On Monday morning, MSNBC’s connubial co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski informed their loyal audience of almost a million viewers that they had recently ventured south from their home in Jupiter to Mar-a-Lago. There, for the first time in seven years, they met with Donald Trump—the very man they’d spent the last several years vociferously pillorying. Reading from their respective teleprompters with well-choreographed solemnity, the couple conveyed this relatively benign news as though they were disclosing their involvement in a top-secret nuclear negotiation. Or, as CNN’s John Berman cheekily put it over on the rival network, “as if it were the Yalta summit.”