Trust and Accountability Matter

Hiring Trump enabler Ronna McDaniel is a dangerous blunder by NBC News, especially when the need for truth-telling is so urgent

“I think our bosses owe you an apology,” NBC’s Chick Todd told Kristen Welker after the “Meet the Press” moderator interviewed just-hired Ronna McDaniel. (Video capture from YouTube)

Just as Donald Trump should be held accountable for his pathological lying, criminality and violent incitements, so should the myriad enablers who have exacerbated his incessant attacks on our democratic institutions and undermined the public’s trust in our country’s sacred commitment to self-governance.

That’s why NBC News’ decision to hire Ronna McDaniel—the freshly exited chair of the Republican National Committee who used her powerful position to repeat and amplify Trump’s lies and put our democracy in grave danger—is so appalling. Her support for the Big Lie of election fraud cannot be simply walked back now that she’s “switched sides” with a new employer.

McDaniel’s new role as an on-air analyst, which has spurred intense criticism from journalists within NBC and beyond, has not only infuriated many viewers, it has undermined the credibility of NBC’s news operation as a reliable source of information. Remember, among her various and shameful forms of enabling, McDaniel called January 6 “legitimate political discourse.”

Giving McDaniel a platform and paying her a reported $300,000 to express her views—including, by the way, an ample history of Trump-inspired attacks on the media—may sound to someone like a legitimate effort to widen the network’s inclusion of multiple voices. But the very act of including her helps sanitize her insidious role in the still-ongoing effort to hasten democracy’s demise and fascism’s arrival. We cannot forget the central, ongoing participation of propagandists like McDaniel in helping Trump achieve his goals.

In announcing McDaniel’s employment Friday, to provide analysis “across all NBC News platforms,” Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees the company’s political coverage, said McDaniel would provide an “insider’s perspective.” I guess that includes detailing her own role in, for example, assisting the fake elector scheme in Michigan? Her involvement there led the Superior Court in Georgia’s Fulton County to call her a “necessary and material witness” possessing “unique knowledge” of the conspiratorial plot.

As Tim Alberta described in Politico in 2022, McDaniel doubted there was “any scalable voter fraud in Michigan.” Yet she and her team refused to tell the truth about what they knew; rather, she chose to defend and advance Trump’s lies. That included pushing to delay Michigan’s certification of the election and helping the Trump operatives assemble fake electors and sow chaos.

In fact, she was on a Trump call with Michigan county officials urging them not to certify election results in Detroit. In the recorded call, McDaniel told the public servant who were about to sign off on the vote count, “Do not sign it…We will get you attorneys.”

In addition, Politico’s Alberta reminds us that, under McDaniel’s watch, the RNC posted a video on Twitter that shows the criminally indicted lawyer Sidney Powell insisting Trump “won in a landslide” and asserting there was “a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.”

Last year in a CNN interview with Chris Wallace, McDaniel was still claiming Biden didn’t win the 2020 election fairly. “I think there were lots of problems with 2020,” she told Wallace. “Ultimately, he won the election, but there were lots of problems…I don’t think he won it fair. I don’t. I’m not going to say that.”

What was NBC thinking when they had Carrie Budoff Brown announce, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team”? Yesterday morning, on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” after Kristen Welker interviewed McDaniel, the usually milquetoast Chuck Todd said, “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”

I’d say they owe more than just Welker an apology, even as they begin to backtrack. MSNBC president Rashida Jones reportedly told employees that there were no plans to put McDaniel on the channel.

As much as this story of Ronna McDaniel is about journalistic ethics and credibility at a time when the profession is under constant attack by Republicans determined to delegitimize factual news gathering, it’s also a reminder that she is just one of thousands of enablers who exploited their positions for personal gain. It raises the serious question of how we as a country—including journalists and media organizations—confront this sordid chapter and begin to repair the damage. That assumes we escape their effort to retake the White House and pursue retribution and authoritarian, anti-democratic control.

Every member of Congress who backed the lies and still refuses to condemn the January 6 coup attempt is helping subvert the people’s will. Likewise, the many staffers who have yet to recant their enabling role continue to undermine public trust in the rule of law and help sustain the big lie of election fraud among the majority of Republicans.

So, too, the time will come when the question of how to confront the tens of millions of Trump cultists—not to seek vengeance against them like their cult leader but to bring them back into the fold of a democratic America—will be unavoidable. I personally can’t wait. This slow, assuredly painful process is critical to genuinely moving forward as a nation.

How the leaders of NBC decide to respond this week to their terrible decision to put McDaniel on the payroll—how they manage their crisis of credibility at a time when truth-telling has never been more urgent—will offer some insight into the challenges we face when the decision-makers are less inclined to listen to progressive, anti-Trump voices. It’s been encouraging to witness the pushback, but let’s not doubt that this experience will only intensify the counterpunching from the MAGA crowd as they work to avoid accountability in the years ahead.

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Speaking of accountability, one last note: Today we’ll find out if Trump’s sudden claim over the weekend that he has nearly half a billion dollars in cash—contradicting his lawyers who said that he can’t come up with the money to secure a bond—is true or another lie. If he doesn’t have the money and the appeals court refuses to grant him more time or a reduced fine, this lifelong fraudster will finally face real consequences if New York State Attorney General Letitia James begins seizing his properties.

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