Mike Barnicle on TV

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Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Mika Brzezinski, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has significantly restricted the ability of Pentagon staff to communicate with Congress, issuing a memo that requires prior approval for nearly all interactions with lawmakers. “The leaks to the media are going to increase hundred-fold; that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it that is really kind of interesting is how long can they get away with building this protective cone around the secretary of defense, so, that he they keep him from the public,” asks Barnicle about Hegseth, who is significantly changing the Defense Department’s policy of interacting with Congress.

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The Hegseth bubble

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“I’m wondering from your perspective, a few weeks ago, the secretary of defense and the president of the United States assembled combat leaders from all across the globe to Washington for a lecture period where they were told some of them were too fat, some of them were too lazy, some of them weren't in shape and as you enlarge the photo that was on the front pages of the Times and the Wall Street Journal and many of the papers in this country, you see hundreds of Silver Star recipients, hundreds of Bronze Star recipients, hundreds of men wearing CIBs – combat infantry badges. And I'm wondering what you thought when you heard and listened to that performance by the secretary of defense and the audience that participated in it?,” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby during a Morning Joe conversation about President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth having hastily gathered hundreds of top U.S. military leaders from around the world to the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, to outline their vision of a "warrior" culture for the military, emphasizing merit, strength, and an end to "politically correct" and "woke" policies. Listen to Kirby’s concerns about this administration’s efforts to “politicize the military” as he transitions from a long career in government to become the newly appointed Director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.

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Military brass meet with President Trump

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Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation as veteran columnist Mike Barnicle questions Karine Jean-Pierre, the former senior advisor to President Joe Biden and former White House press secretary, about why no one on Biden’s team intervened before his infamous debate performance during the 2024 presidential election, which ultimately contributed to his decision to withdraw from the presidential race the following month. “Why did not anyone see a clearly ill President Biden approaching the podium? Why did not anyone around him say, ‘wait, wait a minute?” Hear her response here.

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Biden’s Blunder: Why wasn’t it prevented?

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"We've got to end the confusion that the government, as we describe it, are the people in Congress and the guy who is knocking down the East Wing of the White House. That’s not the government,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle about the state of America during this Morning Joe segment, following an estimated 7 million people having participated in the weekend’s No Kings rallies to protest President Trump’s policies. "The government is the people of the United States of America, and we have to remind ourselves—and remind everybody who was out there over the weekend and everybody who gets up and goes to work and pays their taxes: They are the government. We are the government, the people."

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Barnicle: “We” are the government

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"We have a dysfunctional government….We don't know our own history in this country. If we knew our own history in this country, it would be twice the revolt there was this weekend I would submit with the rallies all across this country. If people would concentrate on what this country has meant over the years, the decades, the generations and what it represents today—there would be more outrage at what's going,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel discusses the sentiment in America over the ongoing government shutdown after this weekend's nationwide No Kings rallies to protest President Trump’s policies brought out an estimated 7 million people.

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Barnicle: “We don’t know our history"

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Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the Major League Baseball playoffs after the Seattle Mariners defeated the Detroit Tigers in Game 3 of the American League Division Series, taking a 2-1 series lead. “The Lou Piniella era, I mean, he could have been in the World Series three separate years—they missed. They had Alex Rodriguez, then they had Ichiro; they missed. This team here, might be, it might be Seattle-Milwaukee,” says Barnicle about the potential of the Mariners finally breaking through these playoffs and making the franchise’s first ever World Series appearance.

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MLB Playoffs

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"This is going to be a transformational papacy, based partly on the fact that he speaks English, and as well as the fact that he has tremendous courage and conviction and beliefs and is willing to speak about them each and every day—whether it's migrants, whether it's what's happening in America,” says Morning Joe’s Mike Barnicle about Pope Leo XIV in response to the Pope’s comments about abortion and immigration in America. "He is unafraid in his confidence, and I think he’s going to be a transformational pope."

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The new Pope speaks out

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Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who represents one of America’s poorest congressional districts, about our “paycheck-to-paycheck” country amid the government shutdown.

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What does the government shutdown mean to you?

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"It would be hard not to admire Jimmy Kimmel after watching him last night in that performance. It was heartfelt, it was sincere, it was personal, it was moving, and it was genuine—and it was about something that affects everyone in this country,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel weighs in on Jimmy Kimmel having broken his silence in an emotional return to ABC’s airwaves as he spoke to the controversy that briefly sidelined his late-night show and sparked a national debate over free speech. "We have something that very few people in the world have. We have the right to speak. We have the right to say what we want to say, when we want to say it with very few restrictions, and that goes from late night comedians to what we do here in the morning, to what you say on a bus or in a school room or whatever: Freedom of speech is the core of the United States of America.” Watch the discussion here.

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Jimmy Kimmel’s back on ABC

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"You've been in the business all of your life. The power of movies when you first began doing 'Arrested Development' on TV was far different than it is today, and the power of Netflix is just incredible. Can you talk about the power of Netflix compared to the old studio things, the way they used to go?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of actor Jason Bateman who joins Morning Joe to discuss his new Netflix crime drama “Black Rabbit,” which centers on two brothers who own a popular New York City restaurant, Black Rabbit, and get pulled into the city's criminal underworld.

