Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the 2024 presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump, who recently delivered remarks focused on his plans for the economy but diverted to numerous tangents about his political rivals and the country. “We saw a man standing there on the stage saying, ‘we are literally a third world country.’ I don’t know anyone who believes we are literally a third world country, and the thing about the Trump campaign now that makes me wonder a lot about it is: Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita running the campaign. (They) are extremely good at what they do; but they seem to have lost control of their candidate…(who) has a tired, 20-year-old act. We just saw it. He updates it with some figures from the past two or three years; but it’s a tired old act: The election was stolen, we’re a third world country, crime is up, immigrants are going to rape your daughter. All sorts of fear factors and a lot of it, a lot of it, with huge, huge ugly racial overtones, especially when it comes to the vice president. And you wonder how long will it be before he really goes out of control, and I think what’s going to happen is when that debate occurs, and he’s in the ring with the vice president of the United States, a woman, a very sophisticated, very intelligent woman, and she hammers him like a prosecutor and doesn’t let him off the hook, he will go – well I can’t say it, but something will snap in him and that will be it,” predicts Barnicle about the September 10 debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The sea change in American politics over just the past few weeks has been astounding….President Biden was supposed to be on the ballot three or four weeks ago, and all the numbers in every state were going the wrong way. Now it’s completely flip-flopped, including North Carolina, which is now in contention, and I would submit there’s one other element to be added to this conversation: I think there’s going to be another sea change after the first debate that occurs between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When a Black woman in the ring cuffs him around, which she will, I think he will go bananas in public, and that will change everything,” says Morning Joe veteran columnist Mike Barnicle about the upcoming presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Harris during this conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and the Rev. Al Sharpton as they discuss the state of the 2024 presidential race between Trump and Harris, who according to new polling is ahead or tied with Trump in six of seven battleground states, erasing the leads the former Republican president enjoyed before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Mike Barnicle as they discuss Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, having made their debut as the 2024 Democratic Presidential ticket at a rally in Philadelphia. “Watching the coach, and I’m going to call him the coach from now until election day. Watching the coach…and watching the vice president…it was mesmerizing in the sense that it’s been a while since I’ve seen a rally like that either on TV or in person. And watching it, you could just sense the power in the hall, and it was the power of joy, the power of laughter, the power of hope for the future, but especially the power of those who were in the hall and those who were thinking or considering voting for this ticket—the vice president, and the coach—giving them the power to think that they’re participating in something that will put a smile on your face. It’s been a long time since any aspect of American politics has put a smile on anyone’s face and these two people…managed to put a smile on the nation’s face,” says Barnicle.
“What kind of a message can we come up with to prevent more election poll workers from quitting their jobs because they fear for their own safety?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig who joins Morning Joe with former United States Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to discuss the American Bar Association organizing a task force with the goal of protecting democracy. Watch the conversation here about why November’s election will be a test of America’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
Tune in for this Morning Joe segment as veteran columnist Mike Barnicle weighs in on President Joe Biden’s historic prisoner swap with Russia, marking a major diplomatic accomplishment and legacy-defining moment for President Biden less than six months before he leaves the White House. “You had a confident, knowledgeable president of the United States standing up, telling the American public exactly what happened, and then singing happy birthday with a young woman….A smile on the President’s face. The deep knowledge and relationships that he has with leaders around the world got this done. More than anything else, he got this done,” says Barnicle about President Biden’s success in bringing prisoners home.
ICYMI: “There was no bitterness, no resentment, no self-pity in his voice or in his presentation… Last night you saw a portrait of character in the president of the United States. Going forward, I think his place in history is well sealed by his presidency,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle during this Morning Joe conversation with Mika Brzezinski about President Joe Biden’s remarks from the Oval Office on his decision to abandon his bid for re-election and support Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination for president. “You can only imagine how difficult it is for anyone to give up such power….And now, America has been given an object lesson in character and history by a man, ‘here I am, Joe Biden behind the Resolute desk ceding power’.” Watch the segment here.
“A sleeper issue in this campaign—guns, violence, street violence, young kids being shot and killed at the age of 12, 13, even younger. What role is that going to play in the campaign, according to your estimates, and how do you go at it if you are looked at as a progressive Democrat?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) during this Morning Joe conversation about the issue of gun control in the 2024 presidential race.
