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Donald Trump’s Tweet Exposes Strange Blackmail Scheme Against ‘Morning Joe’ Co-Hosts

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Is President Using National Enquirer to Blackmail Journalists? Some Journalists Say Yes.

President Donald Trump appears to have just implicated himself in a blackmail scheme.

After being attacked by President Trump, MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski penned a Washington Post op-ed expressing their concern about the president’s fitness – to watch their show, and revealed some of the details the president had mentioned in his two-tweet attack.

“President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal,” the co-hosts write. “America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, ‘Morning Joe.'”

That was the first paragraph of their opinion column titled, “Donald Trump is not well.”

This is the second:

“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. During the campaign, the Republican nominee called Mika ‘neurotic‘ and promised to attack us personally after the campaign ended. 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.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper calls it a “stunning charge.”

To the casual reader this may have seemed an odd thing to mention up so high in the op-ed, when there are so many other things they discuss, but they know their audience well, and his name is Donald Trump.

Likely assuming Trump wouldn’t get very far in their counter-attack, they clearly baited him up top.

And it worked.

“Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” Trump tweeted just before 9 AM Friday.

It took Joe Scarborough all of seven minutes to respond.

“Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven’t spoken with you in many months,” he tweeted to Trump at 9:02 AM.

“Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven? What is wrong with you?” Scarborough followed up with at 9:03 AM.

On Friday morning’s show, the couple offered more background, as Philly.com’s Rob Tornoe reports (see video above):

“We got a call from the White House that the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys. Donald is friends with the guy who runs the National Enquirer,” Scarborough said, claiming he received multiple calls from three individuals at the top of the Trump administration saying the president would call the Enquirer’s owner David Pecker and spike the story if he personally apologized to him for Morning Joe’s coverage.

“That’s blackmail,” Morning Joe co-host Donnie Deutsch said.

“They were pinning the story on my ex-husband,” Brzezinski added, “And I knew he would never do that. So I knew it was a lie and they had nothing. These calls persisted for quite some time. They were threatening. They were calling my children.”

“These calls persisted for quite some time. Then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House where they said, ‘This could go away,” Brzezinski said. “Our response, after talking to my ex-husband, talking to Joe, talking to my kids, was ‘screw it, let them run it.’”

So, let’s sum up.

The President admits first of all that he has the power to “stop a National Enquirer article.” That in itself is news, and should make the paper’s readers at least ask why.

Raw Story’s Brad Reed has the answer:

The National Enquirer’s “boss David Pecker is a longtime Trump ally.”

WATCH: Scarborough Says GOP Congressman Told Him He ‘Was Scared’ for Morning Joe Co-Hosts After Trump Private Explosion

The link mentioning David Pecker goes to a new article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. 

Next, as ThinkProgress editor and founder Judd Legum says, what Scarborough is describing is blackmail:

Both Trump and the “Morning Joe” co-hosts admit The National Enquirer was going to run a scandalous piece on Scarborough and Brzezinski. For some reason apparently it did not. But clearly, both parties acknowledge there was a story and there was discussion between the co-hosts and the White House, be it Trump and/or his aides, to kill it.

Some responses via Twitter:

Former GOP Congressman:

Journalism school professor:

Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones:

Former Obama DOJ chief spokeasperson:

CNN senior media correspondent:

Also via Twitter, again, ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum offers a thread that includes these statements, and a link to ThinkProgress’ story by Aaron Rupar, “Morning Joe hosts say Trump tried to blackmail them with National Enquirer hit-piece”:

 

2. They are accusing President Trump of BLACKMAIL. This isn’t just tawdry. It could be illegal

3. They are basically accusing Trump of ordering the National Enquirer to pursue a hit piece against them

4. They describe Mika, Joe and her kids being harassed over a period of time

5. The top White House aides contact Joe and say it’ll all go away if he calls Trump and apologizes for his coverage

6. Implicit here is a promise to make future coverage more favorable to the White House

7. These are very serious charges and, according to Joe, he has written proof that it happened 

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‘Fundamental Miscalculation’: Columnist Says Democrats Have ‘Little Chance’ in Midterms

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May 8, 2026

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Democrats made a “fundamental miscalculation” in the redistricting wars and now have “little chance” in the November midterms, argues Eric Garcia at The Independent.

