Charles Joseph Scarborough was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Mary Joanna (née Clark) and George Francis Scarborough, a businessman; he has two siblings. Scarborough attended Pensacola Catholic High School in Pensacola, Florida. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Alabama in 1985, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Florida College of Law in 1990. During this time he wrote music and produced CDs with his band, Dixon Mills, including the album Calling on Robert E. Lee, and he also coached football and taught high school.

In 1986, Scarborough married Melanie Hinton. The couple had two sons and divorced in 1999. While interviewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June 2005, Scarborough expressed concerns about the possibility that one of his sons may have suffered vaccine damage (See Thimerosal controversy). Scarborough said, “My son, born in 1991, has a slight form of autism called Asperger’s. When I was practicing law and also when I was in Congress, parents would constantly come to me and they would bring me videotapes of their children, and they were all around the age of my son or younger. So, something happened in 1989.”

Scarborough was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1991 and practiced law in Pensacola.

Scarborough’s most high-profile case was briefly representing Michael F. Griffin, who murdered Doctor David Gunn in 1993. He made several court appearances representing Griffin, before removing himself from the case, later saying: “There was no way in hell I could sit in at a civil trial, let alone a capital trial,” referring to the prospect of prosecutors seeking the death penalty against Griffin. Scarborough assisted Griffin in choosing other counsel from the many who offered their services, however, and helped shield the family from the media exposure, pro bono.

Scarborough’s political profile was also raised when he assisted with a petition drive, in late 1993, opposing a proposed sixty-five percent increase in Pensacola’s property taxes.

In 1994, Scarborough won the Republican Party primary for Florida’s 1st congressional district. The seat had come open when eight-term Democratic incumbent Earl Hutto announced his retirement. In the general election, Scarborough defeated the Democratic candidate, Pensacola attorney Vince “Vinnie” Whibbs Jr., with 61 percent of the vote. Whibbs was the son of former Pensacola mayor Vince Whibbs. The district had not supported a Democratic candidate for U.S. president since 1960. However, Democratic candidates had continued to hold most local offices well into the 1990s. Scarborough’s win coincided with a large Republican wave that allowed the Republicans to take the majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

Proving just how Republican this district was, Scarborough was reelected with 72 percent of the vote in 1996. In 1998 and 2000, he faced only write-in candidates as opposition.

Scarborough was one of a group of about 40 freshmen Republican legislators who dubbed themselves the “New Federalists” after The Federalist Papers. Scarborough was elected political director of the incoming legislators. The New Federalists called for sweeping cuts in the U.S. government, including plans to “privatize, localize, consolidate, [or] eliminate” the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. Gingrich tapped Scarborough to head a Republican task force on education, and Scarborough declared, “Our goal is to get as much money, power, and authority out of Washington and get as much money, power, and authority into the classroom as possible.” Rep. John Kasich (R-Ohio), then chairman of the House Budget Committee, adopted Scarborough’s language eliminating the federal Department of Education in the 1996 House Budget Resolution. The budget passed the House by a vote of 238–193.

During his congressional career, he received a 95 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. He signed the Contract with America. Scarborough served on the Armed Services, Judiciary, Government Reform, and Education committees. In 1998 he was named chairman of the Civil Service Committee.

Scarborough was one of the 228 members of the House who voted to impeach Bill Clinton in December 1998.

In 1999, while still serving in Congress, Scarborough founded the free weekly Pensacola-area newspaper The Florida Sun. The paper merged in 2001 and is now known as the Independent News.

In May 2001, five months into his fourth term in Congress, Scarborough announced his intention to resign to spend more time with his children. Of his resignation, Scarborough said, “The realization has come home to me that they’re at a critical stage of their lives and I would rather be judged at the end of my life as a father than as a congressman.”

A special election was held in October 2001 to replace Scarborough.

Trump has also alluded to an incident from 2001. On July 20, 2001, while Scarborough was in Washington, D.C., one of his aides was found dead on the floor of his congressional office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. An autopsy determined that an undiagnosed heart-valve irregularity had caused the 28-year-old to lose consciousness, fall, and hit her head on the edge of a desk the day before. Speculation developed about the death, often connecting it with Scarborough’s resignation from Congress, announced in May. The idea that Scarborough was involved in the death was promoted by publisher Markos Moulitsas and by filmmaker Michael Moore, who registered the domain name JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com. Since 2017, Trump has raised this debunked theory and has called for another investigation. “It’s remarkable that we have a president who is trying to have someone prosecute the person he considers to be his chief critic in the media,” Scarborough responded in 2020. “That’s what Putin does. That’s what Orban does. That’s what autocrats have been doing for centuries.”

