Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski and her co-host and fiancé Joe Scarborough were once close friends with President Donald Trump.
Brzezinski called him an ‘American business legend’ and a ‘real estate mogul’ who ‘hires a lot of women’ in the 2011 version of her book, Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth.
She and Scarborough interviewed the now-president on their show, and the couple made appearances at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, and even lunching at the White House shortly after his inauguration in January 2017.
But things turned sour when Brzezinski and Scarborough started criticizing Trump months later, calling him a ‘fake president’ and a ‘bumbling dope’ who had a ‘lobotomized’ administration.
Trump retaliated by Brzezinski’s looks on Twitter last year, saying that her face was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ during New Year’s celebrations at Mar-a-Lago.
And now in the latest move in their ongoing feud, Brzezinski is releasing an updated version of Knowing Your Value, in which she has erased all of Trump’s interviews and calls him a ‘struggling reality TV star’ and a ‘misogynist’.
Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski called Donald Trump a ‘real estate mogul’ who ‘hires a lot of women’ in the 2011 edition of Knowing Your Value. In a new version of the book, Brzezinski (pictured above in Trump Tower in 2016), she calls him a ‘misogyinst’ and a ‘struggling reality TV star’
Despite being close with Trump in the lead up to the 2016 election, Brzezinski claims in the forward to the updated book – now called Know Your Value – that Trump’s rise to the White House was a catalyst to her decision to revise the original copy.
The updated version is wiped clean of Brzezinski’s interviews with Trump, in which he spoke about working mothers and being aggressive in the workplace.
In addition to removing Trump’s quotes, Brzezinski’s attitude toward the president has changed compared to the original book, in which she calls him a ‘legend’ and a ‘real estate mogul’.
She also reflects on how the first edition was published by Harvey Weinstein.
In the first edition of Knowing Your Value, Brzezinski applauded Trump for hiring women in top positions within his construction projects.
‘He put a woman in charge of the construction of Trump Tower, as well as the construction of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, as a time when women in the construction field probably felt they had to try harder in order to prove themselves, he tells me,’ she wrote.
In the updated version, Brzezinski attacks Trump for having very few women in leadership positions in Washington.
‘During his first year in the White House, Donald Trump has shown a shocking disregard for appointing women in leadership positions around Washington,’ she writes. ‘The numbers paint a bleak picture of just how low our standing has slid under the new administration.’
Brzezinski adds: ‘The few women who Trump keeps in close proximity have no governmental experience and are never around when men are making the most important decisions for this “Mad Men” administration.’
Brzezinski and Scarborough interviewed Donald Trump for MSNBC during his 2016 presidential campaign
Following an interview for MSNBC in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 2016, Trump joked around with Scarborough
Also, in Brzezinski’s 2011 version of Knowing Your Value, the MSNBC host asked Trump about aggressiveness in the office and how working mothers are treated by their employers.
‘The real estate mogul and television personality Donald Trump hires a lot of women,’ she wrote at one point before delving into the topic of working mothers.
Brzezinski recalled Trump saying: ‘I think the most important thing is the children, and frankly [caring for them means taking] time away, and an employer could say she’s not giving me one hundred percent, she’s giving me eighty-four percent, and sixteen percent is going towards taking care of children. So maybe you can also understand the employer’s point of view.’
He also said that if women are too aggressive or ‘over the top’ in the workplace, he would fire them.
While Brzezinski called some of Trump’s ideas ‘cruel’, she still applauded Trump back then for his views on being ‘gender-neutral’ in the workplace.
These quotes from Trump have been erased in the new book, either cut out entirely or replaced with new interviews with other leaders.
But the new version does feature a story from Brzezinski about a lunch she and Scarborough had with Trump in 2017, shortly after the inauguration where the topic of women came up again.
She writes that she and Ivanka Trump wanted to speak about women’s issues, and in an attempt to help Trump understand, she made an ‘hourglass motion’ with her hands.
‘I felt dirty making the hourglass motion, but it was the only way to get this misogynist to understand the word [women],’ she writes. ‘Ivanka leaned forward.
Trump attacked Brzezinski’s looks on twitter last year, saying that her face was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ when they once saw each other at Mar-a-Lago
n the tweet, Trump said that he saw Brzezinski at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row over New Year’s Eve celebrations
‘Trump responded by looking at Ivanka condescendingly. ‘Oh yeah, women. Yeah honey, yeah, we will get to that.’ Just as quickly he moved on to talk about his travel ban.’
She adds: ‘It was clear that the man who spent years running beauty pageants and talking about women mainly in the context of their physical features was never going to see females as anything more than sex objects to rate on Howard Stern’s show, or as the subject of locker room talk.’
Brzezinski said that during the lunch, it was hard to get Trump to ‘focus on any topic that did not feed directly into his ego’ and break through his ‘flurry of self-aggrandizing stories and fog of disinterest’.
In the updated book’s forward, Brzezinski also includes a quote from Scarborough in which he describes Trump’s first week as president.
‘He’s gone,’ she recalls Scarborough saying. ‘What few guardrails he allowed to be put up during the campaign are completely gone now. He is about to get worse than ever.’
Prior to the 2017 inauguration, Brzezinski and Trump had a buddy-buddy friendship, which saw the MSNBC host interview the presidential candidate for her show and attend events and meetings at Mar-A-Lago and Trump Tower in New York.
Trump was a frequent on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and many people accused the program of giving him preferential treatment.
In the months after Trump entered the White House, Brzezinski and Scarborough’s relationship with the president turned sour.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted a photo of Trump speaking with Scarborough and Brzezinski at Mar-a-Lago during New Year’s celebrations in January 2017
The Morning Joe hosts called Trump a ‘fake president’ and a ‘bumbling dope’ who had a ‘lobotomized’ administration.
Trump then attacked Brzezinski’s looks on Twitter in June last year, saying that her face was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’ when they once saw each other at Mar-a-Lago.
‘I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),’ Trump wrote in 2017.
Brzezinski’s updated version of Knowing Your Value will be released by Hachette Books in September 2018
He added: ‘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!’
In her revised version of Knowing Your Value, she reflects upon the tweet and what it did to her relationship with Trump.
‘Not long after this lunch, the president of the United States would be attacking my looks via Twitter, accusing me of meeting him while ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift’,’ she writes. ‘It was a ludicrous tweet.’
She later adds: ‘There are lessons to be learned from my experience with President Donald Trump and his ridiculous tweets.’
At the beginning and end of her revised version of Knowing Your Value, Brzezinski mentions that Trump was a catalyst for her rewriting of the work.
‘What is true in the age of Trump was true when he was still a struggling reality TV star,’ she says. ‘We women, too, are often prisoners of our own fears and self-imposed limitations.’
Brzezinski’s updated version of Knowing Your Value will be released by Hachette Books in September 2018.