"It's a trap."

💡The moment when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Mika Brzezinski finally realize Democrats have been duped by Trump into defending violent crime in DC:

“It’s a trap!" pic.twitter.com/J3AlvIKGHA

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 13, 2025

Morning Joe restarts communications with Hitler Trump.

Morning Joe then: Donald Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler.

Morning Joe now: We met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to settle our differences. pic.twitter.com/UkfMt9ScuP

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 18, 2024

ADDED: "Defeated left-wing MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski reveal they met with Trump: ‘Time to do something different’" (NY Post).

"How brilliant is Donald J. Trump?"

Brilliant enough to call in to a JD Vance town hall and ask "How brilliant is Donald J. Trump?"

WATCH: JD Vance is currently doing a Town Hall hosted by Chris Cuomo, and Trump surprised them with a call to ask a question

Trump: "How brilliant is Donald Trump?" 😂

Vance: "This is supposed to be for undecided voters. I would hope that I have your vote, of all people." 😂… pic.twitter.com/qvy5l0aWlX

— George (@BehizyTweets) October 25, 2024

And speaking of how women feel about politics, let's hear from Mika Brzezinski:

It's finally happened. Mika has *SNAPPED* live on airpic.twitter.com/EeiNzwopeb

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) October 24, 2024

She's so earnest — or phony-earnest — about wanting women to wake up and start paying attention, but I've been paying attention every day, and I didn't think one thing in her parade of horribles was true.

You know, I said a long time ago that I thought the Democrats should put aside all the Trump-is-evil theatrics and simply engage with him on the substantive merits... if they can. Maybe they know that would be the better strategy but they lack the material to fight on the merits.

ADDED: I'm trying to find old posts of mine where I begged Democrats to fight on the substantive merits, and the first thing that turned up, from December 14, 2023, was "Predicted Electoral College vote: 312 Trump, 226 Biden" ("Here's the Electoral College interactive map, where I generated the numbers used in my post title").

I invite you to look at the Real Clear Politics "No Toss-Ups" Electoral College map right now:

I got it right on the nose! 312 to 226. 

And here's what I wrote last December:

The demonization of Trump has not worked for Democrats. I think Glenn Greenwald put it aptly (reacting to the polls I've displayed above): 

"The more Trump is indicted, the more he rises in the polls. That correlation doesn't prove causation, but what it does prove is that most Americans have so much distrust in the justice system and DOJ that even felony indictments don't undermine Trump's standing with the public."

My advice, not that I think Democrats would or even could follow it: Fight Trump on the substantive merits of the issues. Show us that you deserve the power you seek.

I was right all the way down to the prediction that they wouldn't do it and the belief — which I still hold — that they couldn't do it even if they wanted.

If you had to take the over/under on Trump 312/Harris 226, you'd take the over.

"So I Went On Bill Maher And This Happened..."

And here's the insane "Morning Joe" appearance from 2013 that he talks about (in which Mika Brzezinski acts like a complete idiot):

"The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump."

Writes Kara Swisher in "Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain/The president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules" (NYT).

The "conspiracy theory" in question is that Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of a woman long ago. The woman's husband wants some Trump tweets deleted. There's also the idea — pushed by Mika Brzezinski (Scarborough's wife) — that Twitter should throw Trump off the site entirely.

But what exactly did Trump tweet? The woman's husband is quoted saying that Trump "allud[ed] to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough." Alluded! We need the text of the tweet, but, incredibly, it's not in this long column.

I had to look it up. I found: "A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!"

One reason not to quote the tweet is that it's just asking questions, and we'd have to spend time going into a subject we don't know. The woman's husband implies that the questions have all been asked and answered, but all he says is that there is one "falsehood" — that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman (Lori Klausutis). But Trump didn't tweet that statement. Does the debunking of the idea that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman make the things Trump actually did tweet into the sort of statement Twitter should take down?

