Scarborough blasts NBC for pulling 'Morning Joe' after Trump shooting, threatens to quit if it happens again

MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed his own network for pulling his show on Monday in favor of news coverage of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, saying he and co-host Mika Brzezinski were “surprised” and “disappointed” by the call and threatening to leave if it happens again.

“Next time we are told there will be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said live on air Tuesday morning. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”

Scarborough said the network told the “Morning Joe” team that there would be one NBC News feed “in breaking news mode” across all NBC channels all day Monday. But the “Today” show aired on Monday morning on NBC, and MSNBC hosts Andrea Mitchell and Chris Jansing appeared for their regularly scheduled shows in the afternoon.

“If we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC News across all NBC News channels … we obviously would have been in yesterday morning,” Scarborough said, later adding: “Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.”

CNN reported on Monday, citing an unnamed source, that NBC network executives decided to pull “Morning Joe” to avoid any guests making an “inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole” while discussing Trump’s assassination attempt. POLITICO cannot confirm CNN’s reporting on NBC network executives’ thinking.

Scarborough and NBCUniversal did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment.

Scarborough is a longtime friend and ally to President Joe Biden — who called into the show last week to slam Democratic Party “elites” urging him to step aside — and Trump and his base have long blasted the left-leaning network’s credibility. In 2020, Trump suggested Scarborough had committed murder , and the host asked Trump to stop watching the show “for the sake of America.”

Brzezinski characterized the show, which has been on the air for 17 years, as “the place where you can go to have the hard conversations in a civil way.”

“It seemed like now more than ever is a day, a time when we would like to be on,” she said Tuesday. “I think our viewers agree with that.”