“This man was basically, and always, right up until the day of his death, a parish priest. He related to the people he represented, to the people he served. And he also, in a larger sense, further defined what the Catholic Church at its core is all about. Catholicism and Catholics are in the forgiveness business. That’s why we have the sacrament called confession: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been’ however, long since I have last been to confession. You confess your sins, and you are forgiven. Pope Francis was in the forgiveness business big time. And he was articulate about it, he was eloquent about it, and in his own way, he was vague enough about some of the things that he said, that he would cause millions of people to editorialize and think about ‘what did this Pope really mean’ and what this Pope really meant until the moment he died was about morality,” says Morning Joe veteran columnist Barnicle about the late Pope Francis, with whom he’s pictured, during this Morning Joe panel conversation to remember the life and legacy of Pope Francis who died Easter Monday at 88 years old.
“The Pope symbolized for Catholics, and I think for many, many other peoples of different religions in the world, someone they could approach. He was a parish priest at heart. He lived very modestly in an apartment building just at the edge of Vatican City. I was fortunate enough, lucky enough, blessed enough, to be in that building, to attend a mass that the pope said. And he was a uniquely ordinary individual at one level, despite the fact that he was the Pope. He was an incredible human being. I think that’s the biggest thing you can say about him in terms of who he was. He was a human being who understood instinctively troubles, troubles of the damaged, troubles of those who were viewed as differently by different cultures, a unique, a unique holy man,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel remembers the life and legacy of Pope Francis who died on Easter Monday at 88 years old. Join the conversation here.
“Joyce, in the past few days, we’ve seen the back and forth between various federal courts and the Supreme Court and the Trump Administration. Anybody who is vaguely familiar with American politics knows how easy it is to become totally isolated from reality when you live and work in the West Wing of the White House. Given what’s going on, given the road that we seem to be on legally, what do you think the odds are that the Supreme Court—it goes to the Supreme Court again—they clean up the language, they make it specifically clear to anyone that the man must be returned by the United States to the United States and the Trump Administration, the president of the United States, says ‘no?’” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance as the Morning Joe panel discusses President Donald Trump testing judicial authority as the Trump Administration has said the U.S. government will not return a Maryland resident it erroneously sent to a hard labor prison in El Salvador despite the Supreme Court unanimously upholding a lower-court ruling ordering it to “facilitate” the man’s return to the United States. Hear Vance’s response about what this test will determine.
Watch this Morning Joe segment with Joe Scarborough, Mike Barnicle and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff war amid the economic uncertainty in America. “You are the chief executive of a very large business called the state of Connecticut. In order to run a large business, you need some sense of certainty and some sense of reality. How difficult is it to deal with the state of Connecticut, moving it forward, given the uncertainty that constantly comes out of Washington, D.C.?” asks Barnicle. Hear from Gov. Lamont on the challenges facing his state and constituents and the impact on Americans all over the country.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle about the 2025 Masters, which begins another star-studded affair with a loaded 95-man field featuring the best golfers in the world, including Rory McIlroy who is aiming to claim his first major title since 2014. “On Rory McIlroy, I would personally love to see him win the Masters title, and it doesn’t matter that he won two weeks ago, another PGA title, another PGA tournament. The Masters has been the great white whale for Rory McIlroy, and it would be great to see him win that,” says Barnicle.
Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Mike Barnicle and NBC News senior Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainsley as they discuss her latest reporting that reveals a recently created Department of Homeland Security task force is using data analytic tools to scour the social media histories of the estimated 1.5 million foreign students studying in the United States for potential grounds to revoke their visas. “Is this not a definition of the death of due process?” asks Barnicle.
Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist, Jonathan Lemire and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the future of major league baseball with New York Times investigative reporter Michael Schmidt who recently interviewed MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on a variety of topics including whether the players will go on strike next year when their collective bargaining period ends and the possibility of robot umpires. Find out more here.
“There is—for all practical purposes—no council of economic advisers, no secretary of the treasury, no one on Wall Street who’s close enough to him to say: ‘You’re wrong, stop this, give it a pause, give it a 90 day pause.’ And lastly and most tragically, if you speak to people who know him or think they know him, Wall Street people who think they know him, know what he might do, know what he might say, know that he is a man alone, that…the United States, Gillian, is now a nation alone, economically led by a man, who I was told yesterday, from someone who has known him for years, is uniquely without humility,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle to Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett as the Morning Joe panel discusses the ongoing concerns about the U.S. economy following President Donald Trump escalating his trade war with aggressive tariffs that have rocked the global markets. Watch the conversation here. Only on MSNBC.
On this MLB Opening Day, the Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mike Barnicle and Willie Geist shifts to a memorable June 1986 column by the late Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, titled “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” which provided an inside look into the life of baseball legend Ted Williams. “The Richard Ben Cramer piece captures Ted Williams in the winter of his life down in Islamorada, Florida, where he would go bone fishing all day long…He was supposedly the most expert caster that professional fishermen had ever seen….It’s a spectacular profile,” says Barnicle. Join the conversation here.
“The reflections on your life contained in this book are kind of a gift to anyone who is interested in print and in writers and in great editors. We mentioned Bob McFadden, Bill Geist, Nora Ephron, Ben Bradlee, Maureen (Orth). It’s always what you have on the page….I won’t ask you to name the four or five most memorable pieces in your career, but the daily push towards excellence. Where did that come from?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who joins Morning Joe to discuss his new memoir “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines,” which revisits the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture. Listen to Carter’s response here.
