A lot has been made about how the mainstream media has been treating the prospect of a second Trump administration. From the Washington Post‘s decision not to even issue a presidential endorsement this year for fear of retaliation to other news agencies already pretending like the first term never happened, many outlets are straight-up ignoring how awful those four years were, and how much worse the next four are going to be.

And it’s not like they’re blameless in getting Trump elected in the first place. They have consistently almost ALL done their best to normalize him. The fact that they treated a candidate who was convicted of 34 felony counts of financial fraud better than they did a prosecutor speaks volumes.

And that doesn’t even begin to approach the fact that they took a man seriously who was adjudicated liable for sexual abuse.

But perhaps no one TV program did as much of an about face quite as many times as MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The show, now in its 17th season, started as a sort of conservative glimpse at the news on a mainly liberal network. It stood to reason that it would be: The host, Joe Scarborough, was a former Republican congressman before he was ever on air.

In fact, Joe was a Republican all the way up until 2017, when Trump became president. The year before, when Trump was merely a candidate, Scarborough publicly feuded with him in a WaPo op-ed. In response to remarks that Trump made about the Second Amendment and Hillary Clinton — implying she should be killed — 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..

That set off Trump, of course, who responded with allegations against Joe and his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski.

But after Trump was elected, Joe tried to do the same thing the rest of the media did and treat Trump like a normal politician. That’s become the way of the news since Fox News took over as a pure opinion outlet masquerading as actual reporting.

Back and forth they’ve gone over the years, and apparently Joe thought it was time once again to try and make amends with Trump. He and Mika made a trip to Mar-a-Lago in November to assess the situation, as it were.

The move was roundly criticized by liberal commentators as a cowardly one. While it is true that Trump has threatened to retaliate against those he feels have wronged him, and while it is good to cover your bases for the sake of your show, the way it came across for Joe’s fans was simpering.

After all, Trump is a man who literally accused Joe of killing his own intern, who was found dead in a hotel room from an event related to a heart condition.

But the visit to Mar-a-Lago made Joe and Mika look like they were selling their integrity so they could continue to have access to Trump. And it turned out it was for nothing. After their visit, Trump posted a message on Truth Social celebrating MSNBC’s low ratings, with an article using Joe and Mika as the featured image:

Trump doesn’t care whether Joe and Mika are scared. He doesn’t care about them, period. He cares that HE gets better ratings, whether he’s on television or not. And if ratings are low for any network that’s critical of him, he will celebrate it.

It’s not like Joe and Mika didn’t know that.

Still, they seem to be under the mistaken impression that they’re going to gain favor back with Trump. In an article in the Atlantic, editor David Frum — a frequent guest on MSNBC and Joe’s show in particular — wrote about his last appearance on Morning Joe.

He described a situation in which they were discussing the nomination of Pete Hegseth, and Frum, who has been around the political scene long enough to have been a speechwriter for George W. Bush, remarked on Hegseth’s reported drinking, relating it to a similar nomination from a previous era:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: “Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century.”

Frum was excused from the set of the show and Mika came back on the air and apologized for David Frum’s remarks.

The title of Frum’s piece in the Atlantic about that experience? “The Sound of Fear On Air.” That’s fitting. It was very, very obvious that Joe, Mika, and the show’s producers didn’t want any of it to get back to Trump without a disclaimer.

He’s been called Morning Joe for 17 years. You’d think he might have woken up by now.