Morning Joe Stunned Into Silence After Reading Kamala Harris Excerpt Blaming Biden’s Ego
The set of Morning Joe was stunned into brief but notable silence after Mika Brzezinski read an excerpt of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ forthcoming book, blaming Joe Biden’s “ego” for allowing the reelection of President Donald Trump.
The Atlantic just published an excerpt of Harris’s new book, 107 Days, which details the earliest days of Harris learning Biden was stepping down, which includes some surprising passages in which Harris lays blame on the egos of Joe and Jill Biden for not recognizing earlier the need to step out of the race or not run for reelection. To wit:
And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.
“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.
Brzezinski opened the segment by reading the excerpt above, adding another portion of the book not published by The Atlantic, “I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to the negative. Narratives that sprang up around me when the stories were unfair or inaccurate. The president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more. Their thinking was zero-sum. If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that. If I did well, he did well.”
As she finished her introductory reads, both Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski sat silently stunned for a brief but notable moment, revealing Shakespearean levels of on-air cognitive dissonance rarely seen on live television.
Viewers likely recall that there was no more vocal defender of Joe Biden than Scarborough and Brzezinski, and while they advocated forcefully for the Harris campaign in president, their reaction revealed that their loyalty to Biden is much greater than Harris.
Scarborough’s first comment effectively defended the Biden White House for treating Vice President Harris so poorly, insisting that’s a time-honored tradition in the Executive Branch, and even saying Biden knows that firsthand from how the Obama staff treated him.
A minute or so later, the Morning Joe host then seemed to undermine Harris’s capability (and perhaps prove her point) by promoting the narrative that the former VP had a terrible time managing her East Wing staff, which the West Wing had to clean up (a report that clearly came from Senior Biden aides who assuredly were close to Joe and Mika.)
During the 2024 campaign, the influential Morning Joe led the defense of Biden’s ability. Scarborough notably insisted in April of 2024 that this is the “best” version of Biden he’s ever seen. That video went viral, which he then seemed to revise during Wednesday morning’s program:
When I saw him, he was slow. He was, you know, plodding. He was his neck was stiff. Everything was really stiff and you’re like, ehh. Walks around slowly, but when he sat down, may have spoken more quietly and more haltingly, but man, I never once saw him where he blanked out. I never once saw where, I will just say, a lot of people in this administration. I haven’t seen a lot of people in this administration that could have kept up with him on foreign policy, especially when he started talking about foreign policy because he’d been doing it for 40, 45 years.
Watch above via MSNBC.