“You mentioned leadership. You’ve led troopers into battle. So, the signal flap that’s going on right now in the front pages of every newspaper. We are still the tip of the spear around the world, the American military, from eastern Germany to Africa, troops on the ground, submariners in the arctic, South China Sea, all over the world. We are the force—still. So, what does it tell you in terms of leadership when we have the signal flap and not a single person involved, not one single person steps up and accepts responsibility?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) who joins Morning Joe to discuss President Donald Trump characterizing an extraordinary security breach as a minor transgression, insisting that top administration officials had not shared any classified information as they discussed secret military plans in a group chat that included the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine. Watch Hertling’s response here: “Leadership is about trust,” he says.
Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Willie Geist and Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel discusses the uncertainty surrounding the future of social security as the Social Security Administration has been crippled by cuts to the agency pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. “I can guarantee you that Elon Musk has absolutely zero sense of what a social security check for $375 means to an elderly couple living largely off of social security—none, zero. This is an item that is going to hemorrhage in terms of Trump’s weakness,” says Barnicle about the Trump Administration’s cuts to the Social Security Administration. Join the conversation here.
“About a month before he died, I called our old pal Al Simpson out in Wyoming, in Cody, Wyoming, just having a conversation with him about how things were going, and he raised the possibility that all of his neighbors—who he knew voted for Donald Trump twice; they voted for him in 2016, and they certainly voted for him last fall—that they would not know what to do when they went down to the local social security office and he said in the spring or early summer and the office was no longer there; he said, and then there’s going to be hell to pay. Well, hell has already arrived I think,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle during this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Willie Geist, Ali Vitali and Mark McKinnon as they discuss the state of the Trump Administration and Republican Party after a GOP town hall descended into chaos when a military veteran interrupted proceedings with an expletive-laden rant against DOGE cuts.
“This play is spectacular….It moves miraculously fast…But most importantly, it makes you think about what is happening right now, today. And we cover it every morning. The news each and every day contains some new nugget posing a threat to free speech, or to the judiciary, or to the media. Every day we hear this and you wonder if America has been narcoticized to what’s going on now because people just shrug their shoulders. ‘Oh well, just one more day.’ No, it’s not one more day. It’s one more danger. George Clooney has done a public service with this play,” says Morning Joe veteran columnist Mike Barnicle in his review of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” now on Broadway, written by George Clooney, adapted from his 2005 film of the same name.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Jonathan Lemire, Jason Crow and Mike Barnicle as they discuss the Trump Administration’s efforts to erase diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government, following a report that an article about baseball great Jackie Robinson’s military career in the Army has been removed from the Department of Defense’s website. “Jackie Robinson, that’s only one of many. There is an African American recipient of the Medal of Honor who has been removed from the records in the Pentagon, a recipient of the Medal of Honor. That’s not DEI. That’s courage under fire. That’s what it is,” says Barnicle about the Department of Defense removing acknowledgements of Black history under Trump’s DEI removal policy.
“What is harder? The pursuit of a tennis goal is incredibly hard and incredibly competitive. The pursuit of writing comedy is both dangerous to your ego, very tough to crack, especially as a novice going into it. So, what’s harder? Getting to Wimbledon or getting to the Daily Show?” asks veteran columnist Mike Barnicle of stand-up comedian Michael Kosta who joins Morning Joe to discuss his memoir “Lucky Loser: Adventures in Tennis and Comedy,” which provides insight into Kosta’s unlikely journey from professional tennis player (#864 in the world) to professional comedian. Watch their conversation here. Only on MSNBC.
Morning Joe’s Willie Geist and Mike Barnicle remember the Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman, who was found dead alongside his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog in their Santa Fe home. “He was quite a guy. He was a legitimately ordinary human being when you’d meet him. I had the good fortune of meeting him several times and went to see him in Santa Fe about 5 or 6 years ago, and he was the same then as he was when I first met him in 1973 on the set of “A Bridge Too Far” in Nijmegen, Holland, when he was the star of that cast. He had a lot of fun making that movie. We won’t go into it now. But he was really good guy,” says Barnicle about Hackman. Join the conversation here.
Tune in for this Morning Joe conversation with Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and NBC News medical contributor Dr. Vin Gupta about the possible consequences that could follow the abrupt cancellation of an FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting, which was scheduled for March to select the strains to be included in next season’s flu shot.
Tune in on this Morning Joe segment as Mika Brzezinski and Mike Barnicle discuss House Republicans becoming weary of in-person town hall meetings after multiple lawmakers have faced hometown crowds irritated about the Trump Administration’s push to slash government programs, services, funding and staffing. “This is a disaster in the making for the Republican Party; but, worse than that, Mika, it’s a disaster for the United States of America,” says Barnicle after House Republicans approved a budget framework for President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda, which calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade.
In case you missed it: Watch this Morning Joe conversation with Joe Scarborough, Mike Barnicle and Alexander Vindman, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, about Vindman’s new book “The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine,” which provides an analysis of how Western indecision and apathy made possible the return of brutal Russian expansionism with potentially catastrophic consequences. “Putin is winning,” he says, but we need to focus on “what really matters”—our relationships and democracy.
Mike Barnicle is a veteran print and broadcast journalist recognized for his street-smart, straightforward style honed over nearly four decades in the field. The Massachusetts native has written 4,000-plus columns collectively for The Boston Globe, Boston Herald and the New York Daily News, and continues to champion the struggles and triumphs of the every man by giving voice to the essential stories of today on television, radio, and in print.
