Supplemental: Mika [HEART] her darling Trump!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2015

One of her strangest outings: We’ve had this reaction before as we’ve watched the first half hour of Morning Joe:

If you didn’t assume it couldn’t be true, you’d really think that Mika and Joe must be on the Trump payroll—that their daily TV program must be some sort of closeted infomercial.

We thought Mika was especially strange today. But that thought has occurred to us in the past, so naked is this program’s pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda.

Consider this ten-minute tape from this morning’s program, in which Mika becomes annoyed with “the likes of” Cokie Roberts and Nicholas Confessore when they make some anodyne comments about videotape of Trump.

At the start of the segment, Trump is shown responding to questions at yesterday’s No Labels meeting in New Hampshire. His answers have virtually nothing to do with actual policy questions.

Confessore and Roberts both note this obvious fact. Roberts says you can’t knock the guy for giving such answers, since it’s working for him.

It soon becomes clear that Mika is annoyed with what has been said. In the following statement, she describes her guests, at several points, as being part of a disdainful “intellectual elite.”

She whines about the fact that they aren’t pro-life, like the straight-shooting Trump.

Mika's statements would be unsurprising if they came from a second-tier Republican spokesperson. The statements are amazing coming from Mika, who is cast on this infomercial-like program as a liberal who wants to see a Democrat win next year.

Some of this language doesn’t quite parse. We’ve recorded what was actually said, starting at the 7:30 mark:

BRZEZINSKI (10/13/15): So I fully appreciate the disdain in Cokie’s voice. And [speaking to Confessore] your, like, looking at that going, “What just happened?”

I do! I fully appreciate where you’re coming from on that.

But I have to say, we watch things in terms, “Oh goodness! OK. How is this going to play in that audience? And how is it going to play across the country? And how is it going to impact the polls? What exactly is he doing?”

I don’t even think he’s thinking about what he is doing. But what he was doing was winning. What he was doing was winning!

I’m telling you, those answers weren’t necessarily— they might have been disdainful among the likes of intellectual elite because they didn’t go into deep policy on equal pay, or deep policy on women. But he was right there with his answers, gave clear—“You know what? Hey! You don’t like me? I don’t really care! You don’t like my opinion? This is what it is! I’m not going to be politically correct!”

And then he gave a very clear answer on the issue of being pro-life—which I know, to most of the intellectual elite, that is horrifying.

BARNICLE: But that’s what separates his candidacy, because he gives his answers without fear.

BRZEZINSKI: He gives his answers— Thank you. Thank you. That’s what I’m trying to say.

BARNICLE: You may not like the answer, it may not be a complete answer, but he does give it without fear.

BRZEZINSKI: Thank you.

Mika’s resentment of the disdainful intellectual elite makes her sound like a second-rate conservative spokesperson. She seemed to vouch for the fact that Candidate Trump won't be politically correct.

We were especially struck by the resentment she voiced about Trump’s statement that he is pro-life, which no one criticized him for.

In the passage shown above, Mike Barnicle jumped in to help. Moments later, so did the reliably unctuous Willie Haskell-Geist Jr. Unctuously, he elicited another odd statement from Mika:

HASKELL-GEIST: There was no policy in that answer to that woman about equal pay, that’s true. But we can’t suddenly be shocked that those are the answers he’s giving. This is how he’s been campaigning—

BRZEZINSKI: But there’s a very interesting argument—and I’ve actually had a conversation with him privately about equal pay for equal work. And there’s a very interesting argument behind that. And if you look at—

Well.

Mika knows the real Donald Trump, the deep Trump, the one seen in private.

Mika and Trump should rent a room. To Morning Joe’s alleged liberal voice, nothing about this candidate doesn’t seem good-to-great.

What makes these comments so strange? Once again, it’s the casting! According to the liner notes, Joe is the loud, overbearing former Republican congressman. Mika is supposed to be a liberal who wants to see a Democrat retain the White House next year.

In theory, they’re providing a left/right exchange on their deeply puzzling program. Watching Mika each day, we can’t help wondering:

Is this whole program a con?

One additional point: This was a gruesome statement by Mika, delivered with an air of passive-aggressive annoyance:

I fully appreciate where you’re coming from on that. But I have to say, we watch things in terms, “Oh goodness! OK. How is this going to play in that audience? And how is it going to play across the country? And how is it going to impact the polls? What exactly is he doing?”

Is it possible that Mika and Joe should stop “watching things” that way? That they should start “watching things” by asking if the candidates' statements actually make any sense?