Mike Brzezinski said she was “surprised at the backlash” to the recent meeting she and her “Morning Joe” co-host (and husband) Joe Scarborough had with president-elect Donald Trump.
Brzezinski made the comment while appearing on “The Daily Beast Podcast” on Wednesday.
“The way I look at it is, people are really scared,” Brzezinski explained. “And it’s one of the reasons we went in there is people are really scared about Donald Trump’s comments that, you know, political adversaries, a lot of people are scared because of what has happened with abortion. These are all issues that are important to me and in some ways personal to me, but definitely personal to the people I really care about.”
The “Morning Joe” duo revealed on Monday they met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week. It had been seven years since Scarborough and Brzezinski had spoken to Trump — a timeframe in which hosts consistently skewered the former and soon-to-be president on their show. The meeting, Brzezinski said on Monday, was worthwhile in order to “restart communications” with Trump.
MSNBC viewers didn’t like what they heard, apparently, with the show’s ratings dropping 17% in the hour after the meeting was discussed. On Tuesday, CNN reported the hosts met with the president-elect because they were “credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment.”
Brzezinski told The Daily Beast the meeting with Trump was part of her job, and that she couldn’t hold a grudge against him for previous barbs, like when he said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” in 2017.
Moving forward, Brzezinski said she’d like to have Trump come on “Morning Joe.”
“I really I hope that we have more conversations,” she said. “I hope we do an interview.”