First, Trump just asked questions, but even if we reject that loophole — I'm only asking! — it is true, I take it, that the woman suffered a blow to her head, that her body was found under his desk, that he left Congress suddenly, that it's a big topic of discussion in Florida, and that "Morning Joe" has bad ratings. And it's nothing but inane opinion to call Joe Scarborough "a Nut Job." Trump is called things like that constantly on Twitter, so there's no way there's a Twitter policy against calling famous people mentally ill.

"... used them beautifully... dumped them nicely..."

“Concast” should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough. I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is “nuts”. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2020

I don't know what he's talking about or how that #OPENJOECOLDCASE hashtag is doing. I see the top trending hashtag this morning is DON LEMON, and I know what that is....

Don Lemon with zero fucks left.pic.twitter.com/kbC0zghhzB

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 4, 2020

Anyway.... "used them beautifully... dumped them nicely" — that's pretty cruel. And what the point of stating something "on the record" and then using quotes — "nuts"?

Ah... here's an article explaining what that "Florida Cold Case" is. From Mediaite:

The “Florida Cold Case” here is the death of Lori Klausutis, the 28-year-old intern found dead in Scarborough’s district office when he was still serving as U.S. Congressman for Florida’s 1st Congressional district. An autopsy concluded that Klausutis’ death happened after heart problems caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk in 2001.

Even though there were no indications of foul play or suicide, the tragedy prompted a number of conspiracy theories....

I've got to say, Trump's tweet this morning is some really trashy trash talk. Psycho... Crazy... "nuts"....

Mika Brzezinski confronts Joe Biden with the Tara Reade allegation and he says "unequivocally" that it "never happened."

UPDATED: The original post did not have the full interview, so I want to put this at the top:



ORIGINAL POST BEGINS HERE:



So there you have it — his flat denial. No follow up question, no grilling. Just the denial that is exactly what you would expect. No signs of lying jumped out at me. I do wonder if it's something that he could have forgotten. The flat denial implies that if it had happened he would have remembered. He's not asked if he remembers Tara Reade or knows what happened with her employment in his office. I'm not positive this is the entire clip.

Also: At the beginning of the clip, Biden coughs into his closed fist. Not a good look for the coronavirus era, but no reason not to assume that he washed his hands thoroughly afterwards.

ADDED: Based on this WaPo article, I see that the MSNBC clip above is not the full interview. And I see that Biden has issued a written statement, and, in that he "called on the National Archives to release any record of a complaint Reade says she filed." The statement asserts, "If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there."

On "Morning Joe," according to WaPo, Brzezinski does proceed to grill Biden:

“I’m not going to question her motive,” Biden said of Reade, adding, “I don’t understand it.”

The presumptive nominee said he has never asked anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement. And Biden said that “women have a right to be heard,” but that “in the end in every case, the truth is what matters.”

In a tense exchange late in the interview, Biden repeatedly resisted the idea of querying his Senate papers at the University of Delaware, saying that they do not contain personnel records.

“Why not just do a search for Tara Reade’s name?” Brzezinski asked.

“Who does that search?” Biden replied. Brzezinski suggested the university or a commission could conduct it. Biden then returned to his initial point — that any complaint would be contained in the archives, not his papers.

That sounds evasive. Yes, if she said she filed a complaint, so the complaint should be in the archive, let's do that search, but why not also search his papers, not to find the complaint, but to see if there is anything at all about her? A big part of her allegations is that she was mistreated as an employee in retaliation for her failure to respond to sexual demands on her. Maybe the papers would show that she had other problems as an employee that justified the consequences she experienced.

He said the papers contained “confidential conversations” with the president and heads of state and he did not want them to be made public while he was still an actively pursuing public office.

Asked what he would say to Reade directly if he could talk to her, Biden responded, “This never ever happened. I don’t know what is motivating her.”

That too is evasive. The question — as paraphrased in this article — isn't why do you think she's accusing you, but how would you speak with her. He immediately inserts his denial. Maybe that's what he'd say to her: This never ever happened. I don’t understand what is motivating you. ADDED: Watching the entire interview — the video at the top of the post — I see that Brzezinski did ask Biden what he thought was motivating Reade.

