People close to the president will tell you that in fights like this one, his anger doesn’t stem from the criticism aimed at him, but from the fact that it comes from prominent people he once considered friends. That’s going to be hard to avoid given that his relationships with the nation’s top news people started when they were his fellow New York media fixtures, not national journalists covering him as the president.

No relationship better exemplifies the way Mr. Trump lives and breathes the political-media environment than the one between him and the hosts of “Morning Joe,” Mr. Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, both of whom agreed to talk with me about it on Friday.

As has now been well documented, Mr. Trump spent years courting and hobnobbing with the major media personalities who populate his hometown. Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski were among them. After all, they were part of the same network, NBC, where Mr. Trump’s “Apprentice” was such a hit.

Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski don’t deny that something of a friendship developed, although they say it gets overblown.

“Maybe we had lunch with him five or six years ago, but, you know, it was always a run-and-gun thing,” Mr. Scarborough said. “He’d always show up for our book parties; he was always very supportive there. He’d help us with fund-raisers when David Axelrod was raising money for Cure. Donald was very helpful there. We did a lot of stuff with AmeriCares, and we could always count on him being supportive on that.”