The Battle Between Donald Trump & Morning Joe, Explained

Not even the nation’s current health crisis can stop President Donald Trump from backing down from a fight — especially one he started. The President has been engaged in a battle of words with MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough over Twitter for the last three weeks, and was finally called out on air for his actions by Scarborough on his show Monday morning.

Following Scarborough’s reporting stating that Trump was six points behind former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the polls, Trump responded with a completely unrelated attack on Scarborough. The president took to Twitter demanding that Comcast, the cable provider of Morning Joe, reopen the case of Lori Klausutis, a former intern who worked with the host. In 2001, Klausutis was found dead in Scarborough’s Congressional office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Klausutis’ cause of death was actually an undiagnosed heart condition. The president attempted to troll Scarborough with the hashtag #OPENJOECOLDCASE.

But, Scarborough did not take the attack in kind. Morning Joe addressed Trump’s tweet on air, referring to the president's actions as "cruel" and asking him to take a step back from his duties. Scarborough went so far as to suggest that Vice President Mike Pence should take over in the interim, and told Trump that he should "come back when you’re feeling a little better and when you can really actually focus on your job."

“You actually tweeted something extraordinarily cruel and I know you meant to be extraordinarily cruel to me by attacking me, by bringing up a conspiracy theory that has lived in the gutters of the Internet for some time now,” Scarborough stated on Morning Joe, referring to the false internet conspiracy theory that Scarborough was involved in Klausutis’ death. “You just can’t do that right now. Americans are dying every day because of it.”

Scarborough’s response to Trump on Monday is the latest back and forth between the two, whose very public spat began in late April when the latter tweeted that he had watched an episode of Morning Joe “just to see if [Scarborough] is as 'nuts' as people are saying.” Trump went on to say that he “used to do his show all the time before the 2016 election, then cut [Scarborough] off. Wasn’t worth the effort, his mind is shot!”

Scarborough, as other journalists are doing, has been consistently reporting on Trump’s ever-changing response to the presence of the coronavirus in the United States, including that the virus would be cured by April because of the uptick in heat. If that’s what it takes to go toe-to-toe with the president, he’ll never be short on opponents.