The View co-host Sunny Hostin has criticized MSNBC’s Morning Joe anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski for visiting President-elect Donald Trump, saying: “I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski had been highly critical of Trump leading up to the election, but the pair recently revealed they met with the president-elect on Friday for the first time in seven years to “restart communications.”
Speaking on The View on Monday (November 18), Hostin said: “Look, the bottom line is that America needs a free press that is willing to speak truth to power right now, more than ever.
“I think that we have to be very clear-eyed when we think about the president-elect and cover the president-elect, and I don’t think you need to sit down for 90 minutes at Mar-a-Lago and kiss his ring to be able to speak truth and to be able to cover a story.
“So maybe they’re not journalists in the true sense. Maybe they’re saying that they’re ‘opinion journalists’, but we have to remember that Trump is the guy who ushered in the era of fake news.
“He’s the guy who ushered in alternative facts. He is the guy who attacked three black female journalists. He’s the guy that revoked Jim Acosta’s press credentials for asking him a question…
“So, I think that this president-elect, I hate to say it... would like nothing more than to have only Fox News cover him, would like nothing more than a state-sponsored media, and I don’t think he can be trusted in the way that other presidents can be trusted. This is an aberration.”
By contrast, Hostin’s co-hosts Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin both praised Morning Joe for their attempts to reopen a line of communication with Trump.
Ana Navarro, meanwhile, backed Hostin and said: “I will never sit down with him and I don’t think I’m gonna have to make that decision because I don’t think I’m ever going to get invited.
“The truth of the matter is, as we know around this table, that it is hard to criticize and denounce the abuses of power by Donald Trump when he is president. We have been there before. It means threats, it means death threats, it means retribution against your family, it means crazy things showing up at your house, it means lawsuits, it means all sorts of things. We’ve done it before and if we have to do it again, we will do so again.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are probably looking at what Joe and Mika did and find it opportunistic. There are people who change their stripes or maybe their spots depending on who’s in power and what benefits them… Everybody has to live with their decisions. Everybody has to look in the mirror. I’m good.”
Prior to the election, Hostin delivered a passionate rebuke to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist comments about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.
