‘Morning Joe’ hosts say they met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, fierce critics of President-elect Donald Trump, say they traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with him to reopen lines of communication that would better serve their morning show viewers.

With emotions still raw two weeks after the election, their trip to Trump’s Florida home hasn’t gone over well with many fans and critics of “Morning Joe.”

The show’s anchor team had been so critical of Trump that Scarborough said in September that “it’s not a reach” for compare him to Hitler. MSNBC pulled “Morning Joe” off the air the Monday after the assassination attempt on Trump last summer.

On Monday’s show, the hosts said they had reached out to Trump last Thursday and met with him the next day. “It was the first time we’ve seen him in seven years,” Brzezinski said.

She said Trump was “cheerful, upbeat” even as the three of them discussed issues they disagreed on.

“What we agreed on was to restart communication,” she said. Her father, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in Jimmy Carter’s administration, often spoke with world leaders he disagreed with, and she said that’s a job for reporters and commentators, too.

“For those who ask why we would talk to the president-elect in such busy times, especially between us, I think I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?'” Brzezinski said.

Trump confirmed the meeting in an interview with Fox News Digital. “I really appreciated that they wanted to have open communication,” he said. “In many ways, it’s too bad it wasn’t done a long time ago.”

Not everyone reacted the same way. On “The View” Monday, co-host Sunny Hostin said the country needs a free press willing to speak truth to power, and she didn’t think it was necessary to travel to Mar-a-Lago to “kiss the ring.” One co-host, Alyssa Farah Griffin, said she thought highly of the MSNBC hosts for acknowledging how many people voted for Trump.

Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine blog and a retired professor of journalism at the City University of New York, said online that “it’s a disgusting show of awe in advance.”

Several conservative commentators were not impressed either. Talk show host Buck Sexton, in a post the X, called the meeting astonishing. “Trump’s victory is so complete that ‘Morning Joe’ has completely surrendered,” Sexton wrote. Veteran cable news personality Greta Van Susteren called it “contempts.”

“Morning Joe,” like many programs on MSNBC, has seen its ratings plummet since the election as its liberal audience takes a break. It’s a post-election pattern similar to the experience in recent years of viewers supporting the losing party. After a break, many tend to return.

Neither host was available to speak with a reporter after the show, a network spokesman said. Scarborough seemed to anticipate criticism when he spoke about the decision to meet with Trump.

“Make no mistake,” he said. “We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump. We’re here to report on him and hopefully give you insight.”

In the same Fox News interviewTrump said he had an obligation to the American public to be open and available to the press. “If it’s not dealt with fairly, though, it will end,” he said.

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David Bauder writes about media for AP. Follow him at there.