Inside Donald Trump's long-standing feud with Morning Joe

Cable news network MSNBC’s star morning host is taking partisanship to a new level in the 2024 presidential campaign cycle as he increasingly ‘freaks out’ at the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House, media critics charge.

Joe Scarborough, host of the left-wing channel's Morning Joe, has long railed against Donald Trump as a threat to democracy in a bitter personal feud dating back nearly a decade.

But seasoned media watchers have been left stunned by his recent attacks on other news outlets, left- and right-leaning alike, daring to run pieces critical of Kamala Harris as the polls trend in Donald Trump's direction.

‘They sound desperate because they are desperate, because they know that Donald Trump is winning right now,' Fox News contributor Joe Concha told DailyMail.com.

The four-hour morning show has become a bastion of the Democratic establishment with President Joe Biden routinely tuning in while doing his morning exercises to see his acolytes promote the party's talking points.

Just this past week, Scarborough tore into colleagues in the liberal media after some were unconvinced by claims that Trump fit the definition of a 'fascist'.

Kamala Harris seized on remarks by Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly suggesting that his one-time boss would 'govern like a dictator'.

'This is more than an election to see who the next president is,' Scarborough dramatically informed his viewers.

'This is an election to determine if Madisonian democracy survives.'

But the over-the-top rhetoric, ramped up as it might have been, was hardly something new.

The show quickly rallied behind Harris’ candidacy after she usurped Biden as the Democratic Party's nominee, but showed early signs of nervousness as the move failed to produce a significant poll lead.

It was more than a month before Harris agreed to a sit-down interview with anyone as she tried to surf the wave of enthusiasm, and even liberal outlets grew frustrated with her 'word salad' remarks and reluctance to explain her policies.

Scarborough denounced the complaints as 'a lie, an absolute lie,' as he tore into Bret Stephens of the New York Times and Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal last month.

'Do you really have no shame?' he demanded.

'They're desperately trying to create the permission structure so they can vote for a man who said he was going to terminate the Constitution,' Scarborough said, referencing Trump.

‘Scarborough’s attitude is to harshly criticize any media outlet that dares to ask Harris any relevant questions regarding her candidacy,’ Concha said.

‘He will attack anyone who dares to challenge her, which is odd considering that Scarborough actually considers himself to be a journalist. He’s not. He’s a Democratic activist, plain and simple.’

Scarborough also commiserated with Harris' husband Doug Emhoff after the Daily Mail exclusively reported that he cheated on his first wife with their nanny and got her pregnant and also that he slapped a girlfriend.

Rather than press the second gentleman on the stunning reports, which hit at major planks of his wife's campaign, he posed the questions as if Emhoff were the victim.

'I'm just curious,' Scarborough asked his guest.

'I'm just wondering, how do you all stay centered, how do you stay disciplined and not really go off and not really push back hard at these things?'

'It's all a distraction,' Emhoff easily answered. 'It's designed to get us off our game.'

Tim Graham, of NewsBusters.org, said the exchange allowed Harris' husband to dismiss the reporting without denying them.

'Doug Emhoff didn't deny it, but Scarborough was implying it was made up,' Graham told DailyMail.com this week.

'He was like, 'How do you deal with these people? It's too much!

'They [Democrats] are all very frustrated that the election is effectively tied. They are like, "Why aren't we 12 points ahead?"'

The interview capped what has been a remarkable turnaround for Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida, who swept into office on the back of Newt Gingrich's 'Republican Revolution' in 1994.

Trump was a routine contributor to Morning Joe, and Scarborough was an early cheerleader for the billionaire's maverick bid for the GOP nomination in 2016.

‘Throughout most of the 2016 campaign, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Had embraced Trump to the point they interviewed him 41 times, with a solid majority of those interviews done by phone,’ Concha recalled.

‘And they were absolutely fawning over his candidacy.

‘But once viewers turned on them, they magically changed into the most anti-Trump program on U.S. television.’

Relations soured as Trump pulled off a surprise victory in the Republican primaries and began to look like a serious challenger to the Democrats' Hillary Clinton.

'A bloody line has been crossed that cannot be ignored,' Scarborough wrote in the Washington Post as Trump's free speaking proved worryingly popular.

'Donald Trump has left the Republican Party few options but to act decisively and get this political train wreck off the tracks before something terrible happens.'

With Trump in the White House and Scarborough engaged to co-host Mika Brzezinski he began cementing his show's identity as an outpost of opposition to the new administration.

The couple even recorded a Christmas album called 'A Very Drumpf Christmas' with children's songs portraying the president as Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

It eventually attracted the attention of the president himself, who delivered a series of withering put-downs, labeling Scarborough 'Psycho Joe' and his fiancee as 'low IQ Crazy Mika', while mischievously claiming she had been 'bleeding badly from a face-lift' during a visit to his Mar-a-Lago estate.

And the feud deepened when the president revived long-debunked claims that Scarborough had been involved in the death of his former congressional staffer who was found dead on his office floor in 2001.

An autopsy found that Lori Bolterstein Klausutis, 28, had hit her head on a desk after collapsing from an undiagnosed heart-valve irregularity but Trump called for a fresh investigation into the case.

