'Morning Joe' Scores Huge Ratings Win in Wake of Trump Tweets

The MSNBC show, already up significantly from 2016, surged more than 70 percent.

If there's a silver lining to President Donald Trump's crass public commentary about MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski and her Morning Joe colleague, Joe Scarborough, it's that viewers are apparently quite interested in their side of the story. Ratings for the A.M. talker surged before the July 4 holiday weekend, securing a rare victory over main competitor Fox & Friends.

Viewership for Friday's Morning Joe climbed 66 percent from the most recent quarterly average, with an average 1.66 million tuning in, per Nielsen Media. In the news demographic of adults 25-54, the show was up even more (73 percent) to an average 408,000. Both stats were enough to push it above typical time slot victor Fox & Friends.

Morning Joe and the rest of the MSNBC lineup, as well as much of the cable news landscape, has already been enjoying a helluva year. The recently wrapped month of June has the show up 58 percent in adults 25-54 and 60 percent among total viewers compared to the same month in 2016.

President Trump's already colorful Twitter feed has been focusing an increased amount of vitriol towards the TV news media of late. On top of his comments about Brzezinski and Scarborough, most notably his claim that Brzezinski “was bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw her at his Florida golf course in the past year, Trump's tweets about CNN hijacked much of the news cycle over the long weekend.

The Morning Joe duo have not shied away from commenting on the matter, or their ongoing bad blood with Trump, during their program. They used their first broadcast after the tweets in question to say the White House had threatened them with an unflattering National Enquirer story.

Brzezinski and Scarborough returned on air on Wednesday.