by Joe Scarborough | Mar 2, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the March 2, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
I spoke to President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon to get a better understanding of his goals in Iran. Our last conversation was after his invasion of Venezuela, when he declared that unlike George W. Bush in Iraq, “I’m going to keep the oil.”
The president was equally brash Friday afternoon, declaring hours before the invasion that the Iranian leaders were brutal killers who could not be trusted.
“It’s going to be an interesting two weeks, Joe,” he said.
He repeated the sentence for emphasis. Given my conversations with administration negotiators, I initially read Trump’s comment to suggest he would be debriefed by his negotiators before making a decision.
But on Sunday, a White House official told me they received the intel that Iran’s most powerful leaders were meeting together exposed and above ground. The decision was then made to strike Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top military commanders.
Time will tell whether that decision reshapes the region positively or is yet another in a series of disastrous American attempts at regime change in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
The president made clear in our call that his aim was regime change in Iran and to succeed where he believed other presidents had failed.
On “Morning Joe” today, we turned to a deep bench of veteran reporters and foreign-policy hands to help make sense of the past few days.
Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist who has covered the Middle East for more than four decades, stepped back to 1979 to
by Joe Scarborough | Jan 26, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Jan. 26, 2026 edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
An American was shot at point-blank range by masked government agents.
Administration officials quickly labeled the victim — a Department of Veterans Affairs nurse with no criminal record — a domestic terrorist. They falsely claimed he wanted to slaughter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
When video evidence proved that story false, officials then suggested that Alex Pretti deserved to be shot because he was in legal possession of a gun.
Even the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America struck back at Trump’s team for parroting such unconstitutional mush.
This latest ICE killing is a political crisis for Donald Trump and Republicans. Many GOP leaders are likely relieved that President Trump and Minnesota’s governor are talking about ways to bring this crisis to an end.
Trump told Gov. Tim Walz that the Homeland Security Department would cooperate with investigations into the killing of Pretti.
The president is also sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota — an open rebuke to Kristi Noem.
And Trump has told Minnesota’s governor that he will consider drawing down the number of federal agents in the Twin Cities, Walz’s office confirms.
Political winds have shifted sharply against Republicans — especially with ICE gunning down Americans in the streets.
Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has had enough of ICE’s cruel tactics:
Stephen Miller’s mass deportation methods are turning immigration, an issue Mr. Trump owned in 2024, into a political liability for Republicans in 2026.
Americans don’t want law enforcement shooting people in the street or arresting five-year-old
by Joe Scarborough | Jan 22, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Jan 22, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“Without us, right now you would all be speaking German.”
“Without us, most of the countries don’t even work.”
— President Donald Trump
“Europe is a spectator while America and China dominate everything.”
— Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
“Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark, itself, is irrelevant.”
— Bessent
“Weak and humorless is no way to go through life. The European model of leadership is failing.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham
In the Biden era, the right mocked Democrats for virtue signaling to their progressive audiences.
In the Trump era, virtue signaling is just as common — but the performance has flipped.
Now it is educated men who are expected to play the stooge, signaling feigned ignorance for the approval of a ravenous audience of one.
Whether that means calling the country that sacrificed more of its sons and daughters per capita than any other member of America’s post-9/11 coalition in Afghanistan “irrelevant,” or dismissing our most important allies as “weak and humorless,” or sneering at the world’s second-largest economic bloc as helpless “spectators,” the pattern is the same. These lackeys dumb down their message and crank up their rhetoric to protect their temporary status in the White House.
This virtue signaling for fools — who know little about American history or postwar realities — may play well in the dumbest corners of the Oval Office and TikTok, but it will one day mark these men as apparatchiks who were willing to torch America’s most important alliances to stay in the good graces of their boss
by Al Sharpton | Jan 19, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Jan. 19, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Today we honor the incomparable life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A consequential figure who changed the laws of segregation, Jim Crow, voting rights and more, Dr. King used the methods of nonviolence and high moral principles to transform the nation that had never witnessed such consistent organizing to achieve real lasting transformation.
The King Day holiday takes on renewed importance today as many legislative achievements he fought for — and persevered for over half a century — are under threat yet again from those on the extreme right.
(Original Caption) Cleveland, Ohio: Reverend Martin Luther King addressed a cheering crowd of 2,000 who heard from King that 98% of the Negroes in Cleveland live in ghettos. King held his first rally at Alexander Hamilton Recreation Center, one of many rallies during his two-day visit here. Bettmann Archive
Whether it’s equal employment and opportunities, voting rights, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, immigrants’ rights and more, the progress that we eventually realized as a nation thanks to Dr. King’s unyielding dedication is being dismantled before our very eyes.
And the very methods he used are under threat from extremists on the left.
As we commemorate our nation’s greatest civil rights leader, we cannot simply invoke his name or cite his quotes.
We must emulate his character, in both words and action. We must continue to strive for a more fair and equitable society that affords opportunities for everyone, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, class or any other measure.
“Darkness
by Joe Scarborough | Jan 16, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Jan. 15, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Jim VandeHei is right. ICE is melting public support — and it is Republicans on Capitol Hill who will pay the political price.
For the first time since ICE was created, more Americans say they want Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s agency abolished than kept. An Economist/YouGov poll’s findings were stark: 46% want ICE gone, while 43% want it to survive.
What a reversal from a few years ago, when chants of “Abolish ICE” were dismissed as a left‑wing slogan out of touch with most voters’ sentiments.
Since Noem took charge, ICE’s ratings have plummeted — down roughly 30 points in public polling — and most Americans now describe the agency’s tactics as “too forceful.”
More damning for Republicans: Almost half of all Americans say the mere presence of ICE makes U.S. cities more dangerous.
What will the president’s next move be?
Perhaps he should send in the National Guard — to protect American cities from ICE’s violence.
As VandeHei said today on “Morning Joe,” Republicans will pay at the ballot box for their willful ignorance. They must know that voters hate ICE raids at schools, churches, and community centers.
If a picture paints a thousand words, then those images flooding out of Minneapolis are producing volumes of reasons why this ICE story is cutting through Americans’ consciousness like few others.
Renee Good’s killing was a tipping point.
A confidential memo from Blue Rose Research, the firm run by Obama‑era data guru David Shor and obtained by The New Republic, reportedly described 15 viral Minneapolis
by Joe Scarborough | Jan 13, 2026 | Morning Joe, Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea Spilled Morning Joe, The Tea, Spilled
This is the Jan. 13, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“Pray without ceasing,” the Apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Thessalonians.
My New Year’s prayer for Donald Trump was that the president might be moved — somehow, someway — to become a peacemaker in America.
Not even two weeks into 2026, it’s clearly time to get back to praying.
The opening days of the new year have seen new levels of chaos and divisiveness out of the Oval Office, as Jonathan Lemire details in a new Atlantic article chronicling the administration’s erratic moves since Jan. 1.
American military forces were sent into Venezuela. Trump told me he planned to keep the oil.
The president let the world know that he was going to take Greenland “one way or another.”
The administration sent a surge of troops — not to Caracas or Nuuk, but to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where a young mother was shot at point-blank range.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem responded by sending even more undertrained and unprepared agents to Minnesota.
Those troops have spent the past several days in Minneapolis bullying American citizens — even asking if they had “learned their lesson” from the killing of Renee Good.
The Trump administration then caused world markets to tremble by launching a criminal investigation against Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Powell pushed back hard at the president, explaining how the Department of Justice witch hunt was no more than a method of intimidation to get him to lower interest rates.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called President Trump, complaining about the “mess” made
