Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin described Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s visit to Mar-a-Lago to see Donald Trump as “an appalling example at how eager so many elites are to fall in line, to curry favor, to deflect attention, to deflect any kind of incoming criticism that might come their way from the White House.”
Rubin ripped into her colleagues at the network on her podcast’s Friday episode of “Jen Rubin’s Green Room.” The married duo headed for Florida, she said, “forgetting for a moment that their audience despises Trump, that their audience was counting on them to help hold the line against Trump, forgetting for a moment that their audience has no interest in whatsoever, in quote, opening conversations with Trump.”
“What were they thinking? Who do they think their audience was?” Rubin continued. “Well, perhaps this wasn’t about their audience. Perhaps this was them trying to defend themselves or avoid retribution that they thought was coming their way.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski told their audience Monday that they had opted to personally meet with Trump last week. The pair described their goal as an attempt to “reopen communications” with the president-elect, but sources have since reported to CNN that the visit was little more than an attempt to stave off political, professional, and personal retribution from an administration that made animosity an important part of its campaign.
Concern that reporters and journalists at MSNBC could be targets for the Trump administration have been field by the president-elect’s closest allies. On Nov. 14, Steve Bannon named the network’s Ari Melber and Andrew Weissman as two people who should “preserve your documents.”
“You try to imprison Trump, You try to break Trump. He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you. And he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice, (the) Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live with it,” Bannon also said.
But that fear should not lead to a personal visit at Mar-a-Lago, Rubin countered. “They are hemorrhaging their audience, and this, of course, only exacerbates the reason and the problem why MSNBC and other cable networks are being spun them up, and that is, cable television is dying,” she explained.
Comcast’s recent decision to slim down NBCUniversal, which will result in MSNBC and other companies being spun-off into a separate, standalone entity, will show whether or not the news network is viable on its own, Rubin continued.
“We don’t know if MSNBC, a year from now, is going to exist, or whether it’s going to be in some slim-down fashion. But I would suggest this, that they rethink their model, get rid of the pattern of chewing over the same three or four stories all day long, with a shuffling of panelists all parroting back the same line to the host. This is not working. It’s boring. It’s not good TV,” she said.
You can watch the episode from “Jen Rubin’s Green Room” in the video above.
