Morning Joe host accuses Trump of trying to blackmail him

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough says that Donald Trump is a liar and a blackmailer, and that he has the records to prove it.

Mr Scarborough tweeted at the President amid an ongoing feud, saying that Mr Trump’s statement that he received a phone call from the TV host asking him to kill an allegedly damaging story in the National Enquirer was false.

“Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records,” Mr Scarborough wrote. “Also, those records show I haven’t spoken with you in many months.”

“Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven?” he later wrote. “What is wrong with you?”

Mr Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski have been pushing back at Mr Trump after the President tweeted a personal attack on Ms Brzezinski, saying that she had asked for a job in the White House while she was bleeding from recent cosmetic surgery.

Those tweets were followed up by allegations from the President that the two hosts had begged him to spike a story set to be published in the National Enquirer, an tabloid that Mr Trump has close ties to.

The Morning Joe hosts have a different take on the situation surrounding that National Enquirer story. The pair wrote in a Washington Post article that White House aides had repeatedly contacted them threatening that the tabloid was going to publish a negative story unless they called the President and begged him personally to kill the article. They declined to do so, they wrote, and said that they think the President has an unhealthy obsession with their show.

Ms Brzezinski and Mr Scarborough addressed the issue during their morning show as well, saying that the President’s misogynistic facelift shows that he is “vicious to women” because he fears them.

“I’m fine,” Ms Brzezinski said. “My family brought me up really tough. This is absolutely nothing for me personally. But I’m very concerned about what this once again reveals about the President of the United States.”

“The President’s tweets, whether they’re personally aimed at me… that doesn’t bother me one bit. It does worry me about the country,” she said.

The feud is a far cry from the previous relationship the two hosts had with the President. The two, who are engaged to be married, once considered supporting Mr Trump’s presidential bid, and hosted him on their show frequently. That cozy relationship took a turn for the worst last year when Mr Scarborough wrote an article in the Washington Post expressing concerns about the future President.