Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Nod Along as Reporters Deliver Stunning Indictment of Their Biden Coverage

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed blissfully unaware of how embarrassed they ought to be during a Morning Joe segment featuring Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the authors of FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, on Tuesday.

Allen and Parnes are on a media tour to promote their new book — advertised as “the backstage story of bloodsport politics in its rawest form—the clawing, backstabbing, and rabble-rousing that drove Donald Trump into the White House and Democrats into the wilderness” — that brought them to Scarborough and Brzezinski’s doorstep.

The resulting product on MSNBC was nothing short of remarkable.

“You know, Amy, just-,we always look back in retrospect and think things were a certain way, just because it’s the way the media, at the time, defined it. You know, I remember after Biden’s shockingly bad presidential debate, that’s when, like, the history books were starting, you know, you could just see that was going to be the reason why he was pushed out of the race and he was doing badly,” observed Scarborough. “But I remember talking to a reporter three days before the primary, I mean, before the debate. And we were talking about how Biden was starting to fall behind in Minnesota, that Virginia was getting really tight, uncomfortably tight, and Democrats were afraid Biden would even lose New Hampshire.”

“And we both said to each other, the funny thing is, no matter how Biden does in this debate, people are going to blame the debate for the way the polls are already breaking before the debate, right?” he added.

“In some ways the debate that night spilled out into the open the concerns that a lot of Democrats had had privately about Joe Biden, and his ability to carry out another term, and that he was slipping, and all the other things that became apparent at the debate,” suggested co-host Willie Geist a few moments later. “So there has been reporting in the last several months from a lot of people and saying I told you so, and Democrats in January of 2023 privately talking about encouraging him not to run for reelection. What did you find? How serious were those challenges internally among Democrats? And was it because they thought he was simply too old?”

“People thought this was a five-alarm fire,” agreed Allen. “Some of the people thought that this was a five-alarm fire — most voters, most donors did. For some of the leadership of the Democratic Party, the debate was an opportunity to try to move Joe Biden out, which they’d wanted to do.”

In a pre-released excerpt from FIGHT, Allen and Parnes reported that while “publicly, Democrats scoffed at Republican claims that Biden wasn’t up to the job,” they privately “worried all along that they were putting too much stock in an old man who, at best, had long since lost his fastball.”

“In hush-hush talks in 2023, DNC officials plotted out scenarios where Biden died/withdrew b4 Election Day,” reported Allen in a tweet linking to the book’s Amazon page. A year later, Scarborough was writing rock operas about Biden’s youthful vigor and Brzezinski was tearfully denouncing anyone who suggested that he might be exaggerating.

That’s hyperbole, but only barely.

In May 2023, Scarborough marveled at Biden’s abilities during a p0dcast appearance he surely wishes he could go back and fix.

“He’ll wake me up when I’m asleep at 8:30 at night, because Mika and I, of course, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’ll just go. ‘Hello? Yes, sir,’ insisted the longtime MSNBC host. “And about an hour later, he will aggressively and very effectively give me point by point by point about how my op-ed was flawed.”

In February 2024, Scarborough melted down over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s observation that the president was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who could not recall what years he served as vice president, inexplicably denouncing Hur as a Trumper who had published a “bad-faith” report.

In March 2024, Scarborough played the part of wingman, telling Morning Joe viewers that Biden “exercises every day” and urged them to “look how fit and trim he is.”

His wife was no better.

Brzeznski also reliably misinformed her audience about Biden’s ability to carry out his duties prior to his shell shocking debate performance. In February 2023, for example, Brzezinski cited the fact that her mother “was using a chainsaw” in her 80s to make the case for a second Biden term.

But she even had the temerity to carry on the ruse in the days after it.

“It’s the, ‘let’s just immediately pull this, let’s end this, let’s find someone else,'” she mused the morning after. “That attitude toward this…that is what I’m saying slow down on because, again, there’s no spinning it, but let’s be balanced. Let’s, for once, show some balance in a media world that is so shrill with imbalance.

The following Monday, Brzezinski opened the show with a 15-minute de facto Biden campaign ad that saw her deplore the “chorus of Biden doubters,” call him “the man for this moment,” and assert that “so many draw hope from his empathy and his ability to have perspective, even right now, and to persevere when he is completely counted out.”

It is in this context that Scarborough and Brzezinski chatted matter-of-factly about the Biden campaign’s implosion like historians opining on the causes of an ancient civilization’s collapse.

How shamelessly cynical — and utterly unsurprising.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.