It was a tough week to sneak away, with Donald Trump careening toward his 100-day milestone, playing a bizarre game of chicken with Kim Jong Un, puzzling over ways to revive his health-care bill and reform the tax code. But Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski decided to step off the 24-7 news cycle and jet to Cap D’Antibes on a jaunt that was a bit mysterious, even to Brzezinski.
The hosts of Morning Joe, which debuted in 2007 and more or less dominated the cable-news chatter machine ever since, have long been known for their highly flirtatious office-spouse badinage, squabbling and then making up. In some ways, they were an odd couple: Republican former Congressman with daughter of Jimmy’s national security adviser; red-state quarterback live on air with a D.C. heiress. But both feel at home at the center of the Washington echo chamber, both deeply understand power, and, as another national security adviser notably observed, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
When the show debuted, both co-hosts were married: Scarborough to his second wife, whom he divorced in 2013, and Brzezinski to her former husband of 23 years. But long before they were an item, they made a lot of sense. Their chemistry—the way they bickered, and eye-rolled, and flirted in the I-can’t-stand-you-but-I-love-you way that elementary schoolers do—fueled speculation about their relationship off camera for years, a kind of reality show within a talk show. “Media matrimony,” Felix Gillette called it in 2009 story for The New York Observer. In Washington parlance, there was a lot of smoke.
Was there fire? The two are adamant that there was no impropriety in their relationship, that their marriages ended of natural causes. But something shifted about a year and a half ago. “Everyone talks about how there was always something there,” Brzezinski told me. “Over the past year and a half, I realized I had to face these feelings and that it was time to stop putting them in a box. It was not an easy process and it was not an easy set of decisions for either of us. It was something I couldn’t deny anymore.” In December of 2015, Brzezinski officially split with her ex-husband. “Mika’s divorce was finalized in the past year. She’s really grateful that it was done amicably and in private,” an MSNBC spokesperson told the New York Post’s Page Six.
The trip to the Hotel du Cap in Antibes was ostensibly for Brzezinski’s 50th birthday, which was on May 2, but there was a hidden purpose at play. On the final evening of their trip, the couple ascended the hotel’s palatial walkway from the pool and restaurant to its mansion overlooking the Mediterranean. They were en route to the Bellini bar in its lobby when Scarborough paused and stopped Brzezinski. “Halfway up the hill, he said he needed to sit down,” she told me. “We hadn’t been feeling well, so I thought, Oh, poor guy, he can’t make it up the hill.”
“His glasses were fogging up he was so nervous. I kept thinking he really must not have felt well,” Brzezinski said.
Scarborough then plopped down on one knee with an oval-shaped diamond ring set in platinum that he’d been hiding in his suitcase for days and asked her to marry him. “When I saw him on one knee, I started laughing nervously, almost hysterically,” she said. “And then he asked, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
Mika says she suspected the trip’s secret purpose when she saw the hotel, a fairy-tale spot that they said was the nicest place they’ve ever been. But when the first night came and went, and nothing happened, she told herself to stop being crazy. “He can’t keep a secret,” she said. “He just can’t. He always blurts stuff out.”
Scarborough concedes the point. “It would have been more like me to tell her on the way over,” he said. He thought about doing it when he drove her to Monaco in a convertible for a few hours, bringing the ring with him on the ride. But he didn’t feel it was the right place once he got there, and he was happy that he waited. When he put the ring on her finger, he said it looked perfect. “It looked like it was meant to be there.”
Scarborough, who said he broached the topic of marriage with Brzezinski casually a few months ago, said it’s been quite a long ride, and an unexpected one, given that he has been married two times before. “It’s the one part of my life that unfortunately I haven’t gotten right in the past,” Scarborough told me. “I thought after the last time that I would never, ever do this again in a million years,” he said. “Then it occurred to me that with us working together and being live on the air every day for three hours that we were forced, no matter what disagreements we had, what misunderstandings we had, to work through it and get right with each other by 5:59 A.M.”
He continued: “I was talking to a friend a couple months ago, asking if this was stupid. Am I making a terrible mistake? They said that no, that we had extraordinary training on getting through difficult times together, and it’ll only make us a stronger couple and stronger in married life.”
As many in their station know, secrecy can make public life easier. And days later, they are still somewhat uneasy about their decision to bring their relationship public for the first time. Between them, there are six children, several exes, executives, not to mention their little universe of politics, and their audience. “We know that our kids have a lot of options about what they read about us. We wanted to do one interview on the record. To answer the question is just as important for them as it is for us, to say it once that we’re together and we want to be together forever.”
After the one question come many others. Scarborough and Brzezinski still do not officially live together. The couple says they are right now doing a lot of racing around, wondering how to blend their households, where they will find space for their combined three dogs, three cats, two rabbits, and chickens. They have no idea if the news will alter the show’s dynamic now that that alluring, flirty, are-they-aren’t-they tension balloon will be popped for them. Nor do they know how it will impact the newsroom. As one longtime cable-news executive familiar with conversations within MSNBC told me, this certainly makes managing the show trickier. “Joe is MSNBC,” he said. “He’s as important to the network as anyone. And no one wants to be the one to give the most important guy’s wife notes.” (MSNBC declined to comment for the story, as it is about the anchors’ personal life.)
But for two people whose professional lives have been engulfing, this is one moment when other concerns are central. “We want to spend the rest of our lives together and that’s more important than what management will think and critics will think or anybody else,” Scarborough said.
Wedding plans are still up in the air, too. They have already ruled one idea out, however. In January, when they went to visit Donald Trump in the White House just a little more than a week after his inauguration, Scarborough and Brzezinski sat down for lunch with the president, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, ostensibly to talk to their longtime friend about his first week in office and issues related to women. Once the fish and scalloped potatoes had been served, and special sauces delivered directly to Trump were placed on the table, the couple said that the president came up with an idea: If they planned on getting married, they should consider doing so at Mar-a-Lago or the White House, they recalled. “That’s when Jared interrupted and said, ‘Hey, you know what? I’ve got my license. I could marry you,’” Scarborough said. (A White House spokeswoman had no comment.)
According to Scarborough, that’s when Trump snapped from the end of the table, saying: “Why would you marry them? They could have the President of the United States marry them.”
I asked them if they would consider the offer now that they are engaged. “The White House that I grew up in was an amazing place. If it weren’t Trump, it might be something to think about,” Brzezinski said. “The mental picture is just fascinating, but the reality is just . . . no. No, no, no, no, no.”
