It's becoming increasingly obvious that President Donald Trump's top advisers think he's unfit for the office -- and MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski wondered why they continued to "suck up to him."
"Morning Joe" welcomed frequent guest Eugene Robinson Friday to discuss his latest Washington Post column, "Loyalty to Trump is not enough," in which he compared the president to North Korea's "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-un.
"There just are these embarrassing moments, you know," Robinson said. "I can't get the image out of my head of (treasury secretary) Steve Mnuchin going on Sunday shows and trying to defend President Trump calling for NFL players to be fired, you know, clearly looking as if he were in physical pain, but something he had to do. It's something the president said, therefore, it must be right."
The columnist said that attitude would surely create trouble, and Brzezinski agreed -- especially for a chaotic and ineffective president like Trump.
"What can get done if this is the tone set in the White House?" she said. "It's not as if this is an effective leader that has commanded the respect of the nation? I mean, you walk into a room, you might read on your television screen, 'Trump throws paper towels at Puerto Ricans.' You have no idea what is going to happen next, but you know it's going to be incredibly embarrassing."
"You know he's going to -- with every hour that goes by, he's going to embarrass the presidency, he's going to debase the presidency," Brzezinski continued. "He's going to bring it down a lever lower, and yet these people suck up to him every day and they feel it's a part of their job to suck up to him, to placate him, to stop going on a trip to make sure you get the secretary of state to say he is smart, when the secretary of state thinks he is a moron. What is going on here?"
Nick Confessore, a national political correspondent for the New York Times, said Trump had lost the confidence of his Cabinet secretaries, who were all pursuing independent agendas in the resulting leadership void.
"Look, it's quite obvious at this point that there are members of the president's own Cabinet who do not think he is very good at the job or fit for the job, and the problem with that is that the president is the man in charge," Confessore said.
"What you have in this government right now is a president at the top and a bunch of Cabinet secretaries and appointees who are kind of trying to do their own thing, sometimes against the grain of what the president wants," the reporter added. "What makes it even more hazardous is that the president changes his mind on what he wants. So if you're going to purge people who don't support the president's agenda, the first part is, what's the president's agenda?
