Yesterday I wrote that NBC was smart to Hire Ronna McDaniel.
"Peter, we love you but this is crazy. She can be a guest. But her hiring as a commentator suggests she has more authority, intelligence, credibility and honesty that she has."
"I think you have misplaced your priorities here, Peter. If I hire someone, it's rightly assumed I am vouching for their integrity."
I got lots of comments like these.
Let me explain.
An ongoing theme of this blog is that the message cannot be disentangled from the messenger. Who is saying things and how it is said is a huge part of the received communication. Indeed, when I am being bold I claim that nearly all of the received communication is from the who and how, and that denoted, literal words are nearly irrelevant in political speech.I use the exaggerated example of Joe Biden or Clint Eastwood. No matter how superbly either of them acted the part of Juliet in Shakespeare's play, they could not do it persuasively. They don't look the part. I cite the response to Biden's recent State of the Union speech. All of the attention was on his tone of confidence, his strength of voice, and his apparent clarity of thought -- not what he said.
Ronna McDaniel would not be hired to be a source of truth. She would be a paid contributor to play a role -- the role of Republican quisling and collaborator with Trump, a person who corruptly enabled Trump to spread falsehoods.
Regular viewers of NBC know that Eugene Robinson is on multiple news panels. Every time the panel is introduced we hear that Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter writing for the Washington Post. For all I know he won it 30 years ago for a heartwarming human-interest story about a lost puppy, but that doesn't matter. He won a Pulitzer prize, so he is presented as a highly qualified serious reporter for a major newspaper.
Ronna McDaniel would be introduced as a former Trump enabler who participated in the gaslighting of America, who participated in the fake elector plot in Michigan, and who, even with that effort to undermine democracy, was insufficiently loyal to Trump. I can imagine her on the panel next to Eugene Robinson. He gets his intro. Then:
" . . . and Ronna McDaniel, former head of the Republican National Committee who in that role echoed Trump's false claims of a stolen election and who participated with him in the the Michigan fake elector plot -- actions she now recognizes were lies, but done 'for the team' during her role as RNC head. She was fired by Trump and joins us to give a Republican perspective."
She would be positioned as an unreliable narrator. Because she is a woman and a professed Christian, NBC would need to exercise some care. If she looked like a punching bag, particularly by male news hosts, it would send an unseemly, counter-productive look of misogyny -- a man beating up and humiliating a woman. She claims the identity of Christian mother. This could look like a concerted NBC effort to pick on and humiliate "deplorable" Christians. Avoid that.
Her place on a panel, positioned as a thrust-from-the-Trump-cult Republican, would be to articulate that some of what Trump did and does is criminal. Anti-democratic. Lawless. Shockingly crude. Dishonest. And that McDaniel, a professional Republican partisan, rejects that part of Trump-ism. MAGA Trump-cultists are a lost cause. But there are Republican and Republican-leaning votes up for grabs. These are people who want a more secure border and immigration system, people who hate taxes, people who dislike unions, anti-abortion social conservatives. They probably belong in the GOP, but they are offended by Trump. Those are the people NBC would be trying to reach with McDaniel.
McDaniel might not last long. She would quit. She would not like being introduced as a dishonest enabler of a lying criminal. She would be, as Trump celebrated in a Truth Social post, politically homeless -- in Never Never land:
Nothing about her history suggests that she would accept the courageous position of political homelessness. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and McDaniel's uncle Mitt Romney, all drew lines in the sand. Ronna McDaniel didn't. She was fired.The easy thing for her to do would be to work a few weeks, realize she looked terrible being described as a partisan liar, and negotiate her way out of the contract.
Then go to Fox where she can delight audiences by complaining about her treatment by the liberal media.
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