Donald Trump really, really loves cable news. He takes in more of it than your average viewer, and definitely more of it than a man who is supposedly taking very seriously his job as President of the United States should ever dream of consuming. In fact, as the perpetually shouty Sean Hannity has ably demonstrated, if you want to get a message to the Trump White House these days, your single best bet for doing so is to don a sloppy suit, wake up early, and unleash your most volcanic takes directly into a Fox News camera. When that poorly-punctuated presidential tweet drops an hour later? That's a job well done.

Although the President's abiding affection for Fox and Friends and friends is well-documented, details of the extent of that obsession remain jarring every time they trickle out. On Tuesday, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski appeared on Seth Meyers' Late Night to discuss the evolution of their, um, fraught relationship with Trump. Although Trump was a frequent Morning Joe guest during the early days of his candidacy, that relationship has since soured, and Scarborough has a frighteningly grim theory about why:

MEYERS: What was it that you said that made him no longer want to be a Morning Joe viewer?

SCARBOROUGH: I gotta say, one of the things that upset him the most is when we went on the air and I just said in passing— because people were saying, “Oh, you have Trump on for high ratings”—and I said, you know, at the beginning it was sort of an interesting thing, sort of a freak show. But as time went on, people knew the act. So I said, “Chris Christie and Bernie Sanders actually get higher ratings than Trump does.” He went crazy. Sent me a letter, had a spreadsheet, talked about how his ratings were higher than ours.

A spreadsheet! In the midst of a presidential campaign, it was an offhand comment about a middling cable news show that sent Donald Trump over the edge. (Pity the poor intern who was roused before dawn and commanded to brush up on his Excel skills.) No one tell this thin-skinned ninny about Twitter replies, or he might never look away from his Android again.

Scarborough went on to note that during the campaign, he had referred to Trump as a racist and a bigot who could start World War III, while, Brzezinski, not to be outdone, had opined that Trump needed serious psychiatric help. None of that, though, mattered. "It all rolled right off his back. The second we said Chris Christie and Bernie Sanders out-rated him, that was the end."

So, the President is a terrified, insecure, unserious entertainment personality who isn't bright enough to grasp any of the nuanced decisions that the office he holds requires him to make, and in those moments of existential crisis, taking a breather and firing off a few tweets about television ratings spirits him back to a safe place. Cool.

Only 43 more months until we can try and put a functional adult in the White House.

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