Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have accused Donald Trump of threatening them with a negative National Enquirer article unless they begged him not to.

MORNING JOE HOSTS SAY TRUMP WORKED WITH ENQUIRER 

The co-hosts wrote up an op-ed in which they address their relationship to the president, and their thoughts on his fitness to lead the U.S. The piece is titled, “Donald Trump Is Not Well.” “The president’s unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us,” Scarborough and Brzezinski say.

They specify an incident following the presidential election where the White House threatened them with an inflammatory article about the hosts. “During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika “neurotic” and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended,” they explained. “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.”

And despite Trump claiming he never watches Morning Joe, he had plenty to say about the show and its hosts, tweeting about it multiple times.

In the Twitter attack that Trump waged on the morning show yesterday morning, he referred to the hosts as “Psycho Joe” and “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” He also said the pair had begged him to invite them to Mar-a-Lago for a New Year’s party, and that Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” The hosts refuted the claims in their op-ed, setting the record straight.

“The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go… We had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.”

The face-lift jab was on another level. “Putting aside Mr. Trump’s never-ending obsession with women’s blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal,” they wrote. “More significant is Mr. Trump’s continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly, to his fat-shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women’s genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out Mr. Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples.”

The op-ed piece ended with the hosts taking the high road. “We have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our relationship together. But that hasn’t stopped us from criticizing his abhorrent behavior or worrying about his fitness,” it concludes. “We, too, have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years. Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack. The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.”

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