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At around 4am on the morning of Saturday, September 19, Jacob Soboroff, a host on MS Now, was preparing to head to Los Angeles’s Studio City when he received an urgent call from Niamh Cagney, one of his producers in New York. “She didn’t get in,” Cagney said, of Akayla Gardner, the MS Now White House correspondent. “So we’re going to blow up the show.” On Truth Social the day before, Donald Trump declared that MS Now, CNN, and Politico were banned from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Apparently, he was serious. As Soboroff grabbed his jacket and made for his car, he scrambled to text Gardner as his producers rushed to secure new guests. “By the time I got to the studio,” Soboroff told me, “we had a pretty good plan.”

When MSNBC split from NBC last fall, and became MS Now, Rebecca Kutler, the network’s president, sought Soboroff out.…