Mika Brzezinski on Her Falling Out with Trump and the 'Sadness' of His Presidency

Mika Brzezinski opens up about facing the ire of the president in a lengthy new New York magazine profile with fiancé Joe Scarborough

Photo: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Mika Brzezinski wasn’t ruffled by the president’s vicious personal Twitter attacks against her last month – but says the low-blow was “just another thing you put on the shelf of sadness about this presidency.”

The Morning Joe star opened up about being the subject of some of President Donald Trump‘s infamous tweets in a new, lengthy New York magazine profile alongside fiancé and co-host Joe Scarborough.

“I’m glad I’m at kind of a more confident, comfortable place in my life,” Brzezinski told the outlet. “I think if this had happened when I was, like, 30, it might’ve been really painful, but I’m 50. And I’ve been through stuff that matters, you know? So it is just face-shaming. It’s just so silly. It’s unbelievable.”

On June 29, Trump wrote on Twitter, “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.”

He added of Brzezinski, “She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

According to New York, Scarborough and Trump were something like “family friends” as recently as April 2016 — when Scarborough named a pet rabbit given to him by Brzezinski “Donald Fluffy Trump” after the then-GOP hopeful. But as the couple’s criticism of Trump increased on their Morning Joe talk show, the friendship began to deteriorate.

When it culminated with Trump’s Twitter attack last month, Brzezinski said that “everyone” on the Morning Joe set at the time looked “really uncomfortable.”

“They were all averting their eyes. I was like, ‘It’s funny!’ ” she recalled.

According to the New York Magazine profile, Brzezinski admitted only when pressed that Trump’s comments made her feel “self-conscious.”

“I was like, ‘Do I have a huge growth coming out of my head?’ ” she said.

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Trump’s tweets came after Scarborough and Brezinski spent part of their 8 o’clock hour mocking Trump — his ego and his “teensie” hands — for hanging fake TIME covers of himself in his golf clubs. Also, Brezinski added at the time, for “lying every day and destroying the country.”

Responding to Trump’s tweets on-air, Brzezinski said in June, “I’m fine. My family brought me up really tough.” (Her father, renowned diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, served two presidents.)

“He has a fixation. It does worry me about the country,” she added of Trump at the time. “He appears to have a fragile, impetuous, childlike ego that he can’t take it. It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played. He is so easily played by a cable news host.”