After Ivanka Trump said in an interview this week that her father’s family separation policy “was a low point” for her time in his administration, Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski tweeted, “Wow... where do I begin on how disappointing this is? How will this be fixed for those children. Painful to watch.” On Friday morning’s show, she dug in.
“You can do better than that,” Brzezinski told her one-time friend. “A ‘low point,’ Ivanka Trump? People seeking asylum in America trying to escape poverty, abuse, fear, violence, coming here and now facing never seeing their kids again,” she added, accusing the first daughter of focusing on the impact of the policy “on herself.”
“Ivanka has never talked about the topic, other than congratulating her father over Twitter after he stopped the policy that he created,” she continued. “Yet hundreds, possibly thousands, of children's lives still hang in the balance, but that was a low point for her.”
Chiming in, John Heilemann said that calling it a “low point for the administration” is “as if to suggest that it's something that happened to the administration as opposed to something that the administration inflicted on these children.”
“I just want to say that because Ivanka Trump has her own political aspirations, you're going to have to do this a little better,” Brzezinski said into the camera. “You’re going to have to try and act like you care.”
“This is not just a low point for you. This is not something you can throw away by calling it a low point for you, like maybe your company and all the people you had to fire because it's no longer politically convenient for you,” she added, taking a shot at Ivanka Trump’s fashion label, which was abruptly shuttered last month.
“I don't think it’s a low point for you, I think it's a national disgrace,” Brzezinski added. “And I think there's a lot of people who still want answers how these children are going to be reunited with their families. And if you care, get yourself to the border and stay there until something really substantive is done. Otherwise your words don't matter.”