On Monday morning, Brzezinski and Scarborough revealed that they met with Trump after not having seen him in seven years.
“For nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, Jan. 6, were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him,” Brzezinski said, explaining why the two met with Trump.
Hostin slammed the hosts for going to “kiss the ring” of the president-elect.
“The bottom line is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now more than ever,” Hostin said. “I think we have to be very clear on it when we think about the president-elect and cover the president-elect, and I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak the truth and be able to cover a story.”
Hostin made the distinction that the MSNBC hosts are “not journalists in the true sense” but rather “opinion journalists.”
“I don’t think he can be trusted in the way that other presidents could be trusted. This is an aberration,” she added.
Navarro declared that she would never sit down with Trump and said the meeting may be seen as “opportunistic” by some people.
“I will never sit down with him, and I don’t think I’m gonna have to make that decision because I don’t think I’ll ever get invited,” she said.
“I think,” Navarro continued, “there are probably a lot of people looking at what Joe and Mika did and find it opportunistic. There are people who change their stripes or maybe their spots depending on who’s in power – I don’t know if that’s what happening with them. Everybody has to live with their decisions, everybody have to look in the mirror. I’m good.”
“I don’t think this is opportunistic, but I think they recognize that 75 million people voted for this guy,” said co-host Alyssa Farah.
Brzezinski recently appeared on The View in late October, where she ripped Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden as a “white nationalist, Nazi-type rally.”
Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings. They realized they needed Trump for their survival. pic.twitter.com/NMqNQo60nv
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 18, 2024
During a Monday interview with Fox News Digital, Trump revealed that it was Scarborough who initiated setting up the meeting.
“I received a call from Joe Scarborough requesting a meeting for him and Mika, and I agreed that it would be a good thing if such meeting took place,” Trump said.
The president-elect said the meeting with the MSNBC hosts was “extremely cordial.”
“Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” he said. “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
Trump added that they “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books.’”
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“Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings. They realized they needed Trump for their survival,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said on X.
“Joe and Mika admitting they met with the “greatest threat to democracy” at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend is something to behold,” Trump’s former assistant secretary of the Treasury, Monica Crowley, said on X.