I'm actually going to defend MSNBC host Joe Scarborough here, because I fail to see how this is any worse than everything else about him.
In background discussions, NBC News and MSNBC journalists, reporters and staffers said there was widespread discomfort at the network over Scarborough's friendship with Trump and his increasingly favorable coverage of the candidate.
"People don't like that Joe is promoting Trump," one MSNBC insider said. Others described Scarborough's admiration for Trump as "over the top" and "unseemly."
Now, now: It makes perfect sense that he'd fall for the shallowest, most vapid and most insult-focused candidate. Have you seen his show? It’s basically Fox & Friends without the cocaine. Well, without most of the cocaine. It’s a little late to start worrying about how his on-air behavior makes you look.
Also, Joe seems to be friends with Donald Trump in real life:
[S]ome of his colleagues believe that his coverage is influenced by his friendship.
Which would be a problem if anyone presumed Joe Scarborough to be a journalist—but among the ideological punditry? Let's be frank, the entire point of beltway punditry is to promote your personal friends. Your friend could be a warmonger responsible for the greatest American military fiasco since Vietnam, and if he's got a new book to sell or a new think tank position then by God he will be on your show.
This is every Sunday show, ever. This is Fox News every morning, evening and night. (Fox gets bonus points for their regular practice of actually hiring failed politicians between jobs, because it's one thing to prop up your political friends and associates by keeping them in the limelight between gigs, but noble in the extreme to agree to cut them a regular paycheck until they get back on their feet.)
See, I think the problem here is that some people consider Joe Scarborough's use of his network show to promote his friends and punish his enemies to be unethical and crass, whereas the rest of us think so little of the professional pundit ranks that we have simply presumed everyone, from Bill O'Reilly to Sean Hannity to Joe Scarborough to lesser mortals like Stuart Varney are all crookedly promoting their personal friends and movement soulmates every damn day of the week, because they are all just horrible, horrible people.
So let's not dwell on whether it is unethical or unseemly for Joe Scarborough to promote Donald Trump on his television show. Let's take a moment to reflect, instead, on how amazingly vapid Joe Scarborough has to be to treat the vapid, racist blowhard Donald Trump as a serious voice in Joe's Serious Republican Party, even as the party intellectuals—meaning, anyone left in the RNC offices with two firing neurons—tear their remaining hair out trying to figure out how to derail him. Of course Joe Scarborough is inexplicably impressed by Donald Trump. And that’s good news, because we've finally found a pool shallow enough for Joe Scarborough to play in.