Morning Joe co-hosts accuse White House of blackmail over tabloid story

Extract from The Guardian

• Pair say Trump’s people tried to manipulate them over National Enquirer story
• Brzezinski says Trump’s ‘unhealthy obsession’ with show is not good for US

Morning Joe hosts: we're OK, the country's not – video

Ben Jacobs in Washington and agencies

Saturday 1 July 2017 02.15 AEST First published on Friday 30 June 2017 23.36 AEST

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the hosts of MSNBC’s politics show Morning Joe, on Friday accused White House staff members of blackmail.
Scarborough and Brzezinski also said Donald Trump lied about a December encounter, and that his “unhealthy obsession” with their program did not serve his mental health or the country well.
The two TV hosts, who are engaged to be married, postponed a vacation in order to respond to Trump’s Thursday tweets about them – tweets that drew widespread condemnation. Trump called Brzezinski “crazy” and said she was “bleeding badly from a facelift” when he saw the couple at his Florida estate.
On Friday’s Morning Joe, Scarborough claimed several top White House staffers had warned him about an unflattering article about him and Brzezinski due to published in the National Enquirer, and told him Trump could arrange for the story to be pulled – if the MSNBC host called the president to apologize for negative coverage of the administration.
Scarborough, a former Florida Republican congressman, said: “We got a call: ‘Hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and Donald is friends with … the president is friends with the guy that runs National Enquirer.’ And they said: ‘If you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story.’”
He added: “I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me. The calls kept coming, and kept coming, and they were like: ‘Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.’”
Scarborough said he declined to do so, and the story ran. Brzezinski also alleged that as part of the National Enquirer’s reporting, her teenage daughters were harassed with frequent phone calls.
In a tweet on Friday morning, Trump fired back, and alleged that Scarborough had called him about the negative article. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” wrote the president of the United States.
The National Enquirer put out its own statement. It read: “At the beginning of June, we accurately reported a story that recounted the relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the truth of which is not in dispute. At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story.
“We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions.”
A recent New Yorker magazine article detailed a close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of the Enquirer’s parent company, and how the supermarket tabloid has lauded Trump and printed damaging articles about his political opponents.
A spokesman for the New York County District Attorney declined to comment on whether they were investigating the claims. The district attorney’s office has a policy of not commenting on investigations, including whether or not an investigation exists.

Scarborough and Brzezinski have had a tortured relationship with Trump. They were criticized by some for being too close to him during the presidential campaign, and for giving his candidacy an early boost. But they have turned sharply against him.
In recent weeks, Brzezinski has wondered whether Trump has mental health problems, and said the country under his presidency “does feel like a developing dictatorship”.
“It’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country,” she said on Friday.
“We’re OK,” said Scarborough. “The country’s not.”
They said Trump was lying about Brzezinski having a facelift, although “she did have a little skin under her chin tweaked”.
In a co-bylined column posted on Friday on the Washington Post’s website, the hosts said they had noticed a change in Trump’s behavior over the past few years that left them neither shocked nor insulted by the tweet on Thursday.
“The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check,” they wrote.
On Thursday, Trump launched a crude Twitter attack on Brzezinski on grounds of her intelligence, looks and temperament, drawing bipartisan howls of outrage and leaving fellow Republicans beseeching him to stop.

Trump’s tweets revived concerns over his views of women in a city where civility already is in short supply and where he is struggling for support on healthcare, immigration and other controversial issues.
“I heard poorly rated Morning Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch any more),” Trump tweeted to his nearly 33 million followers on Thursday morning. “Then how come low-IQ, crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a facelift. I said no!”
The tweets united Democrats and Republicans in a chorus of protest that amounted to perhaps the loudest outcry since Trump took office.
“Obviously I don’t see that as an appropriate comment,” said the Republican House speaker, Paul Ryan.

  White House: Trump tweets didn’t go too far – video

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s tweets “blatantly sexist”. The president, she said, “happens to disrespect women. It’s sad.”
The Republican senator James Lankford, from Oklahoma, even linked the president’s harsh words to the 14 June shootings of the House majority whip, Steve Scalise, and three others.
“The president’s tweets today don’t help our political or national discourse, and do not provide a positive role model for our national dialogue,” Lankford said, noting that he had just chaired a hearing on the shootings.
Brzezinski responded to Trump’s insult by posting a photograph of a Cheerios box that included the phrase “made for little hands”. People looking to get under the president’s skin have long suggested that his hands appear small for his frame.
Trump’s allies cast his outburst as positive, an example of his refusal to be bullied. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was “pushing back against people who have attacked him day after day after day”.
“Where is the outrage on that?” she asked, adding: “The American people elected a fighter; they didn’t elect somebody to sit back and do nothing.”
First lady Melania Trump, who has vowed to fight cyberbullying, gave her husband’s tweets a pass.
“As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.

The Associated Press contributed to this story