“Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on Friday fired back at a Twitter attack from President Trump, saying he is “not mentally equipped” to continue watching their show.
The pair penned a scathing column published in the Washington Post to respond to Trump’s Thursday tweets, in which he referred to Brzezinski as “low I.Q. crazy” and Scarborough as “psycho.”
They also appeared on their MSNBC show Friday morning, saying they delayed vacation plans to be there.
“It’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country,” Brzezinski said when asked by fellow host Willie Geist for her reaction to the tweets.
“I’m fine. My family brought me up really tough. This is nothing,” she said. “But I’m concerned again about what this reveals about the president of the United States.”
Echoing their column, Scarborough said simply, “We’re OK. The country’s not.”
In that piece for the Washington Post, the hosts, who recently announced their engagement, hit back at Trump for his unusually harsh comments about them and their show, writing about his obsession with “Morning Joe,” refuting every part of the claims in his tweets and railing against his “continued mistreatment of women.”
The president’s tweets targeted Brzezinski in particular. He attacked her physical appearance, as he has done repeatedly in responding critically to women, writing that “she was bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a visit to his Florida property Mar-a-Lago.
Brzezinski and Scarborough called Trump’s apparent fixation on their show an “unhealthy obsession,” noting that they weren’t surprised by the nasty tweets because of previous comments Trump has made about the co-hosts and the show.
“The president’s unhealthy obsession with ‘Morning Joe’ does not serve the best interests of either his mental state or the country he runs,” they wrote.
Brzezinski and Scarborough also wrote that top White House officials told them that a negative National Enquirer story about them would be published unless they called Trump and begged him to stop the story.
The duo said they did not call the president
The pair fact-checked the president’s claims about their visit to Mar-a-Lago and Brzezinski’s appearance.
“It was amazing how many lies he packed into two tweets,” Brzezinski said Friday on the “Morning Joe” broadcast.
Though the president tweeted that Brzezinski had “insisted” on joining him three nights in a row at the resort, Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote that Trump had invited them to dinner Dec. 30, and that only Scarborough had attended because Brzezinski did not want to go.
Trump then asked Scarborough to bring Brzezinski to dinner the next night, according to the column. The pair said they visited with Trump the next night for a total of 15 minutes, and then refused invitations to a New Year’s Eve party.
Brzezinski and Scarborough also refuted Trump’s claim that Brzezinski had a face-lift, writing that while she did not have that procedure, she did have “a little skin under her chin tweaked” at the suggestion of her mother. She reiterated that on the show.
And though Trump had claimed in his two-tweet attack that he no longer watched “Morning Joe,” Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote that top aides to the president had told them otherwise.
The “Morning Joe” co-hosts ended their assault on Trump with a stinging criticism of his “continued mistreatment of women.”
“The 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children,” Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote. “We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out Mr. Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples.”
And they called on “the women closest to him” to join the chorus of Republican elected leaders who condemned the president’s tweets, adding, “It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women’s empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.”
The president’s Thursday tweets provoked the ire of the press and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. Trump has not released a statement on his tweets, despite the mounting criticism and pressure to apologize, but White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president’s tweets Thursday.
Trump, Sanders said, was defending himself after being “personally attacked, day after day, minute after minute.”
