Transcript - America This Week, March 29, 2024: "MSNBC Loses Its Nose Over Ronna"

You can't stick your nose up at the world if it's gone. Walter and Matt relive the Ronna McDaniel chorus, condemn absolutely all scissors imagery, and read Gogol's "The Nose."

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, what’s up?

Walter Kirn: Nothing. I’m here in Montana. I haven’t traveled for a few couple of weeks in a row, which is rare. I wake up every morning. It’s that Montana spring when you don’t know if you look out the door, whether it will be summer or whether it will be December again.

Matt Taibbi: Right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And so it’s been snowing. I’ve been holed up in a mountain cabin doing some writing, waiting for the world to reawaken, and I’m feeling good, getting ready for a big year every week. I feel like we’re just about to start the weirdness in earnest, but I think we finally have, I mean, the election weirdness crisis, the crisis of democracy,

Matt Taibbi: It’s a little like Lost, season four. I feel like we’re about to have the full-blown melee. We’re preparing for the cross-island confrontation, but it just hasn’t happened yet. So, being holed up in a mountain cabin riding sounds pretty good. I approve of that. That’s awesome. Not a lot in terms of world-shaking events this week, but some-

Walter Kirn: Except for the bridge collapsing in Baltimore.

Matt Taibbi: Well, yes, but that’s just America falling apart, which is-

Walter Kirn: right.

Matt Taibbi: That’s an ongoing leitmotif, right?

Walter Kirn: Right. It’s true at this point.

Matt Taibbi: You guys have a thing 10 years ago in Spy where you would pretend to have predicted stuff?

Walter Kirn: I don’t remember that feature, but I did not predict the bridge collapse. But I think, I’m pretty sure that there will be more such events. And I’m out of conspiracy theories as to why. I only know that once this eclipse happens in a week or so, I expect a hastening of bad juju, like a-

Matt Taibbi: A quickening.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, a quickening. At the last eclipse that happened in 2017, I was with a guy we both know, and right before it happened, he said, “Oh no, all the bad stuff’s about to start,” and he started crying. I mean, he was really upset. He has astrological sensitivity, I guess, and I can’t say he was wrong because August, 2017 did mark a quickening of absurdity and disaster.

Matt Taibbi: Well, Charlottesville happened right after that, right? I’m trying to think of what else went on right around that time. Anyway...

Walter Kirn: Yeah, somebody has to come out with a calendar of all the craziness that’s happened so that we can situate ourselves in time.

Matt Taibbi: I’ve actually tried to do that. I’ve tried to do a full chronology of all the detours into irreality or unreality that we’ve taken, but it takes too long. By the time you get to a third of the way through, a far too significant amount of time has passed, and you can never finish the thing. It’s like Zeno’s paradox: you can never actually get to the end of that.

Walter Kirn: Right, because there’s no pause long enough for you to summarize the chronology up to that point.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: Just when you’re starting to orient yourself, they spin the top again.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Okay, so we did have a historically funny media story happen this week, and I think I’m relatively new to it. I was working on other stuff earlier this week, so I didn’t pay attention to it in real time, so I had to go back and watch it again-

Walter Kirn: Same here. I was in a mountain cabin, and only in the last day have I acquainted myself with the uprising at MSNBC.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. This one actually prompted me to go back and smoke weed again, because some of the video was so funny that I wanted to see if I could get through it without laughing. No, it’s just not doable. So for those that don’t know the backstory... Well, I don’t really understand the backstory. MSNBC hired Ronna Romney McDaniel... By the way, do you notice that they kept inserting the, “Romney,” after she was hired?

Walter Kirn: And MSNBC host and eminence grise Lawrence O’Donnell made special reference to the fact that she seems to have dropped that Romney name while she was running the Republican Party in deference, he claimed to Donald Trump, and he scolded her for changing her very name so as not to give offense to the Donald. And he asked, “What example did that set for your children, Ronna, that you would do violence to your very name in order to kowtow to the madman?”

