But Scarborough isn’t really saying that he was the first pundit to call Trump a serious contender. What he’s really bragging about is that he was the first media figure smart enough to strap on his kneepads in exchange for access once he saw that the Trump campaign was going places. He seems genuinely to think the rest of us are just jealous that we didn’t think to do that first.

The reality, of course, is that Scarborough currently is winning the access battle with Trump because Donald Trump, like the Chinese emperors of yore who surrounded themselves with eunuchs as palace guards, refuses to interact with anyone who threatens him in any way.

Thus Trump’s regular media contacts are exclusively a gang of supplicating ratings-whores like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and especially Scarborough, who appears to be Trump’s favorite lapdog. Trump seems to get a kick out of the fact that he now has an ex-congressman carrying his skirts for him in public, and he tosses Scarborough’s name around at events like a war trophy.

Which, again, would normally be another reason to eat a cyanide capsule, but Joe seems pretty far from this.