I think he’s sincere. Even when he was drawing conspiracy flow charts on his Fox News chalkboard back in the day, he seemed to believe every word of what he was saying. It’s arguably his defining characteristic as a media personality: Whatever he’s saying at a given moment, he really, really means it. But he’s going to get blasted anyway for “selling out” by some anti-Trumpers who’ve spent the last three years appreciating him as a rare voice of MAGA skepticism among the marquee names of conservative talk radio. Given the Blaze’s troubles and Hannity’s ballooning success at Fox, this’ll be read as Beck throwing in the towel and genuflecting before Trump to regain some relevance and protect what’s left of his bottom line.

It’s interesting that the Blaze chose to post this part of his monologue, in which he rants about the media to justify his newfound Trump support, instead of the part where he lists the things Trump’s actually accomplished in office. That’s a reflection of the times. Being happy with the economy, the halting North Korean detente, the end of the Iran deal, and a new embassy in Jerusalem are good, substantive reasons to revisit one’s opinion of Trump. Wanting to spite the media is a stupid reason, even when they’re acting like smug, dishonest jackholes worthy of your spite. But in an age of negative partisanship, the latter appeals more viscerally than the former. It’s more durable too: The economy could tank, the North Korea negotiations could collapse, Iran might produce a nuclear weapon on the sly, but the media will still be smug, dishonest jackholes. The electoral glue of negative partisanship is much stickier than the positive variety.

I hope it works out for him. He’s joining the team here just as Mueller is building to a conclusion on Russiagate and the federal investigation into Michael Cohen seems to be picking up steam. A month from now we could be in a completely different political world. On top of that, there’s the steady stream of petty banana-republic nonsense, like Trump trying to muscle Amazon because he has a vendetta against Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, to wade through. A guy like Beck who frequently waxes rhapsodic about the almost divine wisdom and nobility of the Founders isn’t going to find a comfortable seat on the Trump train. Probably he’ll hang off the sides for awhile and jump if the ride starts to get bumpy again and looks like it might derail.

Exit quotation from Stephen “redsteeze” Miller: “If this is all it took for him to go full Trump, then he was already full Trump a long time prior.”