AND: Let's read Joe Biden's written statement. It begins with 4 paragraphs expressing pride in his role introducing the Violence Against Women Act 25 years ago. He proceeds to talk about his role, as Vice President, starting the “It’s on Us” campaign, addressing college men and telling them that "they had a responsibility to speak out" — "Silence is complicity." He considers himself "a voice, an advocate, and a leader for the change in culture that has begun but is nowhere near finished." And:

"Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?"

That's a headline in the NYT. A column by Frank Bruni.

How sanctimonious and simultaneously blind do you need to be to proclaim the soullessness of another human being?

I mean, it's tempting sometimes. I was just driving home from a glorious sunrise...



... and I had the satellite radio on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski was reading some news story, got the word "humane" and pronounced it "hoo-mane." I wondered, is she even there? Robot mode. But I didn't question her humanity. Hoomanity.

The subheadline on that Bruni piece is — I am not kidding — "He’s not rising to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s shriveling into nothingness."

Well, it's a column. It's subjective. Bruni is seeing the President shriveling into nothingness. Wishful thinking. Why won't this man disappear entirely?

Do you remember President George W. Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? ... Do you remember President Barack Obama’s news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people, including 20 children, dead? I do.... Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

And maybe because you hate him so much you can't see it. I see it every day when I watch the press briefing.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.

I could sense... I can’t... me with a sorrow and a rage... I quite frankly don’t know....

Bruni knows he's talking about his own subjective experience, but he cannot stop. He insists on dehumanizing his adversary.

[Trump stressed that masks are] voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the coronavirus.”

That is, Bruni is picturing Trump catching the coronavirus and dying. The epitaph says "too cool." Speaking of cool, that's cold, Mr. Bruni. Is this what entertains the readers of the NYT? Standing back, looking for the bad, and laughing at the image of Trump dead and buried?

This is more than a failure of empathy....

Thanks for writing a next line that was the very thing I was thinking about you.

It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.

Hoomanity. It's that thing you say the people you don't like don't have. It's a wonderful foundation for building a political ideology.

In The Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.”

Oh! Bruni is copying Gerson's idea. Trying to get in on the hot Trump-hating over there in America's other newspaper.

Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.

I see Bruni stumbling through the canyons of his mind. There's an outpost up ahead... your next stop — the Trump Hotel. Columnists check in. But they never check out.

The Howard Schultz meme: He's dumb.

These responses are quite Trumpian. Kind of amazing how little baseline knowledge Schultz has about American politcs. https://t.co/Ec6ugFRtjS

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 30, 2019

But isn't everyone an idiot when you really look? You're calling someone stupid, and you're writing "Mike Brzezinski."

MORE: More crushing ignorance from HS:

Morning Joe Asks Howard Schultz How Much a Box of Cheerios Costs. He Does Not Know. https://t.co/pWamUnIpge pic.twitter.com/R3DkHyV3xt

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) January 30, 2019

I'm monitoring MSNBC in the run-up to the press conference with Trump and Theresa May...

... and they cannot stop talking about the balloon. Every 10th word is "balloon." Meade keeps saying the balloon looks like Mika Mika Brzezinsk (as the balloon and Mika appear on split screen).

In case you don't know what I'm talking about:

“It’s going to swamp his Twitter feed. There’s no way he doesn’t see this,” an organizer said of the "Trump Baby." https://t.co/xhUkayWXck

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 13, 2018

ADDED: The idea is that Trump is a big baby, but they're all: "BALLOON!!!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

It is a rather cute balloon . . . it is probably going to be repurposed by Trump supporters into pro-Trump material, like that Trump chicken balloon.

That's what I thought too. For anyone who likes Trump, the balloon — if you stare at it long enough — feels pro-Trump. It's the magic of Trump. All the negative energy gets flipped into positive.

