Fabricated Trump post demeans MSNBC hosts after meeting | Fact check

A Nov. 18 Threads post (direct link, archive link) shows what appears to be a Truth Social post from President-elect Donald Trump about his meeting with MSNBC broadcasters Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
The screenshotted post attributed to Trump claims the morning show hosts “owe their careers to me” and goes on to say Scarborough “begged to meet with me after our Big Win” and “approached me like a scolded dog.”
The Threads post was shared more than 300 times in less than a day. The image also was shared widely by other Threads users and on X, formerly Twitter.
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The image is a fabrication that originated from an account that shares satirical content. The post does not appear on Trump’s Truth Social account.
Scarborough and Brzezinski, the “Morning Joe” hosts who have frequently criticized Trump, told viewers Nov. 18 that they visited the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to open the lines of communication. The move drew widespread rebuke from critics accusing them of “kissing the ring.”
But the post that purports to show Trump demeaning the broadcasters did not come from him.
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There is no record of the post being shared by the president-elect to his Truth Social account or to the X platform. The fabricated post appears to have been first shared Nov. 18 by a social media user who is a self-described “universally-beloved meme artisan” and a poster of “humorous-adjacent tweets.” That social media user could not be reached by USA TODAY.
More broadly, the tone of the purported Trump post does not align with remarks he made that day to Fox News about the meeting. In that interview, he described it as “extremely cordial” and added, “In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago.”
USA TODAY previously debunked false claims about altered images purporting to show Trump posts urging retaliation against Israel in case of assassination, claiming his attempted assassins have a record of “0-2” and saying the shooting at his rally “took my entire ear off.”
USA TODAY reached out to several social media users who shared the image but did not immediately receive any responses.
Check Your Fact also debunked the claim.
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