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Joe Scarborough usually sets the tone on Morning Joe. But today, Mika Brzezinski took the lead, abruptly booting Florida Governor Rick Scott from the show today for his refusal to comment substantively on Donald Trump's statement yesterday that "Islam hates us." As Scott repeated various bland statements about Florida, Mika could be heard muttering "wrap it" and "no, no." After a final try at getting Scott to respond, Mika curtly announced "we will move on now. Thanks." When the show returned after a break, Mika excoriated Scott, calling his performance "weak, sniveling political wavering," saying he was "pathetic" and that...

Laugh line of the morning comes from Cokie Roberts' Wikipedia entry: "Some have questioned Roberts' objectivity as a journalist." Some, indeed. On today's Morning Joe, NPR-ite Roberts, her eyes flashing with anger, asked Donald Trump whether he was "proud" of promoting racism among schoolkids: "There have been incidents of children, white children, pointing to their darker skinned classmates and saying 'you'll be deported when Donald Trump is president.' . . . Are you proud of that?" Calling it a "very nasty question," Trump replied "I'm not proud of it because I didn't even hear of it. And I don't like...

Members of the Morning Joe panel got a good laugh today as Al Hunt reported on anguish in establishment GOP ranks. Hunt said that he "was at an event Saturday night with a lot of establishment Republicans and some Rubio people and despair so understates the case. [ Laughter ] I -- really, I've never seen anything like it. There was a lot of heavy drinking" after that. A bit later, Hunt imagined a scenario in which someone informs Mitch McConnell that they had figured out a way to stop Trump: with Ted Cruz, "at which point Mitch has a...

Members of the Morning Joe panel tried their best to block and tackle for Hillary given the revelation that the person who set up her server has been granted immunity. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the most troubling issue is the way things got from the SIPRnet--a Pentagon system used for exchanging Secret information--to Hillary's server. Mukasey explained that someone must have taken something off SIPRnet and either transcribed it or summarized it and then put it on her server. Politico's Jim VandeHei suggested hopefully that if charges are brought it would be against the "staffers" who did that,...

Morning Joe, in the person of Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, took a victory lap this morning on the occasion of Donald Trump's impressive Super Tuesday victories. The theme of the opening half-hour: we told you so. Their point: from the day he announced his candidacy, the Morning Joe team took Trump seriously and said he could be a real factor. In contrast, the poobahs of politics and media made fools of themselves predicting Trump's imminent demise. In an amusing spike-the-ball display, Morning Joe went to the length of producing a montage of its greatest hits, juxtaposing clips...

Hopefully they'll wait till the plane lands . . . New York Times reporters should be thrown off the Trump plane. That's what Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough said on today's Morning Joe. Via a Gail Collins column in the Times and in conversations with BuzzFeed EIC Ben Smith, portions of Donald Trump's ostensibly off-the-record interview with the Times' editorial board in January were leaked. Said Schmidt: "if I was running the Donald Trump campaign, every New York Times reporter on that plane would be off of it until and unless they clarify the attributional policies of the newspaper." Seconded...

Trump at timestamp 1:40

A few days before the South Carolina primary, I appeared on Morning Joe and said Trump was operating out of his lizard brain--which is a common phrase for the ancient knob of reflexive lower-brain structures perched atop our spinal cord--rather than his frontal lobe, which is where thought and reason take place. For this, Joe Scarborough accused me of suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome." The night before, Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had hosted an hour-long town hall with Trump--and no other candidate. It was a classic Trump performance, filled with nastiness and ignorance. He said he would abolish Obamacare but...

And we thought Joe Scarborough was the one who had it in for Marco Rubio . . . Turns out, Mika Brzezinski really doesn't dig Rubio. At all. On today's Morning Joe, Mika painted Rubio as an unprincipled pol "sucking up" to Donald Trump in order to be his VP pick. Mika: "he's the only one who will go against everything he believes in and say whatever Trump wants him to. He'll do whatever Trump tells him to do." Ouch. View the video here.

Newly-leaked audio shows MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough chatting with Donald TrumpDonald TrumpObama to visit Florida on Friday Much of the recording, released by comedian Harry Shearer on his weekly radio show, seems typical of off-camera patter at television shows. But it also comes amid criticism, some of it from CNN and other rivals to MSNBC, that the "Morning Joe" team is too supportive or close to Trump, the GOP presidential frontrunner. In one exchange, Brzezinski calls Trump's decision to call two men onstage to a rally last week after they confronted a protester a "wow moment." "You...