AND: I listened to the whole press conference. Great questions. Great support from Trump to Theresa May. Loved the byplay about the reporter's hat. Loved all the "fake news" shtick.

Meade monitors "Morning Mika"...

... and calls me over to see this...



The chattering and overtalking on TV is so annoying, I say, and then Meade is watching on mute with close captioning. He declares it to be very amusing because he's focusing on the facial expressions.

"They're so self-satisfied. You really see it. You see them overacting and over-emoting for each other, for themselves. It's big jerk circle. It's a circle of jerks. ♪♫♬In the ciiiiiircle of jerks♪♫♬."

Meade's musical reference:

Mika kicks Michael Wolff off the show.

"You might be having a fun time playing a little game dancing around this, but you're slurring a woman... It's disgraceful," she says as he fudges and bullshits. Mika gets irritated, in her subtle, I'll-just-move-one-sheet-of-paper-from-here-to-there style, and comes out with: "If you don't get it – and you don't get what we're talking about – I’m sorry. This is awkward. You're here on the set with us, but you're done."

UPDATE: Afterwards, Wolff "went on Twitter, and, as if determined to prove correct anyone who doubted his judgments about the way men speak about women, wrote, 'My bad, the President is right about Mika.' President Trump has called her 'low I.Q. Crazy Mika' and 'dumb as a rock Mika,' and claimed to have seen her 'bleeding badly from a face-lift.' If being criticized for a couple of minutes can persuade Wolff to sign on to all that, then his book deserves more skepticism than it has already earned." (From The New Yorker.)

A great cold open on "SNL" last night.

I particularly love Fred Armisen as Michael Wolff. It's also wonderful to see Bill Murray as Steve Bannon, and I'm told the Mika and Joe stuff is spot on. I find Kate McKinnon very funny here, but I don't know "Morning Joe" enough to see how closely she's tracking Mika Brzezinski, but Meade tells me it's a great impersonation:



I'm told I should watch some YouTubes of "Morning Joe" so I can understand the Mika and Joe dynamic, but trying to extrapolate from this imitation, it seems that the man (Joe) is inflated with self-importance and the woman (Mika) serves the role of continually deflating him in this weird combination of disrespecting him and being sexually attracted to him. Did I get that right? I don't know, but I laughed a lot and am prompted to believe I would laugh even more if I understood the target that is Mika Brzezinski.

What really cracked me up was Fred Armisen, whom I couldn't recognize for a good while because of the bald head but also because he assumed the ridiculous, infuriating demeanor of Michael Wolff so perfectly.

I laughed even more at the "My Drunk Boyfriend" sketch, which was about full-size robot dolls that are actually like your drunk boyfriend. The physical comedy is really excellent:

"'Morning Joe' co-host Mika Brzezinski upset women who accused Mark Halperin of sexual harassment..."

"... when she reported on air Friday that she had tried to arrange a meeting so the now-disgraced political analyst could apologize," Fox News reports.

Brzezinski said Halperin, who was fired in October after being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, was "more than willing to meet with his accusers and apologize with them face-to-face." The MSNBC star said she “actually tried to offer him to them” but the women “don't want to talk to him.”

[A] letter [from] 10 of Halperin’s accusers... states that Brzezinski was “inappropriate” for suggesting such a meeting and that she has a conflict of interest because of her “personal friendship” with Halperin.... “Sexual harassment and assault is illegal in the workplace, and represents a violation of the policies and standards of NBC News," the letter said. "It is an unethical and harmful request to ask that sexual assault victims confront their accusers in person and, in particular, on live TV.”...

