On Friday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman pointed out that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough laughed in 2015 after airing a clip in which President Donald Trump “mocked” her disabled colleague Serge Kovaleski.
Haberman was on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 discussing Trump’s controversial Thursday tweets in which Trump lashed out at Scarborough’s co-host and fiancee Mika Brzezinski. Trump tweeted that “low I.Q.” Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a visit to Mar-a-Lago.
Haberman said she remembered seeing Morning Joe air footage of Trump “mocking” Kovaleski in 2015.
“Joe Scarborough was laughing at that video of Trump mocking somebody,” Haberman said. “Everybody finds it funny until it’s aimed at them.”
The Times issued a statement in 2015 in which the paper said it was “outrageous” that Trump “would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters.”
Trump denied that he mocked Kovalesky, claiming he did not remember the reporter and saying Kovaleski “should stop using his disability to grandstand and get back to reporting for a newspaper that is rapidly going down the tubes”
Regarding the back and forth between Scarborough and the White House about who reached out to whom about killing a planned hit piece that the National Enquirer was set to (and eventually did) run about Scarborough’s relationship with Brzezinski, Haberman insisted that the White House, when it tries argue, for instance, that Trump’s inaugural crowd size was bigger than President Barack Obama’s, loses credibility on bigger issues.
Here is video of Scarborough laughing at the footage. A woman is also heard laughing in the clip, but it is unclear whether it is Brzezinski.