Ronna McDaniel and MSNBC Are a Match Made in Hell

The Ronna McDaniel backlash continued to spill out inside MSNBC on Monday, as the hosts of its signature morning show blasted her hiring and vowed not to use the former Republican National Committee chair as an on-air contributor. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring,” Joe Scarborough said on Morning Joe Monday. “But if we were,” he added, “we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons,” including her role in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “We believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage,” echoed co-host Mika Brzezinski. “But it should be conservative Republicans—not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier, and we hope NBC will reconsider its decision.”

“It goes without saying,” Brzezinski added, that “she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor.”

The hosts’ remarks echoed criticism former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd leveled at the network Sunday, after McDaniel made her debut as an analyst with an interview on the program, during which she continued to baselessly claim there were “issues” with the 2020 election while acknowledging that Joe Biden “won” and is the “legitimate president.”

“I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” Todd told Kristen Welker, the show’s current host. “I don’t know what to believe,” he said, because the ex-RNC chair was plagued with “credibility issues.”

Of course, the uproar is entirely justified: While the politico-to-pundit pipeline has raised ethical issues plenty of times before, McDaniel is a particularly unseemly hire. Not only was she a hardcore Trump loyalist; she spent the lead-up to the 2020 election helping him plant seeds of distrust in the democratic process and amplified his claims that the contest was marred by fraud, even participating in his efforts to pressure Michigan election officials to not certify the results. After that election denialism led to its inevitable conclusion—the January 6 insurrection—she defended the action of the MAGA attackers, officially declaring the riot “legitimate political discourse” and censuring now-retired Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for investigating it as part of a Democratic-led House select committee. “Insane choice,” Kinzinger, now a CNN contributor, wrote of her hiring. Unsurprisingly, the sentiment is the same among the rank and file: “People,” as one source familiar with the situation inside the network told Politico, “are pissed.”

McDaniel defended some of her actions as RNC chair during her Meet the Press appearance Sunday, telling Welker that as head of the party, she had to “kind of take one for the whole team.” But that shrug-off only underscores her critics’ point about her: She has proven herself willing to do or say anything, even at the expense of America’s democracy, to serve the ambitions of her party, its leader, and herself. “That’s not ‘taking one for the team,’” as Cheney put it Sunday. “It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”

For the most part, network executives have presented McDaniel as a unique and essential voice who will offer an “insider’s perspective” into the GOP, as Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics at NBC News, told the New York Times last week. But it’s unclear how much insight the recently-ousted RNC head can provide into her party, given her poor standing both in Trumpworld and the ever-shrinking sect of “normal” Republicans. And even if she does have “insider” chops, is that really worth $300,000 a year, considering how obvious Trump’s motivations and maneuverings are to anyone who has watched him operate these last eight years?

There could, of course, be larger forces at work, as Semafor’s Max Tani pointed out Sunday: NBC may not be purchasing the political wisdom of someone who oversaw back-to-back-to-back election flops as much as they are preparing for the prospect of “dealing again with a Trump administration.” Executives are “concerned at the possibility that Trump could take revenge on the company,” as a high-profile NBC employee told Tani, and top brass may see “little choice but to extend an olive branch to the former president,” who has already directly threatened to take action against the network and its parent company.

The harsh reality, though, is that nothing short of outright capitulation would guard against Trump’s ire, and the “olive branch” is sure to do more damage to the network’s credibility than it is to give it security against the former president’s threats. Worse yet, it could help to normalize Trumpism during an election cycle in which the anti-democratic danger he poses is coming to a head.