job, etc., — but she did bait Trump a little. “What does it say to the rest of the country,” she said, “that the President is so easily played?”
She also conceded that she had had skin under her chin tweaked, which she absolutely gave no shits about. (“It looks great,” she said, and then she told Donny Deutsch he should get one.)
It was a lot of the same stuff that I’ve seen from Morning Joe in recent weeks, except the chilling story about the National Enquirer.
As Joe and Mika tell it, a while back, the co-hosts got several calls from people saying that, if Joe and Mika didn’t apologize for their negative coverage of the president, the National Enquirer would run a hit piece on Mika. Trump is personal friends with the publisher of the Enquirer, and as we all know, during the campaign, Trump used the Enquirer to run a number of hit pieces on his opponents.
“Three people at the very top of the administration called me,” Joe said. They told him that if he apologized, Trump would spike the story. “The calls kept coming. And kept coming … it’s blackmail.”
Mika added that the Enquirer was calling her children and trying to pin whatever story it was on Mika’s ex-husband, “who would absolutely never do that, so I knew it was a lie. And they had nothing. The calls persisted for quite some time.”
So, basically The National Enquirer harassed Mika Brzezinski’s teenage daughters — going so far as to park a van outside of Mika’s house — and Joe Scarborough was told that the only way it would stop is if he would apologize to Trump.
In other words: The President of the United States was blackmailing two cable news hosts so that they would stop covering him negatively. (This is possibly the Enquirer article they were talking about).
That’s fucked up. That’s abuse of power. That’s some Scandal shit right there, folks.
(Mika and Joe echoed on Morning Joe what they wrote earlier this morning for The Washington Post).
Trump tweeted a response to the accusations this morning:
Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017
Joe has responded to that tweet:
Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven't spoken with you in many months. https://t.co/TZWiElo6Gs
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 30, 2017
Trump said “No,” so he is basically admitting that he had control over The National Enquirer.
Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven? What is wrong with you? https://t.co/aAoUj5HYZS
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 30, 2017
RELEASE THE TAPES, JOE.