Joe, Mika, and the fate of cable tv

• Puck News — The actual reason Joe and Mika visited Trump in Florida was ‘fear of Matt Gaetz investigation.’
• Read the full piece from Puck — there’s a lot in here.
• Morning Joe ratings dropped 38 percent the next day.
• The real story behind Comcast spinoff.

PUCK:

On Monday morning, MSNBC’s connubial co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski informed their loyal audience of almost a million viewers that they had recently ventured south from their home in Jupiter to Mar-a-Lago. There, for the first time in seven years, they met with Donald Trump—the very man they’d spent the last several years vociferously pillorying. Reading from their respective teleprompters with well-choreographed solemnity, the couple conveyed this relatively benign news as though they were disclosing their involvement in a top-secret nuclear negotiation. Or, as CNN’s John Berman cheekily put it over on the rival network, “as if it were the Yalta summit.”

Anticipating some blowback from their mostly liberal coalition, Joe and Mika cast the Trump meeting as an attempt to foster a constructive dialogue. “For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Mika said. “Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.” Later, Mika also alluded to her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a top U.S. diplomat who served as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. She explained that maintaining an open dialogue was “a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.”

In light of Joe and Mika’s relatively exalted status in the legacy media firmament, the disclosure became a minor source of fascination or frustration among their peers at 30 Rock, as well as fodder for the media’s broader introspective post-election soul-searching journey. At MSNBC, weekend host Katie Phang wrote that “normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period,” while Stephanie Ruhle sought to convince her viewers that engagement was sound journalistic practice, and by no means a capitulation. Joe and Mika’s pilgrimage earned write-ups from the Times, the Journal, CNN, and so forth. It also induced predictable hysterics from the chronically outraged gasbag class, including Keith Olbermann and Megyn Kelly. Meanwhile, the Morning Joe audience, already at a post-election nadir, dropped 17 percent in the hour after Joe and Mika revealed their Trump meeting. The following day, the show’s ratings were down 38 percent from this year’s average.

Alas, the debate over statecraft vs. surrender diverted attention from the realpalace intrigue. After all, Joe and Mika’s paeans to diplomacy belied the true motivation for their visit to Mar-a-Lago. In fact, the couple made the trek to Palm Beach because they feared retribution, a fact that has thus far only been alluded to by CNN’s Brian Stelter. This week, sources with direct knowledge of Joe and Mika’s thinking provided me with more details on those fears that, in addition to underscoring the batshit-crazy nature of this moment in American politics, also offer insight into the potential chilling effect that Trump’s return to the Oval Office might have on the news media writ large, and especially MSNBC.

Since Trump’s victory on November 5, Joe and Mika have privately told friends that they’re worried the incoming president will seek revenge for their criticism of him during the campaign. Those concerns became far more acute last week when Trump nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general. That same day, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Gaetz would go after MSNBC for trying “to destroy” Trump. “​​You try to imprison Trump, you try to break Trump. He’s not breakable,” Bannon said on his podcast. “You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice, Department of Justice, and you’re going to have to live with it.”

Specifically, Joe and Mika have told friends and associates they’re afraid that Trump and Gaetz will resurrect a decades-old, totally bullshit, birther-level conspiracy theory about the death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old intern in Scarborough’s former Florida congressional office who died in 2001 from complications relating to a heart condition, and use it to apply legal pressure on Scarborough and otherwise make his life a living hell. The couple’s anxiety stems, in particular, from testimony that former White House communications director and current View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin gave in 2022 during the January 6 hearings, during which she recounted running into Gaetz outside of the Oval Office. Farah Griffin testified that Gaetz was carrying a folder filled with “conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern,” which he then presented to President Trump, who later tweeted about it.

Despite the baseless nature of the conspiracy theory, Joe and Mika “are petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern,” one source with knowledge of their concerns said. “That’s what this was about. It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.” Another source close to the matter said Joe and Mika believed that by meeting with Trump, they could assuage his potential desire for reckless payback and thus nuke any possibility of having to endure the headlines of a Gaetz witch hunt or legal torture campaign. (Reached for comment, Scarborough referred me to an MSNBC spokesperson, who denied this characterization of the motivations for Joe and Mika’s Mar-a-Lago visit and said it was both false and inaccurate.) Coincidentally, Scarborough and Gaetz both represented Florida’s 1st congressional district. 

In his own interview with Fox News on Monday morning, Trump described his meeting with Joe and Mika as “very cordial,” adding that “many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication.” He also said “the meeting ended in a very positive manner, and we agreed to speak in the future.”

The president-elect also said he expects similar meetings to “take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile,” noting that he feels “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press. … If not treated fairly, however, that will end. The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America.”

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