We all remember how Trump’s insurrectionists smeared feces on the Capitol walls. Your basic goon behavior. But who among us could ever have imagined, three years hence, that a mainstream news network would soil itself in a similar fashion?
I’m referring, of course, to NBC News and its $300,000 MAGA apparatchik, Ronna McDaniel – who insisted a few years ago that Jan. 6 was merely an assemblage of “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse”; who goosestepped with Donald Trump in his quest to create slates of fake electors after his 2020 defeat; who, in a phone call, personally urged Michigan election officials not to sign the certification of Joe Biden’s statewide win; whose Republican National Committee tweeted out a video claiming that Trump “won in a landslide”; who is named in Georgia court documents as a “necessary and material witness” with “unique knowledge” of the “conspiracy” to overturn the results of the ’20 election.
And who is now being afforded the opportunity to soil the airwaves and concoct fresh excuses for Trump (as we witnessed yesterday on Meet the Press) – while pocketing NBC News’ lucre. It’s a sweet deal for the ex-RNC chairwoman, and a shit sandwich for the news division reporters who abhor lies in high places.
As network political director Chuck Todd said on the air yesterday, in an extraordinary moment, “There’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this (hire) 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.”
NBC’s corporate overlords clearly hired McDaniel to give the news division a patina of “balance.” The fundamental problem, of course, is that the traditional “both sides” paradigm – Republicans balancing Democrats and vice versa – is deader than the Ford Edsel. The tradition paradigm worked well back when both parties were devoted to the American experiment. Today, however, one party has devolved into an authoritarian cult that’s built on a scaffolding of lies. There can be no “balance” in such an asymmetrical political climate. There can be no “balance” when one side – peopled with the likes of Ronna McDaniel – devotes itself to the overthrow of the democratic process.
Thousands of truth-seeking reporters have been laid off nationwide during the last few years, yet here we had McDaniel, debuting yesterday on Meet the Press, profiting handsomely from her lies and agitprop. Indeed, she lied in her very first sentence: “As RNC chair, you have to remain neutral…We had a neutral primary…Yes, I was neutral.” In truth, she tried to tip the scales for Trump at the starting gate, calling on Nikki Haley to quit after only two states had voted.
Her live chat with host Kristen Welker got way worse after that:
* She thinks it’s fine that Trump is sucking the RNC dry, taking its money to pay his prodigious legal bills: “If (donors) feel strongly to support his legal bills, then they have every right to do so…I think as long as the donors know that that’s what they’re doing, and so, it is in the waterfall of it.”
* She says now that the Jan. 6 violence was “unacceptable” and that those jailed for violence should not be freed (which Trump is vowing to do). But when asked why she has never spoken out until now, she replied: “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the team, right?” Clearly it didn’t bother that by taking one for “the team,” she was abetting criminality.
* She says that, despite the fact that Trump is an adjudicated rapist and fraudster with criminal indictments in four court jurisdictions, she will vote for him anyway because “I feel less safe – crime is on the rise (and) we’re seeing fentanyl come across our border.” The truth is that crime is going down in major cities, and fentanyl flows in via legal ports of entry, brought here by U.S. citizens.
* She says, with respect to Jan. 6, that Trump is basically innocent: “I don’t think he wanted that attack to happen on the Capitol…Do I think that he wanted that to happen or pushed that to happen? I don’t…So I don’t hold him responsible for that.” Wow, where to begin. For weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Trump stoked the goons’ ire about a “stolen” election,” urged them to show up that day (“Will be wild”), and when the goons got violence, he watched it on TV for hours, deaf to entreaties that he do something.
* She says that she never pressured those Michigan election officials to withhold their signatures from the Biden victory certification: “I was not telling them to do anything.” But her phone call was recorded – Trump was on the line with her – and in that call she said: “Do not sign it. If you can go home tonight, do not sign it.”
* She’s still clinging to Trump’s “election fraud” lie. More than 60 court cases failed to prove any fraud, and Trump’s own cybersecurity expert said there was no fraud, but even now McDaniel won’t give it up: “There were issues in 2020…that took away safeguards to the election…There were problems in 2020…There were problems…It is fair to say there were concerns…There’s concerns about the election and that’s the only thing I’m going to say.”
* She’s singling out Pennsylvania. It’s “a concern,” she says, that my swing state went “from 260,000 mail ballots in 2016 to 2.6 million” in 2020. Sounds like a big conspiracy. The truth is, PA mail ballots were virtually prohibited in 2016 but were totally legal in 2020. They were totally legal in 2020 because the Pennsylvania legislature legalized the broad use of mail ballots in 2019. And the legislature in 2019 was controlled by the Republicans.
Bottom line: McDaniel defended her presence on NBC News by insisting that “whether you like it or not,” it’s important to air “different viewpoints.” But a news division supposedly devoted to the pursuit of truth is under no obligation to pay big bucks for a “viewpoint” that weaponizes lies for a mission that is fundamentally un-American.
In her words yesterday, “I am not changing my tune.” By normalizing her, by getting suckered into false balance, the network is soiling itself. Has it learned nothing these last eight years?