Brzezinski issued a statement late Friday... "In the case of Mark... I realize that it is not my place.... As a victim of sexual assault, I understand that each individual's case is different. This is up to the victims, some of whom I've been in contact with.... ”

Brzezinski was promoting what in a criminal case is a right of the accused: the right to confront the witnesses against you. It tends to be an ordeal for the accuser, and it's certainly not a ritual of healing. Victims of sexual assault have sought protection from that ordeal, such as by using one-way closed circuit television. See Maryland v. Craig, a case with a famous Scalia dissent:

The Court makes the impossible plausible by recharacterizing the Confrontation Clause, so that confrontation (redesignated "face-to-face confrontation") becomes only one of many "elements of confrontation." The reasoning is as follows: The Confrontation Clause guarantees not only what it explicitly provides for -- "face-to-face" confrontation -- but also implied and collateral rights such as cross-examination, oath, and observation of demeanor (TRUE); the purpose of this entire cluster of rights is to ensure the reliability of evidence (TRUE); the Maryland procedure preserves the implied and collateral rights (TRUE), which adequately ensure the reliability of evidence (perhaps TRUE); therefore the Confrontation Clause is not violated by denying what it explicitly provides for -- "face-to-face" confrontation (unquestionably FALSE). This reasoning abstracts from the right to its purposes, and then eliminates the right.

Trump blames NBC bosses for his troubles with Joe and Mika and points to the ousting of Greta Van Susteren as evidence.

Trump, not backing down, keeps tweeting about Joe and Mika, but he's not just standing his ground. He's advancing the theory. Here's his most recent tweet, from 2 hours ago:

Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!

That's his second shot at NBC this morning. Earlier he tweeted:

Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC & @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ 'Trump hate!'

In between those 2 tweets, he attacked that other network:

I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It's about time!

Those 3 tweets cohere into the theory that the bosses at NBC — like the bosses at CNN who were "exposed" in the Project Veritas video — are not following decent principles of journalism but chasing ratings. They think "Trump hate" works and they've pushed Joe, Mika, and Greta and only Greta had the guts and ethics to say no. Mika and Joe wouldn't be doing Trump hate on their own — they're not bad people — but they've got to perform in the ratings and they're following orders.

That's the theory I read in this morning's tweets.

The theory Althouse outlines is...

... what Trump is essentially saying and he's probably right or close to right.

... not what Trump is saying but it's a pretty good theory of what's happening at NBC.

... what Trump is essentially saying but it's probably wrong or nearly completely wrong.

... not what Trump is saying and probably wrong or nearly completely wrong.

... an incoherent effort at finding coherence in something that's just a big embarrassing mess.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"It suddenly hit me. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore."

Said Generoso Pope, Jr., the founder of The National Enquirer, who had begun the newspaper as "a serious, upscale weekly," but "had an epiphany one day when he found himself gazing at a particularly gruesome traffic accident, and noticed how many other people had also stopped to stare."

He's quoted in a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin that has a title — "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump/The tabloid is defined by its predatory spirit. Why has it embraced the President with such sycophantic zeal?" — that makes it seem pretty blood-and-gore — metaphorically, anyway. But it turns out to be more of a — how you say? — nothingburger.

I did though enjoy reading about the early history of the paper. I remember stealing glimpses of The Enquirer at newsstands back in the mid-60s, when it was considered too evil for a decent person to look at. As The New Yorker puts it:

In the fifties and sixties, the [blood and gore] formula was a resounding success. With headlines like “mom boiled her baby and ate her” and photographs of purported freaks of nature, such as two-headed babies, circulation soared to more than a million. 

I can still remember getting drawn into the story of a murderer who cut up a body and put the head in some kind of box and threw a foot out the window. There was a photograph of a severed foot. Was it still wearing the cut-off end of a nylon stocking? 

Pope had a second epiphany in the late 60s which was to sell the paper at the supermarket checkout display.

This required him to scale back the gore (which was unacceptable to the markets) and amp up the celebrity coverage. The transformation proved a boon to business. So did a television campaign featuring the catchphrase “Enquiring minds want to know.”

The grisly gunk was gone, and we got the insane, cheerful message that we were sorta intellectual — "enquiring" — to want to know pointless crap about celebrities:



Those were simpler times, back when Princess Di was blasting heartless Fergie for inadequate baby care. Today, the Enquirer is run by David Pecker, and most of Toobin's article is about Pecker, who is friends with Donald Trump, but Toobin didn't dig up anything shocking about the Pecker-n-Trump bromance, so I left the table still hungry.

