By Kaili Joy Gray for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
The response to NBC News’ hiring of Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee, has been nothing short of astonishing.
The revolt from NBC employees—from on-air stars like Chuck Todd to NBC News Guild members—has been loud, public, and righteously angry.
On Monday night, Rachel Maddow joined the chorus of outrage. In a riveting and passionate monologue, Maddow first explained what exactly is so unacceptable about McDaniel. The enabling of Trump; the support of his attempts to overturn the election; McDaniel’s efforts, over and over again, to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election.
Maddow then eviscerated the bosses at NBC for the grave insult of hiring McDaniel and pleaded with them to admit they were wrong and to undo this massive mistake.
You’ll want to read this for yourself:
The person who is the head of the Republican Party during Donald Trump's time in office and during his effort to throw out the election result and stay in power any way, and during his effort to run for election again after having done that, is Ronna Romney McDaniel. And she pitched in and helped. She helped set in motion the part of the plot that involved sending fake Trump electors to Congress from states that Trump did not win so Republicans in Washington could use those fake, fraudulent elector slates to contend that maybe Trump did win those states, even though he didn't.
And don't believe me on that. There she is on page 23 and page 27 of the federal indictment charging Donald Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States. There is her personal appearance in this scene of the crime as alleged by the U.S. Justice Department in this ongoing criminal case. In Michigan, where the fake electors are themselves now on trial, she told the state of Michigan in writing explicitly, do not certify the election results. The Detroit News has reported that with Donald Trump on the phone with her, she directed Michigan election officials to not certify the vote. She told them, quote, “Do not sign it. We will get you lawyers.”
She pitched in. She was part of the project. And what was the project? It was to use the power of the Republican Party—Republican officials in the states, Republican office holders in Washington, the national Republican Party that she runs— to use the party's power to reject election results to take over the government and hold power by other means.
And this project is now ongoing. Right now, the project is to tell the American people that those efforts on the 2020 election were righteous. That 2020 election, it wasn't okay. Those election results were not correct. We shouldn't believe in American elections. We shouldn't believe American elections are real elections. American election results should not be seen as real. They should not be respected.
That's the project now. It didn't work to overthrow the government last time, but as long as you can build on that first effort, as long as you can keep up the anti-election mythology, then you are priming your people, you're priming the American public to not accept the results of the next election either. You're telling them that they're going to need to take power by other means, because the election isn't going to be how we do it anymore. You're also priming people, honestly, to vote to give up this supposed democracy we have because what good is it any way? So what are we really losing if we decide we're going to lose this? Who cares? Elections are fraudulent here anyway. Who cares if we give them up?
Ronna McDaniel has been pitching in on that too, continuing to say since 2020 that that election wasn't right, that the American public should know that that vote wasn't real, and that is a message not only about 2020, but about this next election. And about whether or not elections should matter at all and whether we should bother having them at all.
And so I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn't just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn't really work, that this last election, it wasn't a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.
Because that argument, that is a necessary part, that is the most necessary part, of the overall project of getting us as Americans to give up on this election stuff. Because wouldn't we rather have a real man in charge anyway, somebody who could really get some stuff done? If only we can clear away all the things in his way.
We have a long history in this country of forgettable men telling us that we need a new system of government where everything is under their control and politics is over, and this new strongman way of government is going to make America great again. We have had a lot of these guys.
But our generation's version of this guy has gotten a lot farther than all the rest of them. And why is that? He would have been as forgotten as all the rest of them had he not been able to attach himself to an institution like the Republican Party, and had the leader of that party in his time not decide that she would abide him, she would help. She would help with the worst of it.
It's my understanding that MSNBC’s leadership did not object to Ronna McDaniel being hired by NBC News when the matter first arose, but when the hiring was announced, and MSNBC staff essentially unanimously and instantly expressed outrage, our leadership at MSNBC heard us, understood, and adjusted course. We were told this weekend in clear terms, Ronna McDaniel will not be on our air. Ronna McDaniel will not be on MSNBC. And I say that, and give you that level of detail, because there has been an effort since, by other parts of the company, to muddy that up in the press and make it seem like that's not what happened at MSNBC. I can assure you, that is what happened at MSNBC. Ronna McDaniel will not appear on MSNBC, so says our boss since Saturday. And it has never been anything other than clear.
And I will also say, if you care what I think about this, I will tell you the fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me that is inexplicable. You wouldn't—you wouldn't hire a wiseguy, you wouldn't hire a made man like a mobster to work at a DA's office, right? You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener.
And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision. And it's not about, you know, Democratic Party, Republican Party. It's not about partisanship. It's not about right versus left. It's not about being a political professional versus some other kinds of person. It's not about being mean or nice to journalists. It's not about just being associated with Donald Trump and his time and the Republican Party. It's not even about lying or not lying.
It's about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy as an ongoing project, right? And this is a difficult time for us as a country, and I think that means we need to be clear-eyed about the implications of it. Difficult times make for difficult decisions. We are contending with something we've never had to contend with before. In the news business, yes, we are covering an election, which we do all the time. But we're also covering bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy. The chief threat among them now is not the rioters and the kooks, but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims that America’s elections aren’t real, that election results aren’t real, and that they should not be respected.
We are contending with this now, not from William Dudley Pelley's brown shirt militias, right, but from the multibillion dollar massive political operation of one of the two governing parties of the United States of America. And that's new.
And with our country up against something that daunting and that scary and that dangerous for the country, I think bad decisions will inevitably happen. Mistakes will be made. But part of our resilience as a democracy is going to be recognizing, us recognizing when decisions are bad ones. And reversing those bad decisions. Hearing legitimate criticism, responding to it, and correcting course. Not digging in, not blaming others.
Take a minute. Acknowledge that maybe it wasn't the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now.
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