The ‘Morning Joe’-Donald Trump Bromance Is Over

If Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were ever, as frequently accused, in the tank for Donald Trump, their ardor for the 45th president has cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

On Monday’s installment of their MSNBC program, Morning Joe, they not only kicked him to the curb, metaphorically speaking, they stood over the president’s prostrate body and relentlessly beat him about the head with the television equivalent of a baseball bat.

“When this presidency started, I had hope and an open mind,” Brzezinski said at the top of the show, reacting to Trump’s weekend tweets charging Barack Obama, without the slightest evidence beyond the rantings of a right-wing radio conspiracy theorist and a tendentious Breitbart article, of ordering wiretaps on Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. “I am losing hope and my mind is closing on the potential that we’re going to have any potential for this presidency at all.”

Later, she added that “this White House is a joke,” “this administration has no credibility,” and “I don’t believe in his [the president’s] ability to do this job.”

After more than two hours of unmitigated Trump-bashing, Scarborough opined: “He has absolutely no impulse-control because he has no long game or medium game. Everything is short game because he is a day-trader. He doesn’t care who he blows up or who he hurts.”

Scarborough stopped short of calling Trump “crazy”—a suggestion he made on his Sunday Twitter feed—but cited the president’s “crazy behavior” and repeatedly referred to his “recklessness.”

Both Scarborough and Brzezinski accused White House aides and other administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, of “lying” in regard to their contacts with Russians during the campaign.

Another theme of Monday’s program was the pernicious influence of chief presidential strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News who allegedly alerted Trump to the article that set off the president’s Saturday tweet storm.

“This is the so disturbing part,” Scarborough said about President Trump. “He selects the most dangerous—a guy who says he’s a Leninist, he wants to destroy the government… That is who he turns to in his time of crisis.”

Scarborough and Brzezinski ended their program on a sinister note.

“We’re all scared,” Scarborough told viewers, likening Trump’s actions, and their affect on declining popular trust in government, to the Watergate scandal. “I think we reached a new low this weekend.”

Brzezinski concluded: “This presidency is fake and failed.”

As the program went off the air, she could be seen on camera looking genuinely distraught as she pulled at the microphone attached to her blouse.