MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough launched into an extraordinary rant on Thursday’s Morning Joe in which he angrily hit back at criticisms made about his post-election meeting with Donald Trump.
The 20-minute screed started as a response to a column from The Atlantic’s David Frum in which Frum described the “unsettling experience” he had during his appearance on the show Wednesday. The article addressed the show’s response to a joke he’d made on air about the alleged drinking of Pete Hegseth—Trump’s pick for secretary of defense—from Hegseth’s former colleagues at Fox News.
An NBC News report said Hegseth’s former colleagues’ concerns about his purported drinking included him smelling of alcohol before going on air as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend (a Trump transition team spokesperson said the claims were “completely unfounded and false).
“If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed,” Frum said on Morning Joe Wednesday. Later in the show, co-host Mika Brzezinski said the comment had been “a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in” and noted “there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.”
“It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease,” Frum wrote in his column under the headline “The Sound of Fear on Air,” which also noted that Scarborough and Brzezinski visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month to “mend fences” with the president-elect. “I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious,” he added.
On Thursday’s Morning Joe, Scarborough said the Brzezinski’s comments weren’t “the sound of fear,” but rather “the sound of civility” and claimed she hadn’t apologized for Frum’s comment as he suggested she had in his article. “She simply said it was too flippant,” he added.
“Just because some people have said that we’re fearful, let me tell you something,” Scarborough went on. “You can talk to anybody that has worked in the front office of NBC and MSNBC over the past 22 years. I tell you: I’m not fearful. If you talk to anybody who served with me in congress, they will tell you, not fearful of leadership. Now? Not fearful.”
He went on to say that he’d tried to get Frum back on the show to “talk through this.” In a post on X Wednesday, NBC’s VP of Communications Richard Hudock extended an invitation for Frum to return, while also saying the network “would have responded in the same manner regardless of when these comments were made or what news organization was referenced.”
Scarborough also continued to defend the decision to address Frum’s comment on air. He said he’d even asked an unspecified editor at The Atlantic if they would let him write in a column “‘‘If you are too drunk for The New York Times you are very, very drunk indeed?’ ‘If you’re too drunk for the New York Post you are very, very drunk indeed?’”
“The ‘sound of fear.’ The ‘apology’? None of that is true,” Scarborough said. “But guess what, this is what’s been going on now for several weeks,” he added, referring to the backlash to the Mar-a-Lago meeting.
“We went down to talk to the president-elect and people wrote articles that were just false,” Scarborough said. “But you know what we did? We did the corporate thing. Corporate said: ‘Don’t say anything, just keep your head down.’”
He said the “main complaint” they’d faced was “that we called Donald Trump’s rhetoric fascist during the campaign” and then “went down to have an off-the-record comment with him.”
“Guess who else does that?” Scarborough said, prompting Brzezinski to say: “Let me see, from The New York Times, The Washington Post—you know what? I even think folks from The Atlantic.”
Picking up steam, Scarborough went on to say he’d been speaking to sources on background for years—including a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron last summer. “I did that but I didn’t report it,” he said. “The only difference between what we did on that visit [with Trump] and what The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and everybody else is doing is we were transparent, we actually told you.”
Later, he returned to Frum, apologizing to him for “making him feel uncomfortable” and saying he hopes Frum comes back on the show.
“I’ve got to say, Mika, at this point, I’m sick and tired of the nonsense,” he added. “And I wish we’d all just get to work doing the things we need to do, which is our job, which is talking to people who are going to determine where this country goes over the next four years.”
Scarborough closed out the rant by saying that other news organizations are meeting with Trump as they did. “Do we judge CNN for doing it? No,” he said. “You know why? It’s their jobs! Grow up! It’s their jobs. The only thing we did that caused this Twitter storm is we told you. Now, if you’d prefer that we don’t tell you everything that we do that’s fine. But we just thought in this case that transparency was best.”
