Right-wing website Newsmax has done a lot of fawning over Donald Trump over the past year. Not only did Newsmax lead the way in promoting Trump's presidential ambitions, it was even willing to sponsor a Republican presidential debate with Trump as the moderator, which ultimately imploded when most candidates avoided it due to, yes, Trump's presidential ambitions. (Trump's birtherism probably didn't help either.)
You'd think all of that promotion would have earned Newsmax some kind of scoop when Trump was ready to make an official presidential endorsement. Apparently not.
When Trump endorsed Mitt Romney last week, he completely ignored Newsmax.
Newsmax did rush out an article shooting down reports that Trump was going to endorse Newt Gingrich. But that came from "a senior source with the Gingrich campaign," not Trump. And several hours after Trump's endorsement, Newsmax published an article about it that appears to have drawn from reports by other news organizations, with no apparent contact with Trump himself.
As a final insult, Romney had refused to take part in Newsmax's planned Trump-hosted debate in December. Gingrich's willingness to do so was cited by Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy as a reason for endorsing him.
Does this mean that the slobbering love affair between Newsmax and Trump is over? Given that Newsmax has spent the past month turning its website in to a Gingrich hype machine, perhaps so.
And what will Ronald Kessler, Trump's biggest, most slobbering cheerleader of Trump's presidential ambitions -- and a Trump-touter from way back who served up a fawning portrayal of the man in his 1999 book on the Palm Beach social scene -- do now?
Actually, we already know the answer to that. Kessler is, after all, someone who managed to fawn over Romney during his 2008 presidential bid at least as much as he did over Trump. That culminated in a creepy profile of Romney's wife in which Kessler noted her "good carriage" and "blond mane" and adding, "She is unpretentious, but she isn't shy. She lowers her eyes, thinking, and then looks up directly at her interviewer and dazzles him with that smile."