Fortunately, The National Enquirer popped into the news today: "Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough’s Extortion Claim Against Donald Trump and the National Enquirer." That too is by Toobin in The New Yorker. Trump used extortion against Mika and Joe??

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have just caused a sensation by claiming, in effect, that they were extorted by Donald Trump and the National Enquirer. According to their op-ed in the Washington Post, White House staffers told them that the tabloid would run damaging stories about them unless they could persuade the President to intervene.

At that link to the WaPo op-ed, the word "extortion" is not used. It just says:

This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.

Why would White House staffers be "desperate" to save Mika and Joe from a negative article? And where's the "extortion"? Extortion is a legal term. It is the actual or threatened use of "force, violence, or fear" to obtain property from someone. I think Toobin's idea is that the threat and what was to be extorted with the threat were both press coverage: Trump was trying to get good coverage from Joe and Mika by threatening them with bad coverage from The Enquirer.

But in Mika and Joe's telling, it was only Trump's staffers urging them to get Trump to intercede with the third party — The Enquirer — that was threatening to harm them. But it takes another few leaps to get to the idea that The Enquirer was in cahoots with Trump, cooking up a negative story against Mika and Joe to work as a threat that would bring them begging to Trump and that if they had done so, Trump would have extracted from them a commitment to give him good coverage on their show.

As Toobin puts it:

[I]t’s certainly possible that there was some connection between the Enquirer story about Scarborough and Brzezinski and Trump’s quest for favorable coverage from “Morning Joe.” Bizarrely enough, Trump’s most recent tweet suggests that he served as the middleman between the anchors and the magazine, though he denies that he did ultimately intervene.

The recent Trump tweet is: "Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show."

What a screwy mess! I attempted to watch "Morning Joe" today, but it was so dumb and slow-moving I couldn't put up with it. In the little I saw, I was mostly fascinated by the visual: Mika and Joe looked incredibly glum, positively morose. What's the problem? Why aren't they happy that they got under the President's skin and have everyone talking about them? How can it hurt? Is it just that people are motivated to dig up the terrible story that The Enquirer in fact published about them earlier this month? Or is there something more to this — some trap Trump has set with his oddball tweet about Mika's "bleeding badly from a face-lift"?

Everybody stopped to stare. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.

When is a facelift not a facelift?

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough respond to Donald Trump's infamous "bleeding badly from a face-lift" tweet:

"Putting aside Mr. Trump's never-ending obsession with women's blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal," they said in the column. "And though it is no one's business, the president's petulant personal attack against yet another woman's looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching 'Morning Joe' on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact."

I think the "obsession with women's blood" is fascinating and deserves a lot of attention. It's not just Trump's obsession, but everyone who hopped onto the task of making that tweet the most important event in the world. Blood is vivid and it means so much to us. If it bleeds, it leads is the classic saying about journalism. Look! Blood!



It's very primal. And Trump has an instinct to reach out and grab us in our deep, secret, sensitive place. And we let him! Come on, everybody. Let's talk about how Mika is bleeding. It's like a magnet.

But I want to talk about the fussy distinction Mika and Joe made between a facelift and "a little skin under her chin tweaked." If you've just gotten a little skin under your chin tweaked, have you not gotten a facelift? Your chin is part of your face, but I guess once you go around to the underside of the chin, you're off the face and onward toward the neck, then technically it's not a "facelift."

But I went to the website of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, to the page "Facelift" and it lists 3 kinds of incisions, "Traditional Facelift," "Limited Incision," and "Neck Lift." So it looks to me as though the expert terminology would include "a little skin under her chin tweaked" in the category "facelift."

