MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have long bemoaned President Trump’s frequent use of Twitter to opine on political matters. But on Thursday, the Morning Joe hosts seemed almost perturbed that the President had thus far refrained from tweeting about the Stormy Daniels scandal since her appearance on 60 Minutes.
Throughout the three-hour show, panelists described the President as “silent,” “frozen,” and “hiding.” Brzezinski was particularly keen to discuss the Daniels issue, even opening the show by vowing, “Despite that quick shift in the news cycle, Stormy Daniels isn’t going away.”
Scarborough introduced the topic: “I guess it’s day five, maybe even more than that, that this Stormy Daniels news has frozen the President of the United States yet again.” He drew a parallel between Trump’s aggressive posturing during the Republican primaries and the behavior of Michael Avenatti (the lawyer representing Daniels), claiming that Avenatti had done to Trump “what Donald Trump was able to do to people like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush... and that is freeze them, tongue tie them.”
“He has no response,” Scarborough concluded, “and he’s hiding.” MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle concurred. “We don’t pay enough attention to this,” he claimed absurdly.
Now emboldened, Scarborough reiterated his analysis:
It really is astounding. This President has always been a perpetual motion machine as it pertains to tweets, press releases, insulting statements. Whatever it took to keep the news cycle going, he churned it up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This week, since Stormy, silence.
Brzezinski echoed her co-host’s reading of the situation in a subsequent segment. “It’s amazing how silent the President has been of late given the fact that he runs his mouth on absolutely everything,” she marveled. Later, she added, “He is so silent right now, it’s deafening. And it’s fascinating.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski’s portrayal of the President’s recent public profile betrays their intentions. Their depiction of Trump as “frozen” and “silent” would have viewers believe that his press office and Twitter have gone dark; yet that is far from the truth. In that week alone on Twitter, Trump had announced a cabinet nomination, unveiled a new memorial, proposed an alternate strategy for securing wall funding, and declared a national holiday, in addition to his usual stream-of-consciousness tweets.
Rather, their claim that the President was “hiding” pertained specifically to the Stormy Daniels issue. It is unclear whether they were hoping for a particularly disparaging tweet that Avenatti could use to bolster his case against the President, or if they simply craved a new development in the saga of Stormy Daniels. Regardless, the panelists seemed intent on baiting the President into lashing out, hence their mocking tone.
