Broadway Joe

At the center of America’s schizoid political-fame complex, there sits JOESCAR BOROUGH , a congressman turned TV star who somehow built the most influential show in Washington despite never wanting to be a mere morning-show host. Now, as he quests for something grander—he’s turned his fraught relationship with Donald Trump into grist for a nutty new project, a Trump musical—the ample-egoed Scarborough is trying to prove there’s no business like political show business  JASON ZENGERLE

“ PLAY IT FOR HIM , JOE , ” Mika Brzezinski said. She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Just give him a little taste.” It was a recent morning in New York City, a couple of hours after Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough had signed off on yet another episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and now she was trying to get her co-host to let me in on a secret. It was a secret about Donald Trump.

You wouldn’t know it now—after all, since late spring, Scarborough has been one of Trump’s biggest critics—but in the first eight months of the Trump candidacy, Scarborough often seemed to be an adjunct of the Donald’s campaign, lobbing softball questions at Trump when he’d phone in to the show, and giving him tongue baths in absentia when he wasn’t on the program. Trump, Scarborough told his viewers, was “a masterful politician,” the veritable second coming of Ronald Reagan.

That sort of sycophancy didn’t sit well with some of Scarborough’s colleagues (various NBC employees I spoke with characterized it as “unseemly,” “inappropriate,” and “a disgrace”), but the flattery certainly tickled Trump. “You have me almost as a legendary figure,” he complimented Scarborough in February; on another occasion, he referred to Scarborough and Brzezin ski as “supporters.”