Free Republic

Heilemann: Trump's War On Media "Incitement" For An Oklahoma City Bombing Posted By Ian Schwartz On Date February 20, 2017 Former Bloomberg TV host John Heilemann said Monday on MSNBC's Morning Joe that he is worried that President Trump is inciting "elements in our country that may go ahead and do something" on the scale of the Oklahoma City bombing. Heilemann is afraid that when Trump calls the media the "enemy of the people," that someone may take that "seriously" and use it as a motive to commit an act of domestic terror. "He has been waging war on the...

Mike Barnicle, of all people, set the tone for the opening segment of today’s Morning Joe, exclaiming “thank you, Jesus” in response to President Trump’s pick of H.R. McMaster to take over from Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser. The segment was one belated Valentines Day bouquet of praise of McMaster, coming from members of the panel itself as well as in quotes from a bi-partisan array that included several critics of the president, notably including John McCain. Perhaps even more significant than the accolades for McMaster was the suggestion that his selection reflected well on President Trump himself. View...

Thursday on Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough urged Donald Trump to realize that “the press always wins” in fights withpoliticians. In the same hour, Scarborough criticized an editorial in The Wall Street Journal for not focusing on, what he considered to be, the most important points following former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation. Scarborough huffed, “Donald Trump has tried to delegitimize the courts…Don't screw with federal judges it never turns out well for you. And the courts won that round. He is trying to delegitimize the press the press has risen up over the past couple of weeks. And...

Responding to President Donald Trump's assertions that much of the reporting on his administration is "fake news," MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski called Trump's presidency "fake" during Thursday's "Morning Joe" show. Brzezinski and cohost Joe Scarborough described a series of misleading statements made by Trump's representatives, including top advisers Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, to the media over the past week.

As far as Mika Brzezinski is concerned, Kellyanne Conway should not be permitted to appear on Morning Joe. Said Mika this morning: “Joe was just saying that she books herself on these shows, we know for a fact she tries to book herself on this show. I won’t do it. Because I don’t believe in fake news or information that is not true.” Later, Mika laid down a personal marker, a virtual ultimatum. Warning Conway not to contact the show, Mika said: “I will say, Kellyanne Conway does not need to text our show. At least, as long as I’m...

On Monday, the hosts of Morning Joe mocked and berated White House adviser Stephen Miller for his recent comments regarding the court ruling against President Trump's immigration order. Tuesday morning was no different, as the show came back from a commercial break by airing a distorted, grainy black-and-white video of Miller. The video contained the statement he gave on the network Sunday shows concerning the President’s executive powers and spliced Miller’s quotes attempting to make him look sinister and menacing. After the video concluded, host Joe Scarborough declared, “Wow,” and journalist Willie Geist agreed, “That’s terrifying.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed...

If Morning Joe had a hook, they would have yanked presidential advisor Stephen Miller off the set of the Sunday shows he appeared on yesterday. Today's Morning Joe devoted a long segment to eviscerating his performance. The essence of the criticism was two-fold. First, that Miller spoke too much about his personal views rather than those of the president he serves. Second, that in declaring that the powers of the president to protect the country "will not be questioned" he was expressing an undemocratic view running counter to the principle of judicial review. View the video.

Over the weekend, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were given extraordinary access to President Trump and his foreign policy team. On today’s Morning Joe, they gave their takeaways from their interview of the president and a number of his senior advisors. Scarborough painted a picture of White House staffers in a battle with the senior foreign policy team. Scarborough singled out Stephen Miller, saying “you’ve got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your cabinet agencies to go to hell.” View the video...

Question for Cokie Roberts: how many refugees admitted into the US during WWII went on to commit mass-murder terrorist acts in our country? The question arises because on today’s Morning Joe, Cokie contended that shutting out Syrian refugees would be like “shutting the Jews out during World War II.” Roberts made her remark in the context of claiming that the plans President Trump has announced are “extremely dangerous for the United States of America.” View the video here.

An extraordinary first half-hour of Morning Joe today. The thesis was that President Trump had gotten off on a seriously bad foot by failing to look back at history in his inauguration speech, sending a first and ungracious tweet about the Women’s Marches, sending Sean Spicer out to berate the press over crowd-size reporting, and above all for a self-referential, boastful, angry speech, referencing crowd size, given while standing in front of the wall of fallen heroes at the CIA. And the message, delivered repeatedly and in the starkest terms, by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, was that those aides...

