Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley ridiculed MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Monday after they revealed they met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The famous TV couple said they met with Trump Friday to ‘restart communications’ after they spent eight years berating him as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, fascist.
‘Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him,’ Brzezinski said.
But Haley was not convinced.
‘Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings,’ she wrote on X. ‘They realized they needed Trump for their survival.’
Trump’s landslide victory cratered ratings for MSNBC, as their prime-time viewership has fallen 53 percent from October.
As a presidential candidate challenging Trump, Haley was celebrated by the show hosts on Morning Joe, but was often criticized for not doing more to publicly condemn Trump on the campaign trail.
‘That says a lot Nikki,’ Brzezinski bemoaned after Haley refused to comment on a prior defamation and sexual assault case against E. Jean Carroll in New York.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley mocked Morning Joe hosts for meeting with Trump
Brzezinski also berated Haley for suggesting that Biden could die in office if he was reelected president.
‘Who does this? I’m sorry, it just seems really untoward,’ she said.
But Scarborough and Brzezinski faced their own reckoning from their viewers after the met with the man they denounced as acting like Hitler.
Fellow left-leaning personalities insisted the pair were ‘bending the knee’ to visit Trump and ‘kiss the ring.’
But Scarborough said during the broadcast he felt a duty to visit with Trump in order to ‘provide you insights and better equip all of us to understand these deeply unsettling times.’
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley ahead of a cable news interview
‘Don’t be mistaken: We’re not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump,’ he tried to reassure his viewers.
Morning Joe viewers were outraged by the news, as media colleagues condemned the hosts for their apparent hypocrisy.
‘I don’t think you need to sit down for ninety minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth and be able to cover a story, so maybe they’re not journalists in the true sense, maybe they are saying they are opinion journalists,’ the View cohost Sunny Hostin noted on the show Monday.
‘Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period,’ wrote MSNBC host Katie Phang on X.com.