Matt Taibbi: Well, maybe we should start with Lawrence, or do we have to start with Rachel? I don’t know.

Walter Kirn: I think we have to start with Rachel only because she operated as the kingpin or orchestra conductor of this particular mini-scandal.

Matt Taibbi: All right, so just for the background in this story, NBC, for whatever the fuck reason hired Ronna McDaniel, the former head of the RNC to come onto their team. Now, if you’ve been following the journey of corporate media in the last, I don’t know, five, six years, you will have noticed that there has been a trend away from hiring news professionals and hiring, instead, say, former heads of the CIA or the Director of National Intelligence or White House Press secretaries. Some of them who have even in their own shows now, like Nicole Wallace and Jen Psaki.

But I guess in a response to some negative feedback about the political slanting of their network, they decided to hire Ronna McDaniel, who is the former head of the RNC, NBC hired Ronna McDaniel. Now, when NBC makes a hire, that means that MSNBC is forced to start incorporating that person as content. And this led to an immediate, absolute meltdown among the MSNBC staff, and McDaniel was fired after one appearance, I believe even one question of one appearance, if I’m not mistaken. The metaphor I keep thinking of a sea cucumber. If you attack it opens its guts out and tries to be so disgusting that predators will swim away and look for something tastier to eat, and MSNBC did that: every one of their shows was this sort orgy of self-examination. And let’s start with Rachel, I guess, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: I think we have to start with Rachel.

Rachel Maddow: The person who is the head of the Republican Party during Donald Trump’s time in office, and during his effort to throw out the election result and stay in power anyway, and during his effort to run for election again after having done that is Ronna Romney McDaniel. And she pitched in and helped. She helped set in motion the part of the plot that involved sending fake Trump electors to Congress from states that Trump did not win, so Republicans in Washington could use those fake fraudulent elector slates to contend that maybe Trump did win those states, even though he didn’t.

And don’t believe me on that: there she is on page 23 and page 27 of the federal indictment, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States. There’s her personal appearance in this scene of the crime as alleged by the US Justice Department in this ongoing criminal case. In Michigan where the fake electors are themselves now on trial, she told the State of Michigan in writing explicitly, “Do not certify the election results.” The Detroit News has reported that with Donald Trump on the phone with her, she directed-

Matt Taibbi: Okay, we can pause here. I’m going to go ahead to the part later where she talks about the heroic uprising of MSNBC against NBC. But in the meantime, Walter, what are your observations about any of this?

Walter Kirn: Well, my metaphor for this, okay, every once in a while there’s a doctor or someone in Antarctica who gets sick or has a tumor and is forced to do surgery on themselves. This was MSNBC acting as though it had found a growth in its bosom, and took a knife and cut it out and declared itself healed. It was a cross between an exorcism and a self surgery for cancer. They made themselves the heroes of a story that needn’t have existed in the first place, causing me to wonder if they really meant to hire her sincerely, or if this was all a play which was meant to model how we are all supposed to act as we take out the cancer of Trumpism, et cetera.

In other words, the whole thing had this dramatic structure in which you discover that a foul being is in your midst, you cry, “Monster,” you attack them as a village and throw them out, and then you hold a kind of trial in absentia, a retrospective trial in which you justify and celebrate your own purge. And I couldn’t help but see the whole thing as this microcosmic model for how we’re supposed to behave in general toward election deniers, Trumpers, Republicans and so on.

Matt Taibbi: “Begone, spirit.”

Walter Kirn: And what was so strange was Trump doesn’t want her as the Republican Party head: he celebrated her departure. The party as it’s constituted now with its MAGA-centric concerns, sees her as a RINO or a …

Matt Taibbi: She’s like a cut above Liz Cheney to Trump Republicans.

Walter Kirn: Exactly. But MSNBC used her in this Greek tragedy as the cancer on the empire that is thrown out, and then all is well. And it was a Greek tragedy because they all operated as a chorus against one person. And we just saw Rachel, but we’re going to see that every single host joined together in this heroic effort to remove the stain.

