The co-hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe made the bombshell announcement Monday that they’d visited President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who were once friends with Trump but became arguably his most prominent critics in the media during his first administration, said at the top of the show they had been given the opportunity to meet with the former president on Friday. “Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago, to meet personally with president-elect Trump,” Brzezinski said. “It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.”
Scarborough said the trio used the meeting to discuss a “lot of issues” including “abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets.”
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“It’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we told him so,” Scarborough said.
“What we did agree on was to restart communications,” Brzezinski said. She added that it was the first time she or Scarborough had spoken with Trump since March 2020—except for a personal call Scarborough made to the former president the morning after he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
“In this meeting, President Trump was cheerful,” Brzezinski said. “He was upbeat. He seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues, and for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times—especially between us—I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?”
Brzezinski went on to say that she and Scarborough have been “as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words,” but that his latest election victory called for a new approach.
“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,” she said. “And that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
Scarborough added that Democratic leaders he’d spoken to since the election said “it’s time for a new approach.”
For his own part, Trump told Fox News Digital the meeting had been “extremely cordial.”
“Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” Trump said. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
He claimed Scarborough and Brzezinski congratulated him “on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books,’” and discussed appointments for his new administration.
“We talked about various Cabinet members—both announced and to be announced. As expected, they like some very much, but not all,” Trump told Fox. “The meeting ended in a very positive manner, and we agreed to speak in the future.”
The apparent thawing of relations between the MSNBC hosts and Trump comes after years of extreme and mutual public criticism. During his first term, Trump boosted a baseless conspiracy theory that Scarborough had murdered an aide during Scarborough’s time as a congressman in 2001. He also mocked Brzezinski during his first stint in the Oval Office, using a series of tweets in 2017 to describe her as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and to claim she’d once been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a visit to Mar-a-Lago.
Right up to the 2024 election, Scarborough was warning about the looming threat of authoritarianism that Trump posed.
“His people have said they’re going to arrest my producers,” Scarborough said on Real Time With Bill Maher last month. “He said he was going to shut down CBS because he didn’t like how they edited a package on 60 Minutes. He’s out of control!”
Trump subsequently denied anyone had talked about arresting MSNBC producers, calling Scarborough a “sick puppy.”