Of all the reporters with whom Donald Trump sparred during his campaign, a favorite target was NBC’s Katy Tur. Trump called Tur out by name more than once, as here and here. So it was fascinating to hear Tur, appearing on today’s Morning Joe, report that Trump was very friendly to her behind the scenes. She described two anecdotes. In the first, said Tur, Trump tried to pull her up on the stage to wave to the crowd “as if I was his wife or something.” View the video here.

On today’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough ripped as “repulsive” Sean Hannity’s “bromance” with Julian Assange, and more generally criticized the Republican change of heart on Wikileaks. Background on the evolution of Hannity’s views on Assange here [note: from Daily Beast.] Scarborough noted that when Wikileaks divulged information about a CIA operation some years ago, Assange became the Republican “enemy #1.” In 2010, Donald Trump himself tweeted that WikiLeaks was “disgraceful” and that there “should be death penalty or something.” View the video here.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is no conservative, and certainly no fan of Donald Trump. The headline of a column he wrote during the campaign, after all, was “Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth.” Which makes his column of today, “Thanks to no-drama Obama, American leadership is gone,” which absolutely rips the bark off Barack Obama, all the more remarkable. Observing that Obama “has been all too happy to preside over the loss of American influence,” he describes the current president as having “waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough...

It was the strangest of settings for some very serious breaking news. There was Mika Brzezinski, cuddled up in her flannels on Morning Joe‘s special Christmas set. In the previous segment, Joe Scarborough had grilled Sean Spicer, whom President-elect Trump yesterday named as his White House spokesman, over Trump’s tweet of yesterday in which he said that the US needed to greatly strengthen its nuclear arsenal. Spicer repeatedly refused to say that the Trump tweet came in response from a statement by Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier, announcing Russia’s intention to strengthen its own nuclear arsenal. When the show returned...

Shades of “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” . . . On today’s Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle claimed that Barack Obama had a “great, outstanding” presidency, “with a few minor ripples like Syria.” So the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, traceable to Obama’s abandonment of his red line, is a “minor ripple?” How callous can Barnicle be? And as bad as was Obama’s failure on Syria, it is just one of a string of fiascos at his feet, from the rise of ISIS, to Iran, Libya, and on the domestic front, a record...

Typically, MSNBC isn’t a place you go to find a fair opinion about Donald Trump. They have made it pretty clear over there that they aren’t interested in defending Trump on anything. However, every once in awhile over at ‘Morning Joe’ we hear a voice of reason. Joe Scarborough could barely contain himself when he was remembering how Hillary Clinton bashed Trump over his comments about respecting the election results. She ran around for weeks warning us about how Trump would never accept defeat and how silly he was for talking about voter fraud. Now she’s doing exactly what she...

Earlier in this presidential election cycle, Mika Brzezinski was a big Elizabeth Warren booster, repeatedly urging her to throw her hat into the ring. So it was nothing short of stunning to see Brzezinski go on a blistering attack against Warren on today’s Morning Joe. The segment began with a clip of Warren in essence declaring war on Republicans, claiming Dems had won more presidential and senatorial votes, and that they weren’t intending to “whimper, whine or grovel.” Wondered Mika: “do you lead with anger? . . I am getting tired of this act.” “There’s an anger there that was...

When I suggested yesterday that Kellyanne Conway was being “less than loyal” to Donald Trump by sharply criticizing Mitt Romney on the Sunday shows, some readers took issue, surmising that Trump himself had encouraged Conway’s attacks. But today’s Morning Joe reported as Breaking News that two sources at the top of the transition say that Trump is “furious” at Conway for her comments, notably her suggestion that Trump had “betrayed” his supporters by considering Romney for Secretary of State. The sources described Conway as having gone “rogue.” Scarborough read a response from Conway in which she called the comments “sexist”...

Last week, we reported on Morning Joe ripping the notion of Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of State, with Joe Scarborough saying “he’s temperamentally not qualified to be, and he’s not qualified to be it based on any experience or training or any contacts.” This morning, the show was still on its anti-Rudy rampage, with Scarborough stating: “it’s one of these things that everybody says off camera. I’m going to tell you it to you on camera . . . Even people close to Trump say Rudy Giuliani mentally is a few steps slower than he was several years ago.” View...

Morning Joe spent its opening segment scalding the notion of either Rudy Giuliani or John Bolton as Secretary of State in the Trump administration. Giuliani was described as completely unqualified for the job, and someone who has personally profited off national security matters, a la the Clintons. Bolton was blasted as a “neo-con on steroids” whose views are out of sync with Trump’s, and is “donor-driven,” with Sheldon Adelson’s name being dropped. So who’s Scarborough and company’s pick for SecState? Joe and Mike Barnicle called the selection of Tennessee Senator Bob Corker a “no-brainer.” Maybe so, but not necessarily in...