NBC News announced McDaniel’s new role on Friday, and by Sunday, her hiring was denounced on the network’s flagship public affairs program, “Meet the Press.” Chuck Todd, the show’s former host, told viewers that “a lot of journalists at NBC News [are] uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting.”
Although the announcement said McDaniel would contribute “across all NBC News platforms,” the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, said Monday that she will not be appearing on their show. They cited McDaniel’s role in pressuring election officials not to certify the result of the 2020 election and in abetting “Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme.”
I should note that I am paid to appear on those NBC platforms and do so several times a week. Unlike McDaniel, however, I have never claimed that a presidential election was “rigged” even after dozens of recounts and court cases proved it was not. Nor have I ever tried to trivialize the violent, bloody Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection by calling it “legitimate political discourse,” as McDaniel has.
My inbox and social media feeds have been deluged by viewers asking why NBC would even consider hiring McDaniel, who during her seven-year tenure turned the RNC into an instrument of Trump’s whims and grievances. As far as I’m concerned, she lost all credibility back in 2020, at the Republican National Convention, when she had the party decline to produce a platform laying out its policy views — and instead just pledge to support Trump’s agenda, whatever that might be.
One theory is that the network, like some other large companies and institutions, is trying to position itself for the possibility that Trump will win in November. I’m not sure that makes sense, though. For one thing, McDaniel’s stock has crashed in Trumpworld and she is on the outs. It was Trump who orchestrated her defenestration at the RNC, replacing her with a tandem that includes an even more loyal lackey alongside Trump’s daughter-in-law.
More broadly, the whole world must know by now that trying to appease Trump is a fool’s errand. Any gesture of rapprochement is acknowledged only until the next time you say or do something that angers him — and then, yet again, you become an “enemy of the people.” Anyone who thinks being nice to Trump will keep him from trying to destroy them should call Mike Pence and ask how that worked out.
It’s more likely, I believe, that NBC thought it had found one of the unicorns that virtually all leading media outlets have been hunting for years now: commentators who can articulate the Republican Party’s point of view in a way that is consistent with responsible standards and practices.
The problem is that since Trump’s takeover of the party, the mainstream GOP position — on any given topic, at any given moment — is his position. This is true even if it means Republicans must say the opposite of what they said yesterday, and even if it means saying things that demonstrably are untrue.
That explains why, for example, House Republicans could spend months loudly demanding new legislation to address the crisis at the southern border — and then, when handed a bipartisan Senate bill mandating the toughest border security measures in decades, refuse even to vote on it because Trump doesn’t want to ease the crisis before the election.
And it explains why McDaniel, as RNC chair, declined to push back against Trump’s description of rioters jailed for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as “hostages” whom he will free if he wins in November. “If you attacked our Capitol and you have been convicted, then that should stay,” McDaniel said Sunday during her rocky NBC debut. “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker followed up asking why McDaniel had previously been silent on the subject, to which she replied: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”
McDaniel’s appearance on the show had been booked weeks ago, and Welker learned only Thursday that McDaniel was becoming a paid contributor — which turned their interview into an exegesis of what McDaniel has been saying for years vs. what she says now.
“I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” Todd told Welker on the air.
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