In October 2001, Scarborough married his second wife, Susan Waren, a former aide to Florida governor Jeb Bush and a former congressional committee staffer. Their daughter was born in August 2003; their son was born in May 2008. Scarborough and Waren were divorced in January 2013.

After leaving Congress, Scarborough worked as an environmental lawyer in Florida. He was appointed to the President’s Council on the 21st Century Workforce in 2002.

In April 2003, he embarked upon a television career with the launch of Scarborough Country on MSNBC. In May 2007, he began hosting Morning Joe.

Scarborough released his first book, Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day: the Real Deal on how Politicians, Bureaucrats, and other Washington Barbarians are Bankrupting America, on October 4, 2005.

In May 2007, Scarborough became one of the rotating hosts auditioning for the slot vacated by Imus in the Morning on MSNBC. Scarborough, with his morning show, won the slot permanently in July 2007.

In 2007, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg joined Geist, Brzezinski, MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and Scarborough to cut the ribbon on the new set of Morning Joe at 30 Rock.

On December 8, 2008, Scarborough and Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski began hosting a two-hour late-morning radio show on WABC (770 AM) in New York City, replacing 12-year veteran host John Gambling. On April 26, 2010, the radio show was placed on “hiatus”, which Scarborough said was to redevelop its format into a new three-hour show. The show never returned.

In his second book, The Last Best Hope, released on June 9, 2009, Scarborough outlined a plan to help guide conservatives back to a political majority after their defeats in the 2006 midterm elections and the 2008 presidential election.

On November 12, 2013, Scarborough released his third book, The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics—and Can Again.

Scarborough has covered presidential elections and conventions. In 2015 he interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and abruptly ended the interview, but resumed it after commercial break. During the 2016 election, Scarborough criticized the Democratic National Committee for trying to protect Hillary Clinton and ensure she received the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, calling the DNC “rigged” against voters. 2017 marked the program’s 10th year on air.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post in August 2016, Scarborough argued that the Republican party must “dump Donald Trump” as their presidential candidate. Drawing attention to Trump’s remarks about Hillary Clinton and the Second Amendment, Scarborough wrote: “A bloody line has been crossed that cannot be ignored. At long last, Donald Trump has left the Republican Party few options but to act decisively and get this political train wreck off the tracks before something terrible happens.”

According to Nielsen ratings in 2016, Morning Joe delivered MSNBC’s biggest total viewer and demo audiences in the time period ever and beat third-place CNN in both categories. This marked Morning Joe’s seventh straight year topping CNN in total viewers. Scarborough also is a regular guest on NBC and MSNBC news programs and has appeared on Meet the Press numerous times. In April 2012, Scarborough guest-hosted Meet the Press.

Since then, Scarborough has contemplated returning to politics several times. On July 11, 2017, Scarborough announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that he was leaving the Republican party to become an Independent.

In June 2017, Scarborough and Brzezinski were the targets of tweets by President Trump that, in response to their coverage of his administration, referred to Scarborough as “Psycho Joe” and called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika,” while asserting that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he previously encountered her at Mar-a-Lago. The hosts responded with an op-ed in The Washington Post, in which they described White House officials telling them that the president would kill a pending National Enquirer article if they apologized to Trump for their coverage of him. The president’s tweets received criticism from many Republican lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senators John McCain, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Lindsey Graham, and Lisa Murkowski.

Scarborough released his debut EP, Mystified, on June 23, 2017. A music video for the title track of the new wave-inspired EP was also released on the same day. Scarborough plans to release a new EP every month for the next four years.

Scarborough currently resides in New Canaan, Connecticut, an affluent suburb near New York City. In early 2017, during a trip to Antibes, France, he became engaged to his co-host Mika Brzezinski. The couple married on November 24, 2018, in Washington D.C. in a ceremony officiated by U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings.

In August 2019, Scarborough drew criticism after posting conspiracy-driven tweets about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier multimillionaire and convicted sex offender. Scarborough tweeted: “A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives ends up dead in his jail cell. How predictably…Russian.”