Washington to Wilmington for years, a guy who can look people in the eye, slap them on the shoulder, establish an instant rapport with them, a guy who has known world leaders, a guy who has sponsored legislation and sponsored a lot of legislation that passed and might change the country eventually down the road—the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act. Sum up for us if you could, how all of those strengths are also part of his weakness,” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of The Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, who joins Morning Joe to discuss his latest article entitled “Biden’s Greatest Strengths Proved His Undoing,” which explains how the personal qualities that enabled President Joe Biden’s successes in office helped doom his candidacy for reelection. Watch the conversation here. Only on MSNBC. ”
“The sadness of this is personal for me and I think for people who know Joe Biden,” said Morning Joe’s Mike Barnicle during this conversation with Jonathan Lemire about the ongoing pressure from high-ranking Democrats on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House. “You don’t want to see him pushed out, you don’t want to see him hurt or humiliated. You want to see him thrive to be a success, whether he walks away from the nomination or sticks it out for the nomination. You want to see him succeed.” Tune into the segment here.
ICYMI: Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough and Mike Barnicle address the ongoing speculation of whether President Joe Biden will step aside from the 2024 presidential election, following President Joe Biden having admitted to a Wisconsin radio station that he “screwed up” in last week’s debate against former President Donald Trump, but having vowed to fight on in the election race and move to reassure key allies. “He knows what’s going on. He knows the depth of trouble. He knows that the debate that people saw something they cannot unsee; but he also knows something that apparently the Biden administration hasn’t fully explained to the American public…The Biden Administration has passed the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, two pieces of legislation that I’m told by people who know far more about economics than I do, will change and improve the progress of our economy, modernize it, make it more widely spread in terms of both the country, red states specifically will benefit from it more than blue states will; employment is on the rise. Now, the decision on what he does going forward is his and his alone, in concert with his family, clearly. He will make the right decision for the country and for himself,” says Barnicle about Biden amid the fallout from his debate performance, which has prompted calls for him to drop out of the 2024 race.
“Dr. Fauci, 40 years of helping and/or healing, sometimes both at once, in all of those 40 years, could you ever imagine—the impact that the latter years, dealing with COVID, dealing with the virus, helping cure people with the vaccine—that you and your family would come under such a sustained political assault?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who joins Morning Joe to reflect on his long career in public service , including his experience being the public face of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic —a position that was met with vast appreciation from many and denunciation from others. Listen to his response here.
“The motivated ignorance of Donald Trump has been a lifetime habit, a lifetime habit. He’s been operating on motivated ignorance since he’s been 17, 18 years of age. He did it all through his business career, all through his life, nearly every day. And in politics, he’s done it consistently. And he has developed indeed a cult around him. Now part of that cult, I would think given human nature, you’d have to feel badly for because they are people who bought into what Trump says in his motivated ignorance thinking it was going to help improve their lives. Well, it hasn’t, it hasn’t, and that’s the way you defeat Donald Trump. Point out the facts of people’s existence. The big tax breaks that he always talks about. Did it help someone making $100,000 a year? No, it helped people making millions of dollars a year. And so, now in the debate, for the first time, that motivated ignorance is going to be displayed publicly in an empty hall. There’s going to be no crowds saying, ‘oh yeah, that’s great, yeah,’ applauding if he does indeed walk towards President Biden’s podium. If he does the crazy things that he’s apt to do. It will be met by silence, and he will be told to go back to his podium. His microphone will be shut off; that, I think, is going to be the most interesting aspect of this debate,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle during this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Amanda Carpenter as they discuss Peter Wehner’s latest article for The Atlantic titled, “The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters,” ahead of the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on June 27th, with both campaigns having agreed to various rules for the debate, including microphone muting and no studio audience.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Jonathan Lemire, Donny Deutsch and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the unwavering loyalty from Republican lawmakers for former President Donald Trump— in Washington this week to visit with congressional Republicans for the first time since he left office—despite his many controversies and now felony convictions. “The GOP, as I knew it, as you knew it…as everyone knew it, it’s gone. It disappeared…Eight years we’ve been going through this dance with various Republicans, Donny. It verges from spinelessness, to lack of character, to complete duplicity, to fraud. One political party, a major political party, gone, diminished—means nothing to a lot of people today. I don’t know how you rebrand that,” comments Barnicle about today’s GOP.
During this Morning Joe segment, Mike Barnicle, who grew up in a Gold Star house on a street where the flag flew every day, remembers his many trips to Normandy on this 80th anniversary of D-Day. And host Mika Brzezinski read from a Boston Globe column Mike wrote in 1994 to honor the fallen soldiers. “These are the heroes who all died young. They missed sunsets and baptisms. They went without 50 World Series and 50 New Year’s Eves. They never stood at the door anxiously waiting for a daughter’s first date to arrive or witnessed their kids’ junior proms and college graduations. They never saw men landing on the moon or a fax machine. They were not allowed to walk on a beach with the girls they loved or hold the hands of grandchildren who would have asked about their great crusade. In our increasingly selfish country where everything and nearly everyone is part of some special interest, where defining any enemy or current threat to live or moral values is as difficult as peering through the murky fog that envelops this French coast, it is stunning to realize that these 4,410 and millions of others sailed to certain danger with no thought of conquest or profit. They came because they were asked and because they were needed.”
Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the “anti-American” sentiment that arose as Republicans across the party’s political spectrum denounced former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict on all 34 felony counts related to falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his bid for the White House in 2016. “On the left, on the progressive side or whatever, this is no reason for glee. This is no reason to be in the streets cheering and yelling. This is a reason for stop and think and maybe even get depressed over the reaction on the other side. The anti-Americanism that filled the air last night, from people like Marco Rubio, from people like Ted Cruz because as we indicated earlier, if there is no rule of law in this country, if they really believe the rule of law is rigged and corrupt…than there is no more America without a rule of law,” says Barnicle about the GOP defending former President Trump after his guilty verdicts.
“Twelve average Americans sat in a room, and guess what? They didn’t get information or evidence from TikTok or Instagram. They got evidence presented rationally by the prosecution in this case. And they made a decision that Donald J. Trump was guilty. And Donald J. Trump’s reaction to the guilty verdict was, once again—he’s already demeaned and destroyed much of our electoral process by saying it’s rigged and corrupt. And now he took on the rule of law. He took on the definition of justice itself by saying this verdict was corrupt, and it was rigged, and it’s a rigged system. Well, if he was correct in both his assertions, that the electoral process is rigged and corrupt, and that the judicial process is rigged and corrupt, then there is no more America. There is no more America,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle during this Morning Joe conversation with the panel and MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin as they react to former President Trump being convicted on all 34 and felony counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by falsifying business records in a case stemming from a payment that silenced a porn star. Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a felony crime.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll that shows President Joe Biden has made significant gains against the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, during the past month in six of seven 2024 swing states. Barnicle attributes the gains in part to “the president of the United States Joseph R. Biden being out there, people seeing him, say, ‘oh, okay, fine, I know how old he is; but he’s pretty sharp.’ He knows what he’s doing. And they consider the weight of what he’s carrying when he goes to a small town in North Carolina. He’s coming in with the Gaza war going on, he’s coming in with the Ukrainian war going on, he’s coming in with the economy burping everyday one way or another trying to figure out which way we’re going and which way we’re going to be headed, and that’s what people want to know. ‘Where are you going to take us?’ Joe Biden tells you where he wants to take this country. Donald Trump tells you when he is going to court next.” Join the conversation here.
“There has been continued exposure to Donald Trump. The more exposure that Donald Trump has on TV, the attack that …the Republicans continue to make against Joe Biden, is pretty much universally confined to one word – old: He’s old. And yet, you see Donald Trump on TV night after night at these rallies where he’s practically incoherent….Do you think, more and more voters, potential voters, are saying, ‘hmm, what about the other guy, though?,’” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Bloomberg politics editor Laura Davison about President Joe Biden who joins Morning Joe to discuss a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll that shows Biden has made significant gains against the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, during the past month in six of seven 2024 swing states.
Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Jonathan Lemire, Pablo Torre and Mike Barnicle about the gambling and theft allegations surrounding Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter and close friend of Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, after at least $4.5 million in wire transfers were reportedly sent from Ohtani’s bank account to a Southern California bookmaking operation that is under federal investigation. “Major League Baseball and every baseball fan should really be praying that the greatest star that has appeared in the Major League Baseball stage maybe since Babe Ruth, Ohtani, did not bet on any games. That’s the hope here,” says Barnicle. Join the conversation here.
Morning Joe’s Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle talk about the famed Philadelphia Eagles player and big brother Jason Kelce having announced his retirement through an emotional farewell press conference that felt more like a family affair than a business decision, with his parents and younger brother, Kansas City Chiefs star tight end, Travis Kelce, sitting nearby. “The thing that struck me the most was the element of good parenting. Clearly, his parents and his brother’s parents, they had a remarkable influence on these two guys,” says Barnicle about the Kelce brothers. Join the conversation here.
Mike Barnicle is a veteran print and broadcast journalist recognized for his street-smart, straightforward style honed over nearly four decades in the field. The Massachusetts native has written 4,000-plus columns collectively for The Boston Globe, Boston Herald and the New York Daily News, and continues to champion the struggles and triumphs of the every man by giving voice to the essential stories of today on television, radio, and in print.