And by the way, why are Mika and Joe acting as if it's so shameful for a woman to get a facelift? Speaking of making a "personal attack" on a "woman's looks," they seem to be implying that it's insulting say that a woman has had a facelift. Does Mika mean to lord her superiority over all the other celebrities who have had more surgery? Trump's tweet stressed the bleeding. The facelift played a secondary role as the source of the bad bleeding. He didn't say: Ugh, Mika had a facelift. He said she was imposing herself on me at a New Year's Eve party when she was bleeding badly from facelift incisions.

Mika's answer was that the incisions — which are back around the temples and ears (as I understand it from the plastic surgeons' website) — were only for the purpose of lifting the skin below the face. By presenting that as a defense to Trump's tweet, she is (unwittingly?) introducing the view that a facelift is a stain on a woman's reputation. Isn't that the retrograde, sexist idea?

I don't think Trump is anti-facelift. I assume women in his life have had facelifts and he's quite familiar with the process. That's probably why he recognized the source of the blood.

If there was blood.

Now, I'm speculating that Mika deliberately imposed on him when she was visibly bleeding to see if she could get the a fame boost — a famelift — like the one that had made Megyn Kelly such a big deal so recently. That was back on New Year's Eve, though, and now, I'm speculating that Trump deliberately delayed his reaction until Megyn Kelly's narrative had arced and cratered.

Part 3 of the Project Veritas attack on CNN.

This time the victim of secret filming is Jimmy Carr, who is said to be the Associate Producer for CNN’s "New Day." James O'Keefe tells us Carr is based in Brooklyn, and urges Paul Farhi — the WaPo writer who made much of the failure to say that the victim in Part 1 was based in Atlanta — to take note that he's naming the place.

In the new video, Carr purports know the opinion of everyone at CNN: "We’re all on, 90% of us are on board with just the fact that  [Donald Trump] is crazy." And:

"On the inside, we all recognize he is a clown that he is hilariously unqualified for this. He’s really bad at this and that he does not have America’s best interests. We recognize he’s just fucking crazy... He’s not actually a Republican. He just adopted that because that was the party he thought he could win in. He doesn’t believe anything that these people believe. The man is on his third wife. I guarantee you he’s paid for abortions. He doesn’t give a shit about abortion. He doesn’t care about gay marriage."

And this is especially interesting right now, when everyone purports to be shocked that Donald Trump tweeted that Mika Brzezinski was "bleeding badly from a face-lift": Carr says that Kellyanne Conway "looks like she got hit with a shovel."

Trump tweets that Mika Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."

Just this morning:

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

... to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

Wow. That's harsh. He must know facelifts to be so confident he can diagnose the source of the bleeding. She had blood coming out of her wherever... face.

Why's he suddenly going back to New Year's Eve? And what's with all the "Crazy" and "Psycho"? It seems... crazy and psycho.

Here's the NYT story on the subject:

The graphic nature of the president’s suggestion that Ms. Brzezinski had undergone plastic surgery was met with immediate criticism on social media...

Mr. Trump’s comment on Thursday echoed a contentious remark that he made about another female television anchor, Megyn Kelly, during last year’s presidential campaign. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Mr. Trump said, a remark that was widely seen as a reference to menstruation and drew rebukes from women’s groups.

Yes, widely seen as a reference to menstruation, but who knew he might have been talking about facelifts?

Over at The Washington Post, Callum Borchers is calling it a "blatantly sexist attack." Ridiculous. Men get facelifts too. In fact, it's Borchers who's supplying the sexism:

When Trump hits Brzezinski and Scarborough on Twitter, he hits Brzezinski harder, more personally and in a way that seems designed to portray her as insecure (“facelift”) and unintelligent (“low IQ”) — as a side piece who would not be on TV if not for her romantic relationship with Scarborough, to whom she was recently engaged.

Trump didn't say "sidepiece" or characterize plastic surgery as a marker of insecurity.  That's Borchers projecting. What I read in that tweet is that he found it ludicrous that the person trying to insinuate herself into his company was bleeding from the face. That doesn't sound at all like insecurity. Quite the opposite.

"She would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say ‘Blech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much."

She = Kellyanne Conway, according to Mika Brzezinski (reported in the NYT).