"Play it for him, Joe," Mika Brzezinski said. She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. "Just give him a little taste."

It was a recent morning in New York City, a couple of hours after Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough had signed off on yet another episode of MSNBC's Morning Joe, and now she was trying to get her co-host to let me in on a secret. It was a secret about Donald Trump.

You wouldn't know it now—after all, since late spring, Scarborough has been one of Trump's biggest critics—but in the ﬁrst eight months of the Trump candidacy, Scarborough often seemed to be an adjunct of the Donald's campaign, lobbing softball questions at Trump when he'd phone in to the show, and giving him tongue baths in absentia when he wasn't on the program. Trump, Scarborough told his viewers, was "a masterful politician," the veritable second coming of Ronald Reagan.

That sort of sycophancy didn't sit well with some of Scarborough's colleagues (various NBC employees I spoke with characterized it as "unseemly," "inappropriate," and "a disgrace"), but the ﬂattery certainly tickled Trump. "You have me almost as a legendary ﬁgure," he complimented Scarborough in February; on another occasion, he referred to Scarborough and Brzezinski as "supporters."

Of course, the affection was ﬂeeting. As Trump failed to moderate his message, Scarborough grew skeptical—and by the summer, when he talked on-air about a Trump presidency, he conjured visions of race riots and nuclear holocaust. Privately, he was musing on the meaning of Trump's political foray in stranger ways. And now, as we sat in his office at 30 Rock, I wondered what he had to reveal: A damning voice mail from the Donald? A clandestine recording about the nation's 47 percent? Scarborough had me on tenterhooks. Finally, he gave me his scoop. "I'm working on a musical," he said. "It's Trump: The Musical."

I laughed, but when I realized he wasn't joking, my amusement gave way to admiration for what Scarborough had glimpsed for himself: opportunity. A character he once imagined in the White House he now envisioned on Broadway. "It's actually Hamilton meets The Book of Mormon," Scarborough gushed, pitching his conceit for the comic romp. With Brzezinski egging him on, Scarborough, whose ego is as healthy as his head of hair, reached into his briefcase and pulled out his iPhone. He wanted me to have a listen. "I hope you have no problem putting in my earbuds," he said, giving them a perfunctory wipe on the hem of his shirt. He pressed "play," the music swelled, and soon a male voice, the titular character, was belting in my ears:

I'm just a simple man

Blessed with this orange tan

I'm simply titanic

Beloved by Hispanics and Jews

I'm huge

Losers don't understand

The genius of my border plan

They call me a fool

Then they dare ridicule my huge hands

He hit "pause," and I took out the earbuds. The snippet I'd heard was rough—just a demo, Scarborough reminded me, sung by a friend of his—but in a month, he'd visit a New York City studio to produce a more polished version. There, David Cook, Taylor Swift's band director, would man the soundboard, and Rory O'Malley, who currently brings down the house as King George III in Hamilton, would handle the vocal work. After that, Scarborough and his agent, Ari Emanuel, would have what they needed to start lining up ﬁnancial backers to stage a production. Scarborough's wide, expectant smile belied any insecurity, any sense that this might be a daunting ﬁeld to jump into.

I asked him if he was sure that people—not to mention Broadway audiences—would still be interested in Trump after November. "Oh yeah," Scarborough replied. "There's enough general-interest knowledge about this guy that I can write basically whatever I want to write." He got even more excited as images of ovations and Tony Awards seemed to ﬂicker in his eyes. "People are like, 'Well, what if he wins?' " Scarborough said. "I go, 'That's even better!' "

For all the damage Trump's presidential run has inﬂicted on the body politic, it's done something remarkable for Joe Scarborough. It's boosted his proﬁle on the political-media landscape, sure, but it has also enlarged some already gargantuan ambitions. If the insanity of our political age has induced anxiety in the vast majority of us, in Scarborough something else has been stirred: a renewed conviction that he's capable of feats far beyond a morning TV show. And at a moment when politics is hot and bizarre and very much alive in our culture, who can blame a guy for thinking big?

Scarborough, a former Florida congressman who spent the '90s putting a friendly face on some of Newt Gingrich's harsher Republican policies, birthed Morning Joe nine years ago. And with a rotating assortment of political hands and journalists, he's used the show, ever since, to stoke the curiosities of a tribe of inﬂuencers scattered up and down the Acela Corridor. "I've been on Morning Joe and gotten four-star generals who text me in the middle of the show with something surprisingly newsworthy," says The Washington Post's David Ignatius, a frequent guest.

When Trump jumped into the presidential race last year, Scarborough had been friendly with the businessman for nearly a dozen years, and he began talking him up as a contender when most pundits were dismissing him as a sideshow. Scarborough says he was simply predicting the political future—correctly, as it turns out. He boasts about a drive he took last summer to Scranton, Pennsylvania, for a family wedding, during which he stopped at a Target just west of Nyack to use the ATM. (He'd forgotten his E-Z Pass.) "I looked around at all the people there, and I immediately picked up the phone," Scarborough recalls. "I called Mika, and I said, 'Trump's gonna win the Republican nomination.'"