Calling the Virginia Supreme Court’s nullification of a voter-led ballot initiative that allowed the creation of four Democratic congressional districts a “massive body blow,” Garcia also points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision “virtually nullifying the Voting Rights Act” by requiring Louisiana to redraw its congressional map. There is also the Tennessee legislature turning majority-Black Memphis into another GOP seat — erasing the only Democratic seat in that state.

“And this does not count the redrawing of congressional districts in Missouri and North Carolina before the Supreme Court decision, or Alabama, which is under a court order to not redraw its map until 2030,” Garcia says. He notes that California has been the only state to respond, doing so by adding five Democratic seats to the state.

Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, a political news outlet, “put it bleakly for Democrats.”

Donnini says that now, instead of having to flip just three seats to take the majority in the House, Democrats will have to flip an additional nine seats — a total of twelve in all.

Democrats tried to “lead by example,” but, Garcia says, they turned their states into “laboratories for democracy” by creating “unilateral” disarmament “on behalf of the Democrats” — an act, he labels, a “fundamental failure.”

But he offers Democrats a little hope.

Texas’s redistricting plan relied on Hispanic voters, “after flirting with Trump,” to stay aligned with the GOP. That might have changed. The situation is the same in South Florida, “where the state’s normally conservative Cuban Americans have been caught in the Trump immigration dragnet.”

Pointing to inflation, the economy overall, and Trump’s Iran war, Garcia says Republicans holding on to the House might be “even more difficult.”

Democrats, however, made a “fundamental miscalculation,” Garcia concludes. “By creating guardrails and rules, Republicans did not see a reason to compromise and meet them halfway. It made them targets for weakening. Now, Democrats have put themselves in a bind. They only have themselves to blame.”

 

Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr

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Trump Is Bored With His Iran War — Iran Isn’t: Columnist

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May 8, 2026

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President Donald Trump is “bored” with his Iran war, but Iran is not — and isn’t ready for the war to be over, argues Jonathan Lemire at The Atlantic.

The president, now in a “bind,” is tired of the war he started, and has declared victory several times, while Iran “does not want the war to come to a close.”

Trump’s GOP “is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers,” while the president “doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.”

“The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal can’t even get Iran to the negotiating table.”

Iran hasn’t even responded to Trump’s one-page memo “that is far more of an extension of the cease-fire than a treaty to end the conflict.”

Trump, Lemire says, did not expect the war to go like this. After his successful excursion into Venezuela, he “set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would ‘be another Venezuela,’ a pair of outside advisers told me.”

It has not been that.

Trump expected his Iran war to last days, or maybe a week or two. It has now been months.

And while administration officials believe the blockade will be successful, experts say Iran can withstand it for months, time the president, with the midterms coming, does not have.

“It then becomes a matter of pain: Which side can withstand the most economic hardship?” Lemire asks.

Trump, impatient, has debated declaring victory and moving on.

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio went so far as to say earlier this week that the war was over,” Lemire notes. “But doing so now would leave the conflict’s goals, as outlined at various times by the president and his aides, unfulfilled.”

The president, says Lemire, “wants the war to end. He wants a deal. But deals take two parties, and there’s no evidence that Iran is interested in bailing Trump out of a dilemma of his own making.”

 

Image via Reuters 

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Lauren Boebert Knows What Aliens Really Are: ‘Fallen Angels’ — and Possibly Demonic

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May 8, 2026

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U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) says that aliens from outer space are actually “fallen angels and Nephilim” from the Old Testament of the Bible, according to Right Wing Watch. On Friday, President Donald Trump released declassified government UFO files.

“God is the creator of the universe,” Congresswoman Boebert says in recorded video published Friday by Right Wing Watch. “He’s never not going to create.”

The Colorado Republican lawmaker said that it’s “always been something in my mind to say, ‘Well, how can we be the only ones?’ Like, God’s not going to stop creating just with us.”

“But the more I look into this,” she continued, speaking from inside a car, “the more I see the Old Testament and what was told to us there, of fallen angels, and Nephilim.”

She defended her take by saying, “this is in the Bible,” and there’s “nothing that says that fallen angels, that Nephilim just disappeared. And so I believe that this could be an aspect of it.”

Boebert went on to say that “things that we have seen…could resemble portals,” although in the video she does not explain further.

“And, you know, I mean, this is, we serve an infinite God, a God of the universe. And to say that this is the only realm, is ignorant.”

She denied that aliens are a “Marvin the Martian kind of thing.”

“But I do believe that this is more spiritual, and if you really want to go there, demonic.”

 

Image via Shutterstock 

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