Fire and fury: Inside the Trump White House - Chapter 05

Fire and fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (Audiobook)

From Chapter05:

On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost on the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White House.

Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, and Brzezinski is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking aide in the Johnson White House and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. Morning Joe had gone on the air in 2007 and developed a following among New York political and media types. Trump was a longtime devotee.

Early in the 2016 campaign, with a change of leadership at NBC News, it seemed likely that the show, its ratings falling, would be canceled. But Scarborough and Brzezinski embraced their relationship with Trump and became one of the few media outlets not only with a positive outlook on him, but that seemed to know his thinking. Trump became a frequent call-in guest and the show a way to speak more or less directly to him.

It was the kind of relationship Trump dreamed of: media people who took him seriously, talked about him often, solicited his views, provided him with gossip, and retailed the gossip he offered them. The effect was to make them all insiders together, which was exactly where Trump wanted to be. Though he branded himself as a political outsider, actually finding himself on the outside wounded him.

Trump believed that the media, which he propelled (in the case of Scarborough and Brzezinski, helping them keep their jobs), owed him something, and the media, giving him vast amounts of free coverage, believed he owed them, with Scarborough and Brzezinski seeing themselves as something like semiofficial advisers, if not the political fixers who had put him in his job. In August, they had had a public spat, resulting in Trump’s tweet: “Some day, when things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!” But Trump’s spats often ended in a tacit admission, however grudging, of mutual advantage, and in short order they were back on cordial terms again.