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Jason Bateman talks about his career

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“I was struck by how much I thought I knew about the origins of this country, that I did not know—that I found out during your classroom, and it’s a classroom. It’s an epic classroom, this film. What did you learn? What surprised you as you made it?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns who joins Morning Joe to discuss his new 12-hour docuseries “The American Revolution,” which premieres on PBS on November 16, 2025 and airs on six consecutive nights. Watch how Burns explains that the making of the film provided a “daily humiliation of what I thought I knew."

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Ken Burns’ new docuseries “The American Revolution"

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Tune in to this Morning Joe conversation with Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Jeffrey Goldberg and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the Trump Administration's plans to crackdown on liberal groups, following ABC having pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air indefinitely after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over remarks he made about the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. “Every American household with a television set, that television set comes with an automatic censure thing: It's called a remote control. If you don't like what you're hearing or what you're watching or the person presenting it, you change the channel. Instead, they (the Trump Administration) want to change the philosophy of the country,” says Barnicle.

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White House crackdown on “liberal” thought

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"What does it say about us, right, that if you pick up a grammar school textbook history, a high school textbook history, and look for Emmett Till, you might not find him in the index?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of author Wright Thompson who joins Morning Joe to discuss his new book “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” that revisits the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, revealing the true location and nature of the crime, which took place in a barn rather than the location indicated by a false confession. Thompson, a Mississippi native, explores the historical context of the event, the forces of white supremacy that enabled it, and the efforts of individuals to uncover the truth after decades of obfuscation, which he writes "painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens."

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Revisiting the murder of Emmett Till—70 years later

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“Dr. West...when you talk about these scores and you look at them: They're down in science, they're down in math, they're down in reading. What is wrong with the American educational system—that pretty much across the board, every subject, important subject taught in schools—the scores are way down,” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle to Dr. Martin West, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, who joins Morning Joe to discuss National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores showing drops in science, math and reading for eighth and twelfth grade students. Hear what the contributing factors are here.

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Students’ test scores dropping

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Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the latest in Major League Baseball, including why fewer teams are now winning one hundred games in one season and what Lemire called an “epidemic" of pitching injuries in Major League Baseball. “What's happened to pitchers in Major League Baseball over the course of the last six or seven years is really extraordinary. More pitchers are going out now for surgery at younger and younger ages, and they can't figure out why,” says Barnicle.

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MLB updates

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Listen in on this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough and Mike Barnicle ask they reflect on Axios CEO Jim VandeHei’s latest op-ed titled “A message to college students,” which suggests that today's college students are being "duped" by a narrative of "impending doom" and a "crisis of hope" promoted by social media and politicians. Barnicle suggests reading about the country’s history, in books written by Rick Atkinson, for example: “You come away stunned—stunned at what the United States of America meant to the world and still means to the world. It's amazing to read histories like this of who we are, the fiber, the spine of what it means to be an American and that still exists today.”

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The importance of learning history

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"What we often fail to do is recognize the innate genius of Donald Trump in terms of building up the exhaustion factor, like...that three hour and fifteen-minute cabinet meeting. The exhaustion factor. What happens when you're exhausted? You either go to sleep, or you turn away and try and do something else. That's what's happened to the American electorate I think; that's what's happened to the Democratic Party. They’re exhausted from this every single day, instead of sitting down and saying, ‘listen we've got to come up with a proposal here,’” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle about the Democratic Party’s inability to sway or reach voters in the era of President Donald Trump during this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

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Trump’s "exhaustion factor"

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"The reality is we now live in a world, a political world, coming out of the White House, where if you sign a letter saying: ‘This is going to be trouble, you know, you're letting this go. It's not as good as it used to be,’ you are dismissed. You are sent home. You are told to go home,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel weighs in on the Trump administration placing more than a dozen Federal Emergency Management Agency employees on leave after they signed an open letter of dissent about the agency’s leadership.

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Dissent = Dismissal

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“Donald Trump's position on the National Guard, inserting them into Washington, D.C., allegedly trying to put them into places like Chicago and Baltimore, has shades of 1968 when the Republican Party first took over law and order as an issue and then remained strong with that issue since 1968. Richard Nixon campaigned for president talking about law and order throughout the country…But today… it’s a misuse of the National Guard. You insert them into a city where probably more likely than not many members of that unit don't come from the District of Columbia. They don't know the neighborhood, they don’t know the players in neighborhoods, from one neighborhood to another, and they’re wasting their time really,” says Morning Joe contributor Mike Barnicle about President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. as part of his crackdown on crime.

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National Guard in DC: “They’re wasting their time"

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Watch this Morning Joe segment about the impact the federal government is having on the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois due to its withholding of funds that would benefit local school children and threats of deployment of the National Guard to deal with crime. “Chicago, it's just like a lot of other American cities, big American cities, especially if you pull the string on crime...you’ll find that, that string will lead you to fractured family structures, it will lead you to juvenile crime—growing juvenile crime—and it will lead you eventually to not enough good teachers and not enough good elementary schools. So, my question to you is in terms of the money that you're talking about, the federal government taken from you: How much is being deprived from getting to local public schools in Chicago?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D), a former public school teacher serving as the 57th mayor of the third-largest city in the United States by population.

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