Progressives are upset that a news program spoke with a top newsmaker who is set to become the president of the United States early next year.
That’s one takeaway from the backlash against MSNBC’s Morning Joe cohosts making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were almost apologetic when explaining to viewers that they had spoken to Trump for the first time in seven years. It turned out they had good reason to take such a tone.
Journalism professor and media critic Jeff Jarvis called the chat with Trump a “betrayal of their colleagues, democracy, and us all. It is a disgusting show of obeisance in advance.” A liberal social media influencer with nearly a million X followers launched into an expletive-laden tirade against Morning Joe and its hosts that concluded with, “And f*** MSNBC if they keep them on the f***ing air.”
“No show is more responsible for Trump’s win than Morning Joe,” progressive commentator Emma Vigeland posted on X. “From their dismissal of Biden’s awful approval ratings, to urging him to stay in the race before AND after the debate, to elevating Never Trumpers in the party. They commodified fear of him; now they normalize him.”
Morning Joe has had a complicated relationship with Trump, dating back to his frequent calls into the program in 2015, as he began his first presidential campaign, followed by a nasty break with its hosts. Scarborough had been friendly with Trump before he and Brzezinski became sharp critics. The former Florida Republican congressman was one of the last conservative voices on MSNBC before following the cable network’s leftward trajectory.
MSNBC’s competitors have capitalized on the backlash, with CNN running an analysis of angry Morning Joe viewers and Fox News’s website publishing Trump’s reaction to the show’s hosts reaching out to him for a meeting. “I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile,” the president-elect said, adding that he had “an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press.”
But more importantly, the flap reinvigorated a debate over whether liberals should “normalize” Trump, a Resistance trope about treating him like a standard political figure rather than an existential threat to democracy or the constitutional order.
This leaves the unresolved meaning of “normalizing” the sitting president, who will return to office backed not only by an Electoral College majority but a national popular vote plurality. He has already received more than 76 million votes, the second-highest total in history.
Trump’s reelection after a four-year hiatus raises important questions for his political opponents, especially those who view him as a uniquely malign force in public life. Many will want to treat him as illegitimate once again, repeating the usual charges against him.
But these have been litigated in the court of public opinion, and voters decided to hand him the presidency once more. The effort to read Trump out of the mainstream and shame his voters clearly failed. So did Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing argument that Trump augured the arrival of fascism, following years of President Joe Biden’s warnings that he was a threat to democracy.
Harris has conceded the presidential race to Trump. Last week, Biden invited Trump to the White House, where the two men shook hands and spoke of a peaceful transition of power. Biden smiled for the cameras. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke of trying to be “respectful to the American people,” who elected Trump.
Some Democrats believe the election results make the case for trying to better understand Trump’s voters and resolve their own political weaknesses before the next campaign.
Yet, there remains a strong constituency going even harder in the opposite direction, giving Trumpian enemies no quarter. “Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc,” writes Roxane Gay in a New York Times piece titled simply, “Enough.”
“These are adults, so let us treat them like adults,” Gay added. “Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview.”
Combating misinformation, whether through starting new media ventures or regulating old ones, is the preferred solution of Gay’s ilk to the political problems posed by Trump and his supporters.
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This may misjudge the efficacy of a decade of negative media coverage of Trump, which has nevertheless coincided with him being the dominant political figure of this era. But sometimes the media, like Morning Joe, has desired access or behaved as something other than organs of opposition to Trump.
The revolution, and little else, must be televised.
