Even before Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin got off the ground, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade was pissed. “That’s by far the most ridiculous tweet of late,” he chided, referring to the president’s assertion, on the cusp of the summit, that the United States was at fault for its crumbling relationship with the Kremlin. After a stunning press conference, in which Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, Kilmeade’s displeasure was parroted by a wide swath of conservatives. But the true surprise came the next morning, when Kilmeade, along with the rest of his Fox & Friends co-hosts, continued to chastise Trump, vigorously attempting—or so it seemed—to persuade him to recant. “The president is under the impression, and I don’t know why, still, that if he says the Russians hacked, it makes his election look illegitimate,” Kilmeade said. “I have news for you: Senator [Chuck] Schumer and Hillary Clinton will never get over the fact that you won the election. . . . Did the Russians help with that? No. From the day you came down the escalator, you shocked the world. From November, when everyone had you losing, you shocked the world. It wasn’t because of Russia, but Russia’s goal was to upend our electoral process. They hate democracy. And I will say this to the president: when Newt Gingrich, when General Jack Keane, when [American Conservative Union chairman] Matt Schlapp say the president fell short, and made our intelligence apparatus look bad, I think it’s time to pay attention.”

For Fox & Friends to criticize the president at all is almost unheard of—the network has largely become an echo chamber that absorbs Trump’s policy ideas and talking points, digests them, and regurgitates them into the president’s living room like a mother bird to its young. But in the aftermath of Helsinki, it became clear that in this case, Trump’s blind spot is an acute liability. “He can’t separate meddling from colluding,” a source close to Trump told Axios. “He can’t publicly express any nuanced view because he thinks it concedes maybe there’s something he did wrong.” And so, Kilmeade, Steve Doocy, and Abby Huntsman found themselves in the strange position of attempting to defend American democratic institutions by walking Trump through this concept, albeit via a praise sandwich. “Nobody’s perfect, especially [after] 10 intense days of summits, private meetings, and everything on his plate,” Kilmeade added hastily, at the end of his initial tirade. “But that moment is the one that’s going to stand out unless he comes out and corrects it.”

Safe in the assumption that Trump was tuning in, the show’s hosts took it slow. “It drives the president crazy, apparently, when it is suggested that he did not win the presidency on his own, that there was some meddling that helped him,” Doocy said. ”[But] keep in mind, all the authorities have said that there was meddling”—something, he said, “pretty much everybody and their brother” agrees upon—“but not a single vote was changed.”

Huntsman and Kilmeade then suggested that viewers (read: Trump) watch the interview their colleague Chris Wallace conducted with Putin the previous night. “In his own way, he admitted” to meddling, said Huntsman, summing up the Russian president’s argument: that whoever hacked the Democrats was providing a service to the American people by exposing the party’s hypocrisy. “It’s not up to him to decide what private e-mails get exposed or not get exposed,” added Kilmeade, calling out Putin’s “evil mind” and suggesting that the president reverse course. “And with the president, if he just turns around and says, ‘Not O.K.’ If it happens in November, the retribution—you can’t possibly calculate—that’s gonna be coming down the pike for Russia, we can blink the lights on the entire country.” And Huntsman provided a final piece of sandwich bread by reiterating that Trump was still a legitimate president. “And by the way, President Trump won the election. I think he’s gotta get over that,” she said, ending by saying that Trump “has a real opportunity” to “make it very clear where he stands.”

Their strategy of choice—pandering to Trump’s ego to get him to parrot their priorities—also happens to be the preferred tactic of many a Trump adviser. But in Fox’s case, it’s more likely to work: Trump is an eager audience, and Kilmeade, Doocy, and Huntsman are free of the White House taint, where the president is hyper-aware of aides who may attempt to sway him out of self-interest. And indeed, on Tuesday afternoon, the hosts got their wish, when Trump said in a statement that he fully accepted the findings of the U.S. intelligence committee, but that the meddling “could be other people also.” He added that his administration “will stop it and repel it [if there are] any efforts to interfere in our election.” It’s unclear whether his walk-back will convince those members of his base who bought into his Helsinki talking points. But at the very least, Fox’s on-air talent can rest assured that they’ve done their job.