Morning Joe Trashes Trump/Kim Jong Un Meeting After Praising a Potential Meeting Between Obama and Iranian President Rouhani
It was one of the biggest foreign policy announcements of this presidency that President Donald Trump was going to meet with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un. According to South Korean national security adviser Chung Eui-yong, this meeting is entirely reliant on North Korea's commitment to "denuclearization" and that Kim Jong Un has said they will stop their missile tests.
After months of tough talk between the two world leaders, specifically about the "size" of their buttons and their nicknames for each other like "Rocket Man" and "Dotard," even the tiniest of prospects for potential peace in the Korean Peninsula is obviously something any administration would pursue and if achieved would be the biggest foreign policy accomplishment since ending the Cold War.
But if you watched Morning Joe on MSNBC, it's all one big joke to them.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski kicked off Friday morning’s show by immediately concluding that the White House's announcement regarding potential peace talks with North Korea is a "distraction" from the brewing controversy of Trump's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels. They listed the negative headlines from the resignations of White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and economic advisor Gary Cohn to the messy debate on tariffs and pointed to the front pages of various newspapers like The Washington Post who have bumped the porn star to make room for the breaking news to prove their point. Scarborough dismissed the significance of this meeting, calling it "easy."
Then in an effort to keep talking about Stormy Daniels, Brzezinski mocked the president by saying "he can't even make a deal with a porn star" let alone with the North Korean dictator.
And on top of that, The Atlantic editor and Morning Joe panelist Jeffrey Goldberg is already handing a victory to Kim Jong Un, insisting he's "getting something for nothing" simply because he's meeting with President Trump face-to-face, which is unprecedented in American politics.
It is reasonable to be skeptical or cautiously optimistic about these peace talks. After all, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all made attempts to bring peace and to prevent North Korea to become a nuclear power in the region and they all failed. And yes, there is a chance that Trump too can fail, but there's also a chance that he can succeed. If successful, North Korea's denuclearization will define Trump's presidency and will help pave the way towards his reelection in 2020.
What's so puzzling is that Morning Joe sang a drastically different tune in 2013 when a potential meeting between President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was in the works.
Long before the Obama administration struck a nuclear deal with Iran, it was questioned whether or not the two leaders would meet at the U.N. General Assembly. Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs joined the panel, referring to the reports at the time as "positive vibes" for potential peace and believing they were "exciting" and "significant."
"I think this is a lot smarter for the United States, a lot safer, and it opens up a new way to have some kind of a constructive relationship with Iran," Sachs said. “Of course, the right wing in the United States is screaming, ‘Oh my God, peace is breaking out! This is horrifying!” But the fact of the matter is this is what the American people want.”
“It's amazing the tonal shift in the last three or four weeks from brink of war to all of the sudden to a warm and fuzzier Iran," MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch reacted.
"And so much criticism!" Brzezinski exclaimed.
“At at time when everybody was just banging on Obama, how he was stumbling but somehow he kinda stumbled into a victory lap,” Deutsch continued.
“Mhm,” Brzezinski agreed.
So what changed? Both Iran and North Korea are nuclear threats. Both Rouhani and Kim Jong Un are brutal authoritarian rulers. Yet, when a potential meeting between Obama and Rouhani was in the works, it was embraced by Morning Joe and when a potential meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un is in the works, it’s dismissed as a “distraction.”
It's no secret that Scarborough and Brzezinski have a bitter relationship with the president. They went from palling along during the primaries to throwing mud at each other via Twitter. But this is a classic case of the media’s blatant double standard when it comes to a Republican president versus a Democrat. If the White House announced Thursday night that they found a cure for cancer, Morning Joe will still call it a “distraction” from what they really want to talk about, aka Stormy Daniels.
Partisans on both sides of the aisle have the same problem; they can't praise this president when he deserves praising and criticize him when he deserves criticizing at the same time. It's one or the other depending on who you're listening to. The media's animosity towards Trump is already baked in, but for them to not even throw him a bone for something that would be celebrated with a President Hillary Clinton only feeds into the American people's disdain of them will continue the distrust that exists.
No matter who you voted for in the 2016 election or how you feel about the president now, the American thing to do is to root for resolve with North Korea. And if it ends in failure, Trump will be in good company with his three previous predecessors. But Morning Joe's immediate rejection of the meeting in less than 24 hours since it was announced was one-dimensional, laughable, and shameful.












