MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panel gave Donald Trump a tough interview Tuesday, but after the interview, host Joe Scarborough praised the Republican candidate for remaining on the phone for more than 35 minutes.
About 4 minutes and 30 seconds into the interview, Scarborough got frustrated with Trump not answering their questions and told his producers to go to a commercial break. (RELATED: Trump Calls For Moratorium On Muslims Entering United States)
“Hold on. No, no, Donald. You got to let us ask questions,” Scarborough said. “You can’t just talk. No, you got to let us actually ask questions. You’re just talking.”
Trump interjected, “No, no, Joe. I’m not just talking. Joe, I’m not just talking, I’m giving you the facts.”
Scarborough responded, “Donald, Donald, Donald, Donald, you’re not going to keep talking. We will go break if you keep talking. We’re gonna to ask you questions.”
“Go to break, then, Joe,” Trump said. “All I am doing is giving you the facts, and you do not want to hear the facts.”
Scarborough acquiesced and said, “All right. Go to break. Go to break, everybody. Go to break. Go to break. Go to break, right now. We’ll be right back with more ‘Morning Joe.'”
A minute and 30 seconds later, the interview continued unabated. (RELATED: Trump Thinks Ben Carson Is ‘Finished As A Nominee’ For President)
Upon the conclusion of the interview, panelist Nicolle Wallace said that during the interview she wrote, “I said he [Trump] ‘survives after this’ and I think his ‘support grows,’ and at one point, I will admit that I wrote this, ‘I want to eat glass.'”
Scarborough asked Wallace, “Why do you say he survives this and his support grows?”
Wallace explained, “Well, this is a pattern. … The thing about Trump that people should watch is, that he gets better. This is where he has gotten better. He says something so outrageous that the impulse is to call him a ‘maniac.’ And then he comes on, I think he was on for 30 minutes, and he took the questions. I mean, you sort of reprimanded him for not answering the questions, and I can’t think of any politician that would have come back after the break and stayed for another half an hour and taken all of our questions. So he has talents, but … I wrote, ‘I want to eat glass’ because I believe they are so squandered.”
Scarborough retorted, “Let me correct you there. You said ‘no candidate would come back after the break.’ No candidate in his position after we attacked him for an hour would have called in in the first place.” Wallace agreed with Scarborough’s analysis.
“And that’s what so many politicians don’t understand is, you show up, you go in the ring, you get bloodied,” Scarborough explained. “And at the end of the day, well, you know what, you came to the same conclusion that Mika came to the last time we had one of these episodes, where she was talking about how this might be the end of Donald Trump, and she wrote a note halfway through it saying, he survives this and he grows.”
Host Mika Brzezinski corrected Scarborough insisting, “I actually wrote, he’s [Trump] going to win.”