Donald Trump listens as RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks during a campaign rally in Missouri in 2018. Jeff Roberson/AP
In a Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel launched her campaign to rewrite her history of aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert American democracy. In her first interview since stepping down as RNC chair earlier this month, McDaniel washed her hands of the Republican establishment’s complicity in the January 6 insurrection and declared her time running the GOP between 2017 and 2024 to have been a resounding success.
NBC News announced on Friday that McDaniel would be joining its politics team. The decision was lambasted by reporters. Within NBCUniversal, MSNBC News President Rashida Jones has told employees that the cable network has no plans to have McDaniel appear on its shows. On Sunday, NBC News’ chief political analyst Chuck Todd criticized the decision on Meet the Press.
Quite a moment on Meet the Press this morning. pic.twitter.com/1RKvAq7mj2
— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) March 24, 2024
Meet the Press host Kristen Welker said that the Sunday interview was arranged before McDaniel’s hiring was announced and that it would be conducted as a standard news interview, not as a conversation with a new colleague. In response to questions from Welker, McDaniel appeared to renounce a number of the positions that she had amplified in her previous job.
Take the 2020 election. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote in response to McDaniel being hired by NBC:
McDaniel did more than shill for the president. She played an important role in public and behind the scenes in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—and with it, two and a half centuries of constitutional governance. That should be a clear red line for employers in the truth-telling business. In November 2020 story in Politico, just a few months before the Capitol insurrection, Tim Alberta offered a glimpse of how McDaniel abetted Trump’s lies about the election and allowed her party organization to amplify them in even more absurd ways.
As Alberta reported at the time:
McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.
In contrast, on Sunday, McDaniel acknowledged during the interview that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. When Welker pointed out this was the first time the former chair had done so, McDaniel disagreed. Then she was presented with an exchange she had with Chris Wallace last year in which she refused to acknowledge Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. “I don’t think he won it fair,” McDaniel said in the clip. “I don’t. I’m not going to say that.” Fast forward to Sunday, when McDaniel said, “He won. He’s the legitimate president…Fair and square.”
McDaniel also condemned the violence on January 6, noting that the RNC put out a statement that day to that effect. Technically true, but McDaniel failed to mention that the January 6 statement did not say who won the 2020 election, nor did it mention that the assault on the Capitol was motivated by conspiracy theories promoted by a Republican president and his allies.
One day after January 6, McDaniel put Trump on speakerphone during an RNC meeting at a Ritz-Carlton on Florida’s Amelia Island. The crowd responded by chanting “We love you!”
As always, McDaniel read the room. Later in January 2021, she joined Trump on a call in which she pushed Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the results of the election. “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,” McDaniel said, according to a recording obtained by the Detroit News. “We will get you attorneys.”
In another exchange on Sunday, Welker asked McDaniel whether, like Trump, she supported pardoning those who had been convicted of crimes for their action on January 6. McDaniel said she did not. Why then, Welker asked, was McDaniel only now making that point, given that Trump had been calling for pardons for months. “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel replied. “Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”
In reality, the new McDaniel looks a lot like the old one: a craven political operative willing to play any part that comes with sufficient compensation and prestige.
