Morning Joe Hosts Reveal Meeting With Trump at Mar-a-Lago

The married MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough drove half an hour from their Florida home on Friday to meet with an old friend-turned-frenemy-turned-enemy: President-elect Donald J.Trump.Their relationship has been complicated.

Mr.Trump was once a regular guest on their talk show, “Morning Joe,” and the couple rang in 2017 at a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago estate.Then things deteriorated.

Mr.Trump called Mr.

Scarborough a “psycho” and Ms.Brzezinski “crazy,” claiming that he had once seen her “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” “Morning Joe” became a redoubt of the anti-Trump resistance.

This year, the couple repeatedly warned that a second Trump presidency would threaten democracy’s future.Even for talk show hosts, it turns out, elections have consequences.“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’” Ms.Brzezinski told viewers on Monday, disclosing the meeting for the first time.

“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”The meeting, at Mar-a-Lago, was their first in-person encounter in seven years.Mr.

Scarborough said that the group had discussed “abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets,” and that there had been plenty of disagreement to go around.“What we did agree on,” Ms.Brzezinski added, “was to restart communications.” She compared the summit to the diplomatic work of her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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