NBC’s hasty hiring and swift firing of former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel points to the political crisis the GOP caused — and the choice it forced for the press — by turning adherence to Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election into a core party principle.
News outlets that historically host commentators to present the views of both political parties have faced a problem since Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. His combination of dishonesty, corruption, bigotry, and authoritarianism was unique in recent American politics, meaning that networks or newspapers that wanted a Trump supporter on the payroll had to make their peace with hiring someone who would inevitably deceive their audiences.
That long-fermenting tension has only heightened since 2020, when Trump used election fraud lies as the pretext to subvert American democracy through a multifaceted effort that included a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
McDaniel’s Tuesday removal brought a wave of Fox News attacks on journalists at NBC and MSNBC over their unprecedented on-air criticism of her hiring. Fox’s onslaught largely presented McDaniel as a victim of her employer’s lack of ideological diversity, an argument which is on its face wrong but nonetheless points to a key fault line in American politics.
Fox anchor Trace Gallagher, for example, claimed that MSNBC hosts had forced out McDaniel “for not being a Democrat.” But McDaniel did not draw criticism from her new colleagues because her views on taxes or regulation or abortion or any other policy issue skewed from the Democratic party line. What united the network’s employees — from former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough and former Bush White House communications director Nicolle Wallace to former Air America Radio host Rachel Maddow and former The Nation writer Chris Hayes — was the role she played as RNC chair in aiding Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
For Gutfeld! panelist Kat Timpf, the network’s “disgusting” actions show that the only Republicans the network associates with are “the Liz Cheney types who are like, ‘Oh, listen, I call myself a Republican, but I’ve made my whole career about how much I hate Trump.’” This comparison is instructive. Cheney, a former Fox contributor, climbed the GOP ranks on a long record of support for the party’s conservative principles. But her unwillingness to support Trump’s coup attempt — indeed, her staunch opposition to that effort — made her an unperson in Republican politics and at Fox.
It is an unfortunate reality that at this juncture, being a member in good standing of the national Republican Party requires, at a minimum, saying that Trump’s coup attempt is not a dealbreaker. More often, climbing the party’s ranks involves full-throated adherence to the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and support for Trump’s effort to overturn it.
The signs that election denial is a core GOP principle are everywhere. Trump won the 2024 Republican nomination with little apparent effort while continuing to claim that he won the 2020 election. Large majorities of Republican voters say in polls that they agree. Politicians who want consideration for the vice presidential nomination either publicly attest that Vice President Mike Pence was wrong to oppose Trump’s 2020 machinations or refuse to comment. Republicans who opposed the election subversion plot have either subsequently joined with Trump, been purged, or are retiring from a party they barely recognize. A 2021 vote to accept the results of the election makes you a nonstarter for the House speakership, while having worked to overturn it is a selling point. McDaniel herself was forced from the RNC in favor of more fervent election deniers, while would-be new hires reportedly “have been asked in job interviews if they believe the 2020 election was stolen.”
This places news outlets that typically prioritize employing commentators with a range of opinions in a difficult position: Anyone they hire who would accurately represent the views of the GOP is by definition someone who will lie to their viewers about the 2020 election — and will inevitably support a future Trump attempt to overturn the results of the 2024 vote.
Fox is a Trumpian propaganda network, so that reality presents no conundrum there at all. The network’s top executives spent the last several years either purging their teams of employees who opposed Trumpian election denial or watching them leave in disgust. They hired a slew of former Trump administration apparatchiks and restocked their prime-time hours with a new lineup of hosts notorious for their fealty. The network’s on-air talent is already laying the groundwork for a new 2024 election denial push. And all this came after Fox paid a record defamation settlement over 2020 election claims its top stars and brass knew were false.
Executives at more credible news outlets, however, are forced to make a choice. They must decide whether they want to prioritize paying to air the views of the Republican Party or supporting democracy. A world where you could do both because both major political parties support democracy would be preferable. But thanks to the choices Republicans and their Fox propagandists made, that isn’t the world we live in.