NBC News published a story today promising the “inside story” of the Trump dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes. The general tone of this is that Milo Yiannopoulos set this up as a kind of troll of Trump. And of course Trump didn’t help himself by making a big show of the dinner at his club.

“We saw everybody in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the president entered,” Fuentes told NBC News. “He greeted us, and he invited Ye into dinner and Ye said that he wanted to bring us with him to the table. So we walked in and Ye took some pictures with some of the guests in the dining room and then we sat down at the table.”

So when the dinner took an unexpected turn with Kanye asking Trump to be his running mate and Trump in turn telling him he would lose if he ran and also insulting his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, there were plenty of witnesses around to see it happen.

As for adding Fuentes to the mix, everyone agrees Trump didn’t know who he was but Milo, who has been acting as an adviser to Ye, obviously did know who he was and knew that his presence would make this a big story. A trump adviser said “Kanye punked Trump” but it was really Milo who set this up.

“The master troll got trolled,” the adviser said. “Kanye punked Trump.”…

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News.

“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abusedthe people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he added.

And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.

As you might imagine, Trump was not happy about the negative story and also reportedly had the sense that he’d been set up.

Trump fumed afterward that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him. “He tried to f— me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, who then relayed the conversation to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Trump’s ego was bruised by Kanye who, I think it’s fair to say, has an equally massive ego. But what really happened here is that Milo set this up knowing it would explode and Trump would be left explaining why he was having dinner with an anti-Semite like Fuentes. And of course Trump can say he didn’t know but that just raises the next question which is why is the former president having dinners with complete strangers? It doesn’t seem very professional or smart and clearly it backfired in this case.

On the other hand I’m honestly not sure how any of this was supposed to help Kanye. It sort of makes me wonder if Milo isn’t doing this for his own personal reasons which have nothing to do with Ye’s plans to run for office. Or maybe he just assumed there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Except, as we found out last night, bad publicity seems to be the only kind Ye and Milo can get out of this whole thing.