Fact Check: Did Trump Say Joe Scarborough Behaved 'Like a Scolded Dog' During Mar-a-Lago Meeting?
It’s something that many of you probably saw on social media on Monday, and you may have thought President-elect Donald Trump was stabbing two of his most notable critics in the back after they very publicly offered him an olive branch.
And, while those predisposed to believing Trump is inherently malevolent may have bought it, it turns out they were had.
As you may have heard, the two principals of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — former Republican-turned-liberal Rep. Joe Scarborough and his wife, Mika Brzezinski — announced Monday they had met at Mar-a-Lago with President-elect Trump for the first time in seven years.
While he was a frequent guest on the show before his presidential run, Trump spent his first term sparring with the morning show couple, including a rather ugly back-and-forth in 2017, which is best remembered for Trump saying Brzezinski had showed up at a social event at Mar-a-Lago “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” (Not so well-remembered was that Brzezinski was hardly the bigger person in the Twitter troll war, posting a meme that took a crude, none-too-subtle jab at the then-president’s anatomy.)
Well, bygones shall be bygones — at least when “Morning Joe” has to co-exist with a new administration for four years.
“Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate,” Brzezinski said Monday about the “personal” talk with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago in which the two agreed to “restart communications” between the administration and the show.
“For nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, Jan. 6 were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote,” she said
“Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
Scarborough said that they talked about “abortion, mass deportation and threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” adding about the last part: “We talked about that a good bit.”
“It’s gonna come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” he added.
Trump, Brzezinski said, “was cheerful and upbeat” and “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”
Scarborough, meanwhile, opined a second Trump term would be different: “Somebody close to Donald Trump told me this past weekend, this is a president who is not seeking re-election, so maybe, just maybe now could be time for both parties to get to work.”
NEW
On MSNBC, @morningmika and @JoeNBC say that they went to Mar-a-Lago this weekend and met with President-elect Trump for the first time in seven years.
Mika says that despite “profound disagreements,” they agreed with Trump to restart communications. pic.twitter.com/7rZwQkleWJ
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 18, 2024
About as humble and gracious of a peace offering as you might expect from the two of them, I suppose. But, almost immediately, a post supposedly from Trump’s Truth Social account began circulating on social media alleging that The Donald took them for chumps.
“This morning, ‘Morning’ Joe and Mika, who owe their careers to me, went on their show and claimed to have met with me,” the supposed post read.
“They made it sound like we had a summit. The truth is, Joe begged to meet with me after our Big Win, and when I finally agreed, he approached me like a scolded dog.
“He should consider himself lucky that I didn’t have him thrown out of beautiful Mar-a-Lago. Mika was charming, as usual.”
Horrible sounding stuff. Also: fake!
Trump did not post this
Fake post https://t.co/6CylohvT9S
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) November 18, 2024
The post came from an account run by an individual known as “Ingenuous Firebrand,” who describes himself as a “Universally-beloved meme artisan” who traffics in “humorous-adjacent tweets.” Some other very serious commentary from this, well, ingenuous firebrand:
Business tip:
Whenever you are flying, always wear a tuxedo t-shirt.
When someone walks on the plane in a tuxedo T, I always think to myself, “I wonder what’s on that guy’s agenda?”
It’s human nature.
I always find myself thinking “he looks formal, yet he came to party.” https://t.co/LjOhRYYNJI pic.twitter.com/RGMelpzLSl
— Ingenuous Firebrand 🐆🇺🇸 (@ING2Firebrand) November 15, 2024
People keep posting this video like it’s real life – this is from the live-action Moana reboot that Disney is making more woke
— Ingenuous Firebrand 🐆🇺🇸 (@ING2Firebrand) November 14, 2024
“And they said their strategy was ‘vibes’” pic.twitter.com/Z55U6RQXvn
— Ingenuous Firebrand 🐆🇺🇸 (@ING2Firebrand) November 13, 2024
Funny, yes. Also not accurate. Except for the part about AI jungle cats wearing tuxedo T-shirts while flying; that’s just dapperness in action.
However, since this fake Truth Social post read like what the left tends to imagine Donald Trump sounds like at moments like this, it had legs.
As for what the president-elect actually said about the Joe-and-Mika visit, he called it “extremely cordial.”
“I received a call from Joe Scarborough requesting a meeting for him and Mika, and I agreed that it would be a good thing if such meeting took place,” Trump told Fox News.
“In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago,” he said, adding that he hopes to meet with others in the press, “even those that have been extremely hostile.”
He added that the president has “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
So, no, there was no knife-in-the-back to the “Morning Joe” duo. It was cordial both ways, apparently. However long it stays that way is anyone’s guess, but the fact we can tell you for sure is that, at least for the moment, there’s detente — and no “scolded dog” involved.
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