Joe Scarborough is mastering the art of dealing Donald Trump the derision Trump loves to rain on others.

The “Morning Joe” co-host, former Florida congressman and longtime Friend of Donald found himself under fire during the early months of the 2016 campaign for a series of friendly, bantering on-air appearances with Trump that critics saw as powder puff. But Scarborough has flipped the script with a vengeance since the developer secured the nomination last month and has proved to be one of the rare mouths in the media who are a match for Trump.


“None of these guys knew how to get Trump at a gut level,” he told me during a taping of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast last week, of the vanquished Republican field. Lucky, he added, that George W. Bush wasn’t on the stage: He would have “cut Trump to shreds.”

The 53-year-old Scarborough, whose conversational style is at once wise-ass and senatorial, briefly considered running this year — and he clearly relishes the fantasy-football idea of getting up there on the stage with Trump and taking a few shots at the aging heavyweight.

“I think you'd just go to him. He's a bully, and you don't let bullies bully people. You just mock him,” Scarborough said, sitting at a country pine table in his office at 30 Rock, a pair of spare Docksiders tucked under a bookcase in a preppy tableau. "See, the one thing Donald Trump can't stand is people calling him out, and instead of becoming indignant about it, laugh at him. Which he hates. Oh, really? Really, Donald?

“He is insecure,” Scarborough confided. “That's always driven him — I'll say it — batshit crazy.”

It turned out our conversation was a dress rehearsal for a full-scale flogging of Trump over his onetime buddy’s GOP attack on the Mexican-American judge in the Trump University case (“you’re acting like bush-league loser, you’re acting like a racist, you’re acting like a bigot,” Scarborough said on his show Wednesday — and suggested that Republicans who refused to un-endorse were a slang word for furry housecat).

Trump has been a less frequent visitor to the show of late and responded to one of Scarborough’s recent fusillades with the usual Twitter tirade. “I don't watch or do @Morning_Joe anymore,” he wrote on June 3. “Small audience, low ratings! I hear Mika has gone wild with hate. Joe is Joe. They lost their way.”

(Subscribe to POLITICO's Off Message podcast with Glenn Thrush)

It wasn’t always this way. Trump was once a frequent on-air caller to the show and kibitzer with Scarborough off the air. The host wasn’t shy about dispensing generic advice — like study your goddamned briefing books for a minute before a debate — and Trump opened up (briefly) from time to time. Last December, when he was starting to gain momentum, he giddily told Scarborough, “Can you believe this? I can't believe this. Can you believe how well things are going?”

Scarborough responded with, "No, I really can't," and he still doesn’t think the reality show star can actually win by insulting minorities and scoffing at building a conventional campaign infrastructure to compete with Hillary Clinton’s efficient, state-of-the-art voter outreach machine.

But it’s not just business, it’s personal. Like a nephew freed to dish on a domineering uncle after being cut out of the will, Scarborough lurched forward in his chair when I asked what specifically got under Trump’s paper-thin skin.

“Ratings, numbers,” he said with a laugh. “Saying that Bernie Sanders draws more people than him. Mocking him for only having 5,000 people at [a Washington, D.C., rally over Memorial Day weekend] when he thought he was going to have 400,000.”

Ah, but the real kryptonite? Suggesting to Trump that he’s just not the drop-the-laundry-basket and turn-up-the-volume draw he used to be.

A recent example sprung to mind. “I made the mistake, in Donald Trump's eyes, of saying that actually Chris Christie … would outrate Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders would outrate Donald Trump [on 'Morning Joe'],” he said. “You want to get to Donald Trump? That's how you do it. I got a long letter [from Trump], talking about spreadsheets and how he actually outrated Chris Christie … we just kind of checked — ‘How did Trump do yesterday? [Do] people flock when Donald Trump came on?’ Maybe they still do in prime time; I don't know. But they didn't, at least for our show.”

Scarborough says Trump has stoked interest in the campaign, big-time, over the past year or so — but “not as big of an impact as you would expect.”

His attack on Trump is not exactly bad for his reputation on a network, MSNBC, with an overwhelmingly liberal, un-Trumpian viewership. And it’s not clear, in a chicken-or-the-egg sense, who dumped who first.

But he bristles when I rehash criticism of his friendship with Trump early in the campaign — or grousing that his current dump-on-Donald routine is little more than a rebranding exercise. “Total bullshit,” is how he described a report that the show precleared questions on deportation policy with Trump.

Scarborough sees the real culprit of Trump-enabling not at his own desk but at a rival network’s — and he related an off-air conversation with Trump about CNN boss Jeff Zucker that he believes to be revealing, and not in a good way. “He and Zucker are very close. Zucker personally calls Trump,” Scarborough said. “[Zucker] books Trump. And Trumps laughs and calls Zucker ‘my personal booker’ because Zucker will call Trump. He hasn't said that publicly, but he's said it. I've said it publicly now. Trump will laugh every time Zucker calls.”

But Scarborough is candid about his approach to interviewing big-name newsmakers and concedes (as I do) that he toes a fine line between holding people accountable and creating a relaxed environment where they reveal themselves.

“We will push. We don't let people lie. We don't let people read their talking points. We cut them off,” he told me. “But it's a balancing act. Do I want to hammer Hillary for 30 minutes on emails and know she's never going to come back? Do I want to hammer Ted Cruz on the shutdown and just how stupid he was for 30 minutes, and never have him come back? … A lot of times I'll have reporters say, ‘Hey, the next time Trump comes on can you ask this question?’ I'm like, ‘Sure, I'll ask him any question. Am I going to make it about me? No.’”

What makes Trump different, Scarborough said, is that there really is (or was) some kind of friendship there — to the extent that Trump is capable of having one.

“I've known him for 10, 11, 12 years, and we're friends, but currently he's angry with me,” he said. “You know, he'll call me once every three weeks, ‘Joe, you're a good guy,’ and I'll be like, ‘Yeah, for now, this second …’ I am his friend, but to be Donald Trump's friend is be somebody that says hello in short verse. It’s like … ‘Hey, Joe, thank you so much for being here. Isn't this the most beautiful place you've ever seen? You were great. I love you. You're wonderful.’”

“I think that is a friendship in Donald Trump's mind. But I will tell you, I've never sat down and had dinner with the guy,” he added.

Even in the middle of this big fight, Scarborough leaves open the possibility of ultimately backing his old frenemy, saying he’d flip back if the GOP’s presumptive nominee backs off his call for a temporary ban on Muslims. Until then, he’ll pine for a third-party candidate (he hopes it’s Mitt Romney) and hold forth on the relative trustworthiness of Clinton and Trump — in other words, bad and worse.

Scarborough thinks Clinton is basically a serious (and flawed) pro who lies in the course of plying her politics trade — but Trump is a hustler-shaman (“Trump Water is actually taken from the brooks of the Swiss Alps by Nordic elves who actually bring it down on sleds”) who makes stuff up for sport, then mesmerizes himself and others into believing it.

“I think Donald Trump believes a lot of what Donald Trump says, which is — you know, is frightening in some aspects,” he said.

“With Hillary ... she's moored. She has a set of beliefs. She has a 40-year history in the business. It's much easier to nail her down,” Scarborough added.

“I think Trump is unmoored, by any ideology, by any truth, and so he's just sort of — he's like a floating dock.”