The allegations earned Trump his first rebuke from Twitter, which would eventually kick him off the platform altogether in January 2021.

'It's remarkable that we have a president who is trying to have someone prosecute the person he considers to be his chief critic in the media,' Scarborough wrote.

'That's what Putin does. That's what Orban does. That's what autocrats have been doing for centuries.' 

Trump appeared a spent force after his 2020 election defeat, facing multiple legal investigations and the rise of young challengers pledging to put the drama of his presidency in the past.

Morning Joe, meanwhile, became the forum for DC's new Democrat establishment and the most-watched morning cable news program by 2023, boosted in part by its extensive coverage of Donald Trump's legal battles.

But by 2023, Trump once again mystified his critics by turning the prosecutions to his advantage, gobbling up his GOP rivals in the primaries without even debating them.

With the scene set for a rematch of the 2020 election between Biden and Trump, Scarborough took up arms as the former president began shining the spotlight on his 81-year-old rival's declining abilities.

'I'm about to tell you the truth,’ the host told viewers. 'And f*** you, if you can't handle the truth.

'This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years,' he went on, seemingly beyond reason ignoring the decline that by then had become obvious to most of the world.

'The defining moment of this campaign was Joe Scarborough trying to shame people for questioning Joe Biden because 'he's the best he's ever been',' Graham told Dailymail.com.

'They keep the base riled up. They are morale officers - 'Don't worry your pretty head, everything is going to be fine'.

Viewers, however, seemed unconvinced, and concerns were anything but allayed after Biden's disastrous debate with Trump threw the Democrats into turmoil on the evening of June 27.

For two months, the show became the crucible in which the future of the party was thrashed out and on which Biden made his desperate last stand.

The day after the debate Scarborough described Biden as a 'man I love', and the president phoned in on July 8 to reassure him that 'I'm not going anywhere'.

'I'm not letting up, Joe. I'm not letting up even a little bit,' Biden told the host.

Scarborough began rallying his supporters, even echoing Donald Trump in accusing Democrats of fomenting a coup.

'Democrats, you believe, may now be doing the same thing that Donald Trump tried to do in 2020, and that is overthrow the popular will of Democratic voters,' he asked one guest.

'You know, I haven't heard even President Biden go that far,' noted NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.

'It may be he was trying to channel Biden or advise him a little bit about some of the rhetoric there.'

'The role they've played is just doing the bidding of the Biden White House and the Biden campaign,' one Democratic consultant told the Washington Post at the time.

Scarborough continued to defend the president even after the pressure for his removal became irresistible, and former speaker Nancy Pelosi chose the program to deliver her lethal demand that Biden 'make that decision'.

The president bowed to the inevitable and Scarborough, without missing a beat, hitched his wagon to Kamala Harris as the VP climbed unopposed to the top of the Democratic ticket.

'Being against Donald Trump is their bread and butter,' said Graham.

‘I think they are sincere in thinking that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but (Scarborough) started out as a Republican congressman and for 10 years made a big show of being the only Republican in the room.

'And now he is the last of the red-hot Democrats.'

Harris, indeed, has signaled her gratitude for Scarborough's unbending support, telling Howard Stern 'I love that guy' in an interview on October 10.

'I don't agree with him on every issue, but we agree on the most important at this moment, for sure,' she added.

And the agreement seems to have deepened as the campaign reaches its final crucial days with Trump's supporters seemingly impervious to appeals on policy or personality.

Biden made Trump's supposed threat to democracy a centerpiece of his aborted campaign, but Harris preferred to portray her opponent as a figure of ridicule.

Now the issue is front and center of Democrat messaging, with Scarborough moving in step.

‘In recent weeks, they’ve only turned up the reckless rhetoric while completely ignoring the fact that there were assassination attempts on Trump’s life over the summer,’ said Concha.

Trump hit back at Scarborough this week for accusing the former president of threatening to arrest his show's producers.

'Nobody said that,' Trump told Fox News, before hinting at the reasons for one of the most toxic relationships in politics.

'Look, Joe's a sick puppy. I know him well,' he explained.

'I was friendly with him and with Mika.

'But at a certain point — and it doesn't matter why — but I didn't want to do it anymore with them. And they're not too happy about it.

'He says a lot of things like that. I think they're unethical, but who knows?'

Graham said Scarborough and the program he leads are now simply struggling with blowback from the hyperbolic language they helped pioneer.

'We're all amazed by them freaking out over Donald Trump talking about "the enemy within,"' he said. 'They have been calling him the enemy within since the moment he was elected.

'It goes back aways, because they were quite supportive in 2015. This is the thing that they do. They say they want Donald Trump to be the candidate because he's easy to beat, and then when he is elected they call him Adolf Hitler.

'Well if he's Adolf Hitler why did you support him as a candidate?

'The worst thing about this is that he's actually been president for four years and we didn't have an American Reich. There's an entire political establishment to restrain him.'

And Scarborough looks set to remain at the heart of that establishment even if his nemesis triumphs.

‘When you have a job in cable news and you’re making millions of dollars it’s not really going to affect you,' said Graham.

‘You only really get upset if someone sends illegal migrants to your Nantucket market.’

But what will viewers see if their host is thwarted in his determination to keep Trump out of the White House?

'More freak outs,' said Graham.