Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online assesses a recent performance from two of President-elect Donald Trump’s most vocal cable television critics.

Back in the mid 13th century, after Batu Khan conquered Kievan Tus, the Mongols ruled from afar as distant overlords. For hundreds of years they required local leaders to duly collect taxes and tribute and make a periodic journey to the Golden Horde’s capital at Sarai, where their authority would formally be reconfirmed at the pleasure of the Khan. Those who refused to make the journey typically ended up on the receiving end of an invading Mongol army, with their territories seized, their heirs dispossessed, and their heads chopped off.

I raise this fun and colorful historical analogy only because it has much in common with the way everyone — for once, across the political spectrum — is bemusedly characterizing the visit made by Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski to President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago for a sit-down over the weekend. Yes, Joe and Mika — hosts of MSNBC’s flagship “liberal Beltway consensus” broadcast Morning Joe — took a secret drive across Florida, that desolate no-man’s-land of MAGA country, to visit the barbarian conqueror in his West Palm Beach palace. …

… On Monday morning, the pair read a prepared speech about this to their audience — an oddly overchoreographed performance where they traded off paragraphs like a hydra-headed duo — and for all of the statement’s amusing and poignant qualities it sounded first and foremost like a tired wheeze of surrender. Joe and Mika took great pains to reassure their panicked audience that they expressed their disagreements with Trump very sternly, so don’t you worry, gentle progressives — they haven’t turned cur on you, at least not yet. But while they did not swear obeisance to Trump, they also wanted everyone to know that, well, things were going to have to be different now. Forgive the comedic darkness of this analogy, but as Mika gently spoke through her monologue it felt for all the world like “the talk” a mother sensitively gives to a bereaved child about how “Daddy’s gone, but you have a new daddy now.”