Donald Trump Suggests ‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Joe Scarborough And Mika Brzezinski Are Secretly Lovers
Donald Trump and the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, are in the midst of a Twitter war, with the Republican nominee repeating a rumor that the two co-hosts are secretly lovers, the Washington Post is reporting.
The dispute began early Monday morning while Scarborough and Brzezinski were live on the air, according to KSAT-TV (San Antonio). The two had been highly critical of Trump in the early part of the broadcast, and Trump fired off the opening salvo.
Tried watching low-rated @Morning_Joe this morning, unwatchable! @morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016
As Washington Post writer Callum Borchers notes, taking jabs at a show’s ratings is par for the course for Trump’s social media attacks, a fact that wasn’t lost on Scarborough.
Thanks for watching.
Morning Joe is enjoying it’s best ratings ever thanks to obsessed fans like you. GLAD???? https://t.co/FPaqGW9JWv— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 22, 2016
But the real humdinger in this feud came when Trump got personal, suggesting that there’s more to the relationship between Scarborough and Brzezinski than just co-hosts.
Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016
To be fair, Donald Trump didn’t levy the accusation that Scarborough and Brzezinski are having an affair out of whole cloth, as he appears to be repeating a rumor that was floated in June by the New York Post’s Page Six (Page Six is the Post‘s gossip section).
At the time, Post writer Emily Smith put forth the idea that Scarborough, divorced since 2013, and Brzezinsky, divorced just recently, were a thing, citing unnamed sources at NBC.
“Everybody at [NBC] knows they are a couple… They are constantly together, they arrive and leave events together, even on weekends. They are each other’s publicists and finish each other’s sentences. It’s the worst-kept secret in TV.”
Trump has used tabloid reporting and resulted to rumor and innuendo at other points during his campaign as well.
Back in March, Trump cryptically tweeted that he was going to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz, who at the time was one of Trump’s challengers for the Republican nomination, according to a Washington Post report from the time (Borchers suspects that Rump was referring to rumors that Heidi was battling depression). Weeks later, Trump suggested Cruz’s father was in some way connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a story first reported by the National Enquirer. Just last month, Trump sent a tweet that, to some observers, appeared as if Trump was suggesting that New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is gay.
If Cory Booker is the future of the Democratic Party, they have no future! I know more about Cory than he knows about himself.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2016
Interestingly, until recently, Trump and the Morning Joe crew were considered by some observers to be a little too close to each other. In the early stages of his campaign, Trump was a frequent caller to the show, and radio host Hugh Hewitt suggested that Scarborough could possibly serve as Trump’s running mate.
Clearly, the relationship between Donald Trump, Joe Scarborough, and the Morning Joe crew has soured since then.
[Photo by Gerald Herbert/AP Images]
