"Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski said during a podcast on Wednesday that she was surprised by the backlash she and co-host Joe Scarborough were getting for meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, attributing the furor to people being "scared."
"I’ve been surprised at the backlash, and the way I look at it is, people are really scared," she said on "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 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 joined the program hosted by Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles on Wednesday to discuss the aftermath of her and Scarborough's meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which the married couple announced on their show on Monday.
"I hope that we have more conversations. I hope we do an interview," Brzezinski said during a podcast. "So I want to, you know, stick to the guidelines that we put in place, me, myself, for the interview. I talked to a reporter last night. She was very, very upset that I did this meeting. And I said, ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’ I mean you work for a extremely powerful, credible publication. And she said, ‘Well, I would only go in there if there were certain guardrails put in place.' There were certain agreed-upon boundaries."
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She questioned, "how do you know anything about that?" The MSNBC host noted that the meeting with Trump was on background, and said she's done her best to be as transparent as possible in light of that fact.
Some reports have stated Scarborough and Brzezinski were motivated to meet by fear of retribution by Trump against them due to their fierce criticisms of him over the years, including repeated accusations of Trump being a fascist and authoritarian threat. The show's ratings have suffered in the days since the announcement.
The meeting drew mockery from pundits across the aisle, with the left saying it was essentially a betrayal of their viewers and effective capitulation to Trump, and the right saying the hosts were admitting their past rhetoric about Trump was hyperbolic if they were willing to talk to him. Others defended the meeting as a legitimate journalistic exercise.
Asked about how she dealt with Trump's criticisms of the pair as co-hosts, Brzezinski explained she was looking at how to do things differently.
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"I mean, it’s my job to interview and talk to people I disagree with, feel threatened by or who have hurt my feelings in some way," she said. "So there’s how I do it. I do my job. I mean, do I really not go in there because he tweeted about me bleeding badly from the face lift at Mar-a-Lago, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago? I mean, we haven’t talked in seven years.
"And I will say that’s a problem, too. So I’m worried about myself and how I conduct myself in this media universe that we’re in, taking stock of everything that has happened. I don’t regret anything I’ve said during the campaign, and I stand by it. But I’m also looking at how to do things differently. And I would never turn down an opportunity to gain insider information. Never."
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Fellow MSNBC staffers were also upset by their meeting with the president-elect, as the pair regularly sounded off on Trump as a threat to democracy.
Some prominent media figures have called for a boycott of the show, which is popular with Beltway Democrats and media elites. President Biden is also known to be a fan of the program and is tight with the co-hosts.
"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin suggested the MSNBC hosts were being opportunistic and said they kissed Trump's "ring" at Mar-a-Lago. "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart mocked the summit on Monday as well.
Scarborough called out the criticisms of his meeting earlier this week and said there was a "massive disconnect" between social media and reality, claiming he and Brzezinski received a lot of positive feedback as well.