Matt Taibbi: It was awesome. It was across the board, and these videos will live on YouTube forever. Just quickly, let’s go back to Rachel talking about the heroic resistance of MSNBC to NBC. So, here we go with that.

Rachel Maddow: But we do defend ourselves as an institution, not because we’re personally offended by the way that we’re treated, but because a free and uncowed press is necessary for our democracy. A free and uncowed press is part of our system of government. We stand up for ourselves as a way of standing up for our country and for our constitution, the First Amendment to which makes it possible for us to exist.

Matt Taibbi: Now, they care about the First Amendment-

Walter Kirn: “To exist at all,” Matt, we would disappear-

Matt Taibbi: Hang on a second. Yes, we would disappear-

Walter Kirn: The rhetoric can’t soar any higher. Our very existence as molecular structures depends on the First Amendment, which let’s not forget these people have been trashing with their other hand consistently when it comes to supposed purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. But nevertheless, now they are the last, lone defenders of the First Amendment. And how did they defend it?

Matt Taibbi: By …

Walter Kirn: By shutting somebody up.

Matt Taibbi: By shutting somebody up. It’s amazing. Okay, so she’s going to go on and talk about in defense of the First Amendment we showed up the bosses. Here we go.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Rachel Maddow: And so, I want to associate myself with all my colleagues, both at MSNBC and at NBC News, who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, so if you think that maybe that was an accidental over-hype, right, like, “We hired somebody who was actually trying to overthrow the United States,” MSNBC actually wrote a Chiron for their own assault on democracy. Here’s the Chris Hayes story.

Chris Hayes: A couple of hours ago, NBC News announced that Ronna Romney McDaniel, the former chairperson of the Republican-

Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry, look at that: the attack on democracy, which happened in our own house when we hired Ronna Romney McDaniel. I lost it when I saw that-

Walter Kirn: Dude, the uprising. They saved democracy. Rachel would suggest that they may have saved our very existence. And here they are reporting on MSNBC internal politics, supposedly, as though they have put down Frankenstein’s monster. And their pride in their own defense of all that is good is just amazing to watch: the solemnity, the amazing bravery that they showed. And they’re simply not above proclaiming their own bravery. That’s what this is all about.

Matt Taibbi: It’s amazing. The real story is, “Our ratings suck so bad that we turned our faces all the way inside-out to hire somebody we couldn’t stand. And that actually, we thought that we might’ve been able to put that over on our staff. But it didn’t work out, so now we’re going to take credit for saving humanity,” and just focus on the Chiron here. I’m sorry, hi, I looked at this and I spit out everything I was trying to drink at the time. Here we go.

Chris Hayes: A couple of hours ago, NBC News announced that Ronna Romney McDaniel, the former chairperson of the Republican National Committee, will not be a contributor to the network. This comes just four days after NBC News announced her hiring as a political analyst. As you might know, we don’t have a show on weekends or Mondays. Between then and now, I’ve been closely following the news and talking to lots of people inside the company, and most of what I wanted to say about all this has already been said very well by my colleagues from people Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough to Nicole Wallace …

Matt Taibbi: Okay, so let’s hear from some of those folks.

Walter Kirn: Can we pause just for a sec, Matt?

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely, yes.

Walter Kirn: Back to my Greek chorus comment: there they are in tiny little boxes like the Hollywood Squares, that old game show, all ready to throw their stones. This is The Lottery. They should each be holding a stone with Ronna’s name on it. Look at this. This is not just an individual revulsion: this is true team effort against the intruder.

Matt Taibbi: I’m sorry, Nicole Wallace, look at the box in the upper right there.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Didn’t she sell us on the Iraq war that this exact audience couldn’t stand? That wasn’t a red line we couldn’t cross?

Walter Kirn: And then there’s Rachel, chief proponent of the Russiagate, Trump taxes investigation, and Chuck Todd-

Matt Taibbi: Morning Joe, who was a... Yeah, Chuck Todd. Yeah, right.

Walter Kirn: Right. This is their all-star team putting down a revolution that was within the company and presenting