If there was one theme on today's Morning Joe, it was Joe Scarborough's relentless, merciless mocking of the notion that Marco Rubio has an electoral "firewall" in Nevada. It began with Mika Brzezinski's citing of a National Review article from December that spoke of such a firewall. Joe, butter not melting in his mouth, turned to Mark Halperin, coyly wondering why he was laughing at the notion. Halperin opined that, in fact, Donald Trump was likely to carry Nevada with his biggest margin yet. Scarborough returned repeatedly to his routine, even working it into a Richard Haass report on the...

Everything wrong with Jeb Bush can be summed up in his approach to border security and American sovereignty. As we all now know, the former Florida governor considers illegal immigration an "act of love" on the part of the illegal immigrant sneaking into America illegally. Wednesday morning on "Morning Joe," after barely getting out of New Hampshire alive, Bush repeatedly described frontrunner Donald Trump's proposed temporary ban on foreign Muslims as "horrific." You don't have to agree with the idea of Trump's temporary ban to see the benefits of such a thing, or why two-thirds of Republican voters in a...

Yesterday, Politico reported that in a Wall Street speech, Hillary sounded more like "a Goldman Sachs managing director." Today, Bloomberg's Josh Green quoted a financial CEO who attended another Clinton speech as saying Hillary "lavished praise on Wall Street, said you guys are the pillar of our economy." Ruh-roh: how will the increasingly left-wing Dem electorate react to that? GOP strategist Steve Schmidt subsequently said that release of the speech transcripts could be "fatal" for Clinton's campaign. Happy day after New Hampshire, Hillary! The MSM is not eager to sink Clinton. But the drip, drip, drip of these stories about...

Recent controversial statements from feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright sparked MSNBC's Joe Scarborough to unleash a rant against feminists who did not stand up for people like Monica Lewinsky. The "Morning Joe" panel was discussing a recent statement Steinem made on Bill Maher's HBO show (and her subsequent apology posted on Facebook) about young women who follow Bernie Sanders and Albright's warning of a "special place in hell" for women who do not help other women. Scarborough began his rant with the question, "Where were these women in 1998 when a young 22-yr-old intern...

Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump reacted to an attack on the him from his opponent former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) earlier in the show.

Bill Clinton has lost his fastball. That's an emerging theme from this campaign season, and it was on glaring display on today's Morning Joe. Introducing a clip of Clinton [dressed like a lumberjack] attacking Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Mika Brzezinski said the ex-prez had picked up the "hatchet"--not a good image for a would-be statesman. After the clip aired, Joe Scarborough called it "painful." Mike Barnicle said it was a "cringe" moment, with Chuck Todd seconding the assessment. View the video here.

Donald Trump normally projects the image of a guy with only one gear: warp drive. But on today's Morning Joe, Trump made an interesting admission, saying that in Iowa, "I sort of went through the motions a little bit." According to Trump, he went less than flat-out in the Hawkeye State because he had been told he couldn't win, until a poll at the very end of the campaign indicated that he could. Note: there was an odd moment at the very beginning of the phone interview. When Mika Brzezinski began by asking "let's talk about Iowa. What happened?" there...

If you want Chris Matthews to change his mind, just wait a minute. In just over a minute on Morning Joe today, Matthews changed his election prediction from agreeing with Joe Scarborough that Trump would win and that Bernie Sanders would squeak out a victory to changing his prediction to a win by Hillary Clinton. However, the most fascinating part of his quick change of prediction was his frozen face when put on the spot by Scarborough as weird undulations played out over the surface. A body language expert could have a field day analyzing what was going through the...

**SNIP** "All of our sources high up are telling us... that this investigation is far more advanced than we the public knows," Scarborough said, before asking the panelists what information they're getting. "Well, there are three things that people are keying off of. First of all, there are a lot of chatter amongst FBI agents, many of whom have never been big fans of the Clintons. But a lot of FBI agents seem to be saying something is happening here," Bloomberg News analyst Mark Halperin said. "Second is from a legal point of view, you look at the recent developments...

Mike Huckabee with his wife Janet, left, before an event in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Wednesday. DES MOINES - Donald J. Trump may have some company from other candidates at his counterprogramming event here on Thursday night during the Fox News-hosted Republican presidential campaign debate. In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said that he had heard from other candidates “proactively” about attending the event that Mr. Trump will hold at Drake University at the same time as the debate. Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday afternoon that he would skip the final...