The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” slammed President Trump over his meltdown during a recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” calling the entire situation a “complete farce.”
“Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski took particular issue with Trump’s suggestion during his “Meet the Press” interview with host Kristen Welker that a large portion of the insurrectionists and rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 were led there by the FBI.
“[He’s] lying to the American people. Those folks had zip ties. They had a noose,” Brzezinski noted. “They’re criminals who were convicted of their crimes. I know the president pardoned them because, for some reason in his twisted thinking, these people deserve something more than what they got. Many of them have gone out to commit more crimes since they’ve been pardoned.”
“There’s no evidence that the FBI ushered anybody in. But even if they did, that was the FBI under a Donald Trump Department of Justice,” “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire added, noting, “Biden had not taken the Oath of Office yet. It’s a complete farce.”
“This is the President of the United States thinking it is OK to go on television and lie over and over and over to not only his interviewer, but to the American people,” Lemire continued. “It is something that is fundamentally damaged about our democracy right now that he’s able to do this, and I worry about where we’re heading, not just between now and November, but in the years ahead.”
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
Brzezinski went on to call for greater efforts on the part of all journalists who interview Trump to refuse to let him string together a series of lies in their conversations.
“That was absolutely a great, great, great effort. But I would stop at the first lie. I wouldn’t allow any lies on my program,” Brzezinski said of “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker’s interview with Trump. “We can’t have a complicit media. We can’t be involved at all with spreading lies.”
“We all must be more aggressive than ever in getting the facts out to viewers,” Brzezinski urged later Monday morning. “[Trump’s] lies must be met with facts and run over and not allowed on decent broadcasts that represent journalism. His insults must be answered with the truth that he does not want to hear, and his cabinet’s efforts to blur reality must be knocked down at every turn.”
“I actually think Kristen Welker did everything she could do in that moment. But we’ve seen this now many times over,” Brzezinski concluded. “If the president says the grass is blue and you go on to another topic, aren’t you tacitly normalizing that lie? I would stay at the lie.”
