The former Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.
“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.
“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.”
NBC announced the hire on Friday. Carrie Budoff Brown, the senior vice-president for politics, said McDaniel would contribute analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.
On Sunday, McDaniel told Meet the Press Joe Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square”, adding that she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.
But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [in elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies, which ultimately stoked the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .
That prompted an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire.
The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff. Later, primetime MSNBC stars Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki also protested.
Maddow said: “In the news business, we are covering … bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of the 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.”
Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “What NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ’24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’
“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.
“If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”
McDaniel and NBC did not comment.
McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept defeat by Biden, culminating in his incitement of the January 6 attack; and his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.
On Monday, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”
And yet, despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’
“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.”
