Eyes wide open, please...

December 8, 2024

Menu for a winter day, One World Cafe, (2009) east Sprague Avenue, Spokane

Morning Joe at Mar-a-Lago

The only television I own (thanks to my ex-sister-in-law) is in storage. But I’m often awake at 3 a.m. and I was listening to the audio feed of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on my laptop as they opened their four hour show on Monday, November 18th.

By “they” I mean former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of famous U.S. national security guru Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017). The pair are the power-couple hosts of what has been MSNBC’s flagship morning news and politics broadcast over the past 15 years or so.

“Morning Joe” leans left of center and especially so when it comes to things Trump. Their alienation from Trumpworld is mostly due to the perpetual gravity of Trump’s lies and malfeasance. But it’s also personal because Trump routinely marks and insults his critics. He did so in May of 2020 (while he was in office, as President) by regurgitating a baseless and utterly disgusting rumor that Scarborough, when in Congress, killed, or had murdered, a young female staff member to cover up an affair.

“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida,” Trump tweeted. “Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”

Again—just so we don’t lose the context—this is something written and instantly distributed across the globe—by the President of the United States.

As you’d expect, Scarborough was furious and—with millions of others—had to have wondered (again) how such a vile person could be popularly elected (and be the overwhelming choice of self-identified church-goers) to set up shop in the Oval Office. Many of those doing the wondering were once Republicans (including attorney George Conway, the enraged and now divorced husband of longtime Trump advisor and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway). No surprise then that “Morning Joe” became a place where East Coast early risers and West Coast insomniacs could at least take the pulse of that part of the Trump resistance movement that has a viable cable TV show.

But November 18th was different. The two anchor hosts appeared in their spacious New York studio and took turns reading from a teleprompter script beneath a chyron that said “Covering Trump’s Second Term.” They disclosed they’d made a trip to visit Trump in Mar-a-Lago the previous Friday, something along the lines of ‘we talk a lot about Donald Trump, but we now need to talk to him.’

“And for those asking why we would go speak to the President elect during such fraught times, especially between us,” Brzezinski said, “I guess I would ask back, ‘why wouldn’t we?’”

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, fresh from Mar-a-Lago, on November 18th.

I could offer several reasons—one of which is that the ‘off the record’ nature of the visit between two self-absorbed media elites and the nation’s most corrupt and powerful political leader (as comedian Jon Stewart acidly opined) is rife with hypocrisy. But the most obvious and compelling reason not to make a Trump-appeasing pilgrimage is you can’t resist soul-sucking evil by normalizing and legitimizing it.

There are so many other examples of how Trump and his enablers have sought to threaten, humiliate and defenestrate those who publicly confront Trump and resist his corruptions. The cruelty is the point, to quote writer Adam Serwer, and it’s often deeper than what meets the eye. For example, it wasn’t just Joe Scarborough who was smeared and injured by Trump’s outrageous slander in 2020—it was also Lori Klausitis’s surviving husband who was aghast that the President of the United States used his wife’s tragic death (she had a rare heart condition which caused a fatal seizure at work) to rattle Joe Scarborough’s cage, so to speak. The widower tried to get Twitter to remove the slanderous tweet. But Twitter (now renamed “X” by its new owner Elon Musk) declined to do so.

The shushing and the enemies list

I don’t get out as much as others, but I do get out some, and what I notice are two currents passing each other as if on the moving walkways at an airport. In small conversations people can acknowledge their deep confusion and despair about the Trump movement. In larger groups, I’ve been shushed to even bring it up, as though it’s crudely impolite to do so.

The most generous interpretation is that the prospect of Trump’s announced “retribution” is a real buzz-kill for those holding to the hope that whatever is in store for some of us won’t affect their comforts, hobbies, and status. It reminds me of the 2021 dark-comedy “Don’t Look Up.” The script has scientists warning of an Earth-destroying comet but being drowned out in the comet-denying zeitgeist promoted by characters resembling Trump and his new best friend and major donor Elon Musk. (The Joe and Mika go to Mar-a-Lago field trip would have fit right in with the lethal hubris of the “Don’t Look Up” screenplay.)

A half century ago, the nation was shocked to learn of Richard Nixon’s secretly held “enemies list” in the summer of 1973 (it’s not hard to remember the famed CBS journalist Daniel Schorr reading the names of Nixon’s “enemies” live on the air, and coming upon his own name, there on the list). Fast forward to the present and we have Trump’s open promise to persecute and prosecute his detractors. His supporters find no problem with this before they go on to rant about “cancel culture” on college campuses.

The unofficial keeper of the Trump list appears to be his ardent loyalist Kash Patel, whom Trump is advancing to be the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You can read about Patel, here. But a short-cut to his curriculum vitae was offered by Trump’s once-loyal Attorney General William Barr in a recent memoir. Barr writes that when he learned Trump was considering inserting Patel as FBI director he called then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and bluntly informed Meadows: “Over my dead body.” To which Barr added “(t)he very idea of advancing Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality.”

I’m not making this up. Patel is such a shameless political valet for Trump that he’s written a children’s book, The Plot Against the King, about a good king Trump being undermined by a slew of nasty characters.

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