The ‘Morning Joe’ host attributed the criticism to fears about the incoming Trump administration.
Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was not expecting the blowback she received after she and her co-host husband, Joe Scarborough, met with President-elect Donald Trump last week.
“I’ve been surprised at the backlash. And the way I look at it is people are really scared,” Brzezinski said on the Nov. 21 episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
“It’s one of the reasons we went in there, is people are really scared about Donald Trump’s comments about, you know, political adversaries. A lot of people are scared because of what has happened with abortion. These are all issues that are important to me, and in some ways personal to me, but definitely personal to the people I really care about.”
Brzezinski and Scarborough disclosed the meeting with Trump on their show on Nov. 18, saying that they had visited his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, three days prior to discuss his Cabinet selections and policy agenda face-to-face.
The pair said that they disagreed with the president-elect on many issues—a fact they have repeatedly made clear on their show in recent years. While noting their “deep concerns” with some of Trump’s actions and words, they said he seemed interested in “finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”
But that did not stem the flow of criticism they have received since.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people in my phone, people that I respect a great deal, leaders, people I don’t usually hear from who are really powerful, who just wanted to let me know that that was the right thing to do. And then I have seen … the very opposite happening online,” Brzezinski said.
Negative reactions to the visit—from mockery to disgust—poured in on social media.
While much of the backlash surrounded objections to Trump’s character, there were others who took issue with the hosts’ attempt at finding common ground with the man they’d spent years vilifying on air.
“You called him Hitler!” late-night host Jon Stewart noted on “The Daily Show.”
Brzezinski, however, defended the meeting as a valid journalistic exercise.
“You can interview Vladimir Putin as a journalist and not normalize him. You can learn, and you can also take a lot of what he says and put it within the context of what we know about him,” she said.
“Many things can be true at one time, and as journalists, I think we have to be open to conversation, and we have to be open to learning, and we have to be open to talking face-to-face and talking about each other. And quite frankly, coming after me and Joe about doing this is exactly what someone with nefarious intentions would want,” she added in a pointed note to her critics.