“Go f**k yourselves,” said conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly when she got wind of what they’d done. “Go f**k yourselves, you dishonest jokes of faux journalists.”

These must be liberating times for Kelly, who’d never have gotten away with such language during her Fox News days. But perhaps the stunt pulled recently by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” cohosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, called for some anatomically impossible vulgarity. That stunt? They announced Monday that they’d met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week in an effort to repair the wounds of the past seven years or so after having made a red-meat living off of attacking Trump nonstop.

“Their relationship has been complicated,” reports The New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum in a fit of understatement. “Mr. Trump was once a regular guest on their talk show, ‘Morning Joe,’ and the couple rang in 2017 at a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Then things deteriorated. Mr. Trump called Mr. Scarborough a ‘psycho’ and Ms. Brzezinski ‘crazy,’ claiming that he had once seen her ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift.’ ‘Morning Joe’ became a redoubt of the anti-Trump resistance. This year, the couple repeatedly warned that a second Trump presidency would threaten democracy’s future.”

Grynbaum, not surprisingly, doesn’t mention what might’ve caused Trump to utter such mean things about Scarborough and Brzezinski, but we can be sure that Trump didn’t fire the first shot. It’s simply not in his nature to attack media personalities unless they attack him first.

Kelly pointed out that Scarborough and Brzezinski had initially helped promote Trump’s candidacy during his first presidential run in 2015 when he frequently called into their show. Kelly even played a laughable clip of Scarborough saying he’d be open to serving as Trump’s running mate before their relationship fell apart.

Here’s how Scarborough described the recent encounter on Monday’s show: “Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit. And it’s gonna come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues. And we told him so.”

Ah, they were speaking truth to power, they’ll have us know.

The “Morning Joe” team says they traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President Trump and make amends as they get ready to cover his second term: “We did agree to restart communications. It’s time to do something different.” pic.twitter.com/5fnl4ntk8Q

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) November 18, 2024

“In this meeting,” added Brzezinski, “President Trump was tearful. He was upbeat. He seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues. And for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?”

Why wouldn’t they? Because they’d come off as two-faced opportunists, that’s why. On the other hand, though, think about the ridiculousness of this: The idea that even talking to someone is beyond the pale. You what? You actually talked to Orange Hitler?

Isn’t that precisely what journalists and media types are supposed to do? Brzezinski continued:

Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate.

But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, and January 6 were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.

This approach seems almost sensible. If you can’t beat him, join him, right? But Rosie O'Donnell, an inveterate Trump-hater and longtime friend of “Morning Joe,” doesn’t think so. And she took to TikTok to say as much.

“So Mika and Joe went down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring,” O'Donnell began. “That’s the last time I ever watch ‘Morning Joe.’ Period. End of statement.”

But that wasn’t the end of her statement. She continued because, after all, narcissistic Hollywood types love to hear themselves talk. “Unreal,” she added. “Unreal,” she repeated, in case you didn’t hear her the first time. “For months, you were telling us he’s the worst thing that could happen to this country and democracy. And then you go kiss his ring? Despicable. … Readjust your thinking. It’s not going to be a good four years, I can tell you that much.”

Speak for yourself, Rosie. It’s going to be a glorious four years.

Why would Joe and Mika do it? The cynic in me wonders whether it’s a purely monetary play based on MSNBC’s tanking ratings. Indeed, the network’s viewership has gone off a cliff of late, at a time when I suspect they thought they’d be bringing in a strong anti-Trump “resistance” viewership.

Or maybe Joe and Mika are no longer afraid of Trump because he can’t run for reelection. Or maybe some folks on the Left are beginning to realize that they’re in the minority now, that their brand of unhinged leftism has been thoroughly repudiated by the American people, and they’ve finally had an awakening. Maybe they realize that the way to grow their appeal is not by shaming the majority but by talking to them. Maybe they’re just desperately trying to find their footing after such a stunning Trump victory on November 5.

If that’s the case, we can hardly blame them. After all, who wants to tune in to a bunch of whiny leftist losers?