Though Donald Trump's supposedly cozy relationship with the hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" soured months ago, it wasn't until Friday morning that the breakup became official.
On Friday, nearly every mention of the GOP nominee was accompanied by an exasperated sigh or a critical remark. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was given a warm welcome, and peppered ever-so-lightly with questions ranging from softball to moderately difficult.
"You all have done remarkable work in the fight against HIV and AIDS," said host Joe Scarborough, referring to the Clinton Foundation.
The foundation has come under scrutiny recently for an alleged pay-to-play scheme when Clinton served at the State Department.
Though Bill Clinton announced last week the foundation would stop accepting foreign and corporate donations should Hillary Clinton win in the fall, the family maintains it won't go so far as to shutter the organization on account of all the good work it does.
"You are not suggesting … that fight [against HIV and AIDS] is not dependent solely on the Clinton Foundation remaining in place, is it?" Scarborough, who was absent for most of Friday's show, asked in a follow-up.
The former Florida Republican congressman asked later in reference to an address Clinton gave this week in which she accused Trump and his supporters of pushing a racist campaign, "Do you think yesterday's speech that you gave … may be the defining moment? A turning point in this campaign when talking about what is at stake for the American people and our future?"
The difference between how Clinton was treated Friday, and the general tone used by the show's hosts and guests while discussing Trump, couldn't be more stark.
Scarborough's left-leaning co-host, Mika Brzezinski, asked Clinton, "If a Republican candidate who is actually credible was running against you, and served as secretary of state and ran a foundation that took donations from foreign entities, wouldn't you be criticizing him or her for a conflict of interest?"
Earlier, before Clinton called into the show, Brzezinski had a moment where she faced the camera and chastised Trump for calling the Democratic nominee a bigot.
"We were just talking off-set, and I have to say it," she said looking directly into the camera. "Donald Trump, you have no idea what your words mean. You have no idea. You have no idea what your words mean."
"I can't pretend and sort of try and cover this fairly and put it in the veil of objectivity. This is wrong. You have no idea what your words mean and what you're doing to this country," she said.
Disparaging Trump is not new territory for "Morning Joe," and Brzezinski isn't the only host to level criticism against the GOP nominee.
Scarborough penned an op-ed recently denouncing the GOP nominee as a demagogue, and beseeched GOP leadership to do something about the "political train wreck" before "something terrible happens."
However, things haven't always so icy between Trump and the MSNBC morning crew.
For the first several months of the GOP primary, Scarborough and Brzezinski couldn't get enough of the 70-year-old native New Yorker. They hosted him for soft-focus, sit-down interviews. They took his phone calls. They hosted him for a so-called "town hall" discussion.
Scarborough himself claimed at an event last year that he acted as something of an informal adviser to Trump, and said, "I've actually called him up and said, 'Donald, listen, you need to speak in complete sentences at debates.'"
It got to the point where some in media, including Slate's Isaac Chotiner, began to refer to Brzezinski and Scarborough as Trump's "favorite hosts."
The "Morning Joe" team, for their part, defended themselves by claiming they hosted Trump so often only because he made himself so readily available.
Even if it were as simple as that, Scarborough and Brzezinski's treatment of Trump during the GOP primary nevertheless created "discomfort" at the network, according to CNN.
It also drew heated criticism from media personalities of all political persuasions.
"Trump's regular media contacts are exclusively a gang of supplicating ratings-whores ... especially Scarborough, who appears to be Trump's favorite lapdog," Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi wrote in February.
National Review's Jonah Goldberg argued in May that the "Morning Joe" crew played an important role in helping Trump achieve electoral success.
"By constantly pushing the narrative that Trump is unstoppable, that he's 'in a different league,' that he's inevitable and on the right side of history, and, most importantly, that substantive criticisms of Trump just don't matter, Morning Joe … has been making in-kind donations to his campaign," he wrote.
But by May, everything changed. The once warm relationship between "Morning Joe" and Trump unexpectedly bitter.
Scarborough and Trump on May 6 started to trade insults on social media, catching many in media off guard.
The two have been trading barbs and threats ever since.
Not long after their initial Twitter spat in May, "Morning Joe's" 2016 election coverage suddenly became consistently critical of Trump.
Since the May meltdown, Scarborough has also tried to clarify that he never actually supported trump, and that the soft interviews and free airtime was just business.
"I said from the beginning that when Jeb Bush dropped out I supported John Kasich," he said in August. "I also said I couldn't vote for Donald Trump. I also said I could never vote for Donald Trump all along from the very beginning because of the things that he was saying."
The GOP nominee, for his part, has remarked recently that he doesn't consider the "Morning Joe" breakup as any great loss.
"He used to like me — then all of a sudden, he didn't like me and that's okay," he said in an interview with Newsmax TV.
But the billionaire businessman is still keeping close tabs on the once friendly morning cable news program.
On Friday, after the show's hosts had already gently guided Clinton through an interview, and after they spent nearly the entire morning disparaging Trump, the Republican candidate demanded they apologize for mocking one of his surrogates:
Wonderful @pastormarkburns was attacked viciously and unfairly on @MSNBC by crazy @morningmika on low ratings @Morning_Joe. Apologize!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2016