By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Dear reader, let us talk candidly for a moment about some
people who no longer really matter. Do you even remember who Ronna McDaniel is?
She was, of course, known as Ronna Romney McDaniel back when
she was a fledgling chairwoman of the Michigan GOP during 2016, when Trump eked
out a narrow statewide victory, but chose to drop her middle name for prudential reasons
once Trump selected her as chair of the Republican National Committee. She
departed the job recently, after Trump ended the 2024 primary and installed his
own loyal myrmidons in office there. (This is, in fact, a traditional thing for
presidential primary winners heading into the general election to do; what
Trump’s servitors intend to do with that institutional power and money
threatens not to be.) So, as part of the standard politics-to-media carousel,
she signed with NBC/MSNBC on Friday as an on-air “contributor,” presumably
hired to represent the pro-Trump side during the election for audiences like
MSNBC’s, which clearly crave more pro-Trump content.
She’s now departing this job as well, only days after it
started: An internal rebellion at NBC, most noticeably from its on-air
talent, caused NBC to drop her. (Well-lawyered negotiations no
doubt await.) The fusillade was first sounded by MSNBC’s president Rashida
Jones who, obviously reacting to internal lobbying, announced that she
had “no plans” to allow McDaniel to appear on the cable
news channel. On Sunday, Chuck Todd went on NBC’s Meet the Press and,
well, made it about the press: “There’s a reason why there are 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, have been met with character assassination.” Yesterday morning,
MSNBC fully assembled their frontline to complain about the hiring of a woman
they had already officially banned from their network; first, the Morning
Joe team trotted out to deliver a sermon, with Joe Scarborough
chippily noting, “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were we
would have strongly objected to it” and asking them to reconsider. Later on,
Nicole Wallace practically sang
an aria of sorrow, and then Rachel Maddow provided a fitting coda to the
day’s events by registering her disapproval as well, as if that was ever in
doubt.
All in all, a rather amusingly petulant foot-stomping
reaction — and make no mistake, it worked. But whence does this sudden pang of
conscience spring? In all cases, the complaint from (MS)NBC’s on-air whingers
was about “election denialism.” As head of the RNC during the November 2020
elections and their aftermath, McDaniel‘s RNC played footsie with far too many
of Trump’s claims of election fraud (albeit without aggressively promoting
them). This, according to NBC’s on-air talent, is not just a moral demerit but
a uniquely disqualifying failure. McDaniel herself seems to be under no
illusions as to whether she was right to support Trump’s claims of a fraudulent
election: when finally subjected to her first (and last) interview on NBC, she
said, “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team,
right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right? This is what I
believe.” Thanks for telling us now, Ronna!
I will be blunt: I think Ronna McDaniel is a fool and a
failure. Her only notable characteristic throughout her tenure at the RNC was
how she privileged servility over service, catering solely to the needs and
desires of Donald Trump above those of the party. She certainly did nothing to
improve candidate recruitment or electoral outcomes in 2018 or 2022, when Trump
was not on the ballot but Trumpists were. She leaves behind a shell of an
organization that now has willingly consented to become Trump’s personal
backstop for his innumerable legal fees. She is such an unpersuasive advocate —
for Trump, or conservatism, or the Republican Party as a brand — that before
the affair boiled over, a colleague and I idly joked that she might have been
hired as “controlled opposition,” a tackling dummy others on the network could
take square and unanswered shots at. (Over at the Atlantic, David Graham writes a smart piece setting aside the
partisan aspect of the kerfuffle and analyzing it simply as a dumb hire on
NBC’s part; even her loyalty to Trump is of dubious value for gaining “access”
in a second Trump administration, given her recent expulsion from the RNC.)
But my opinion does not matter any more than Joe
Scarborough’s or Chuck Todd’s do, at least on the merits. (Their opinions
certainly mattered internally.) To echo an observation made by occasional NR contributor Peter Spiliakos, the complaint
made by Todd and others about Ronna McDaniel is a procedural one — “she’s an
election denier” — designed to stand in for a substantive one they are not
allowed to voice: They want to retain the prestige and persuasive branding that
comes from being “straight news” whilst using that as cover to frame the Trump
campaign as fundamentally illegitimate. It simply will not do to have anyone
making the vocal (or even worse, persuasive) case for Trump as a paid colleague
in that situation. I’m sure they are acting in what they perceive to be
the national interest (which they have arrogated unto themselves).
Unfortunately for them, they simply cannot have it both ways. Either you have a
partisan view, or you do not. (I have no problem saying I will not vote for
Donald Trump, but then again, I also have no need to pretend to be neutral in
the matter.)
Furthermore, the line they affect to draw here is
entirely artificial, a transparent case of selectively holding the Other to
standards you constantly excuse when those of your own tribe are on trial. I
don’t particularly mind the fact that Jen Psaki literally negotiated her NBC
contributor gig while still working as Joe Biden’s press secretary. I do
mind that John Brennan went from Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency, where he
set up the “Crossfire Hurricane” FBI investigation into the Trump
campaign’s purported “Russian collusion,” directly to NBC/MSNBC, where he was
the loudest and most influential voice flogging the Steele dossier and the Russiagate hoax, for which he
has paid zero professional price. Al Sharpton – where does anyone even
reasonably begin with the long list of enormities his name is attached to? This
is the man who directly provoked an antisemitic mass murder that his
colleagues seem to have either forgotten or forgiven. (If a colorful run for
president successfully cures a man of his past political crimes, then by NBC’s
apparent logic Donald Trump is off the hook and free to restart The
Apprentice any time he pleases.)
The hypocrisy isn’t confined to NBC, either; it’s
widespread across media networks: Terry McAuliffe went from proudly calling
2000, 2004, AND 2016 all “stolen elections” — oftentimes in his capacity as
head of the Democratic National Committee, curiously enough
— to being a paid CNN contributor in 2019. (By way of
karmic restitution, he had a worse 2021 than many.) In an earlier era, George
Stephanopoulos moved immediately from being one of Bill Clinton’s most
gleefully vicious and amoral hatchetmen (his particular specialty was in
quelling Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions”) to ABC News, swiftly becoming the host of This
Week and later Good Morning America. He did truly awful
things to the reputations of multiple women merely because they had the
misfortune to be bedded (or allegedly raped) by his boss. But his friends don’t
hold it against him; they understand that it was just a job to do, you see.
Peruvian president Óscar Benavides, who seized power in a
coup d’etat in 1933, once explained his political worldview the following way:
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies — the law.” By entering into the
media world of NBC, where she was not only without friends but surrounded by
enemies, Ronna McDaniel received her full measure of “the law” by which these
organizations are run. Nobody should delude themselves into believing those
laws are anything but arbitrary. So please, NBC — spare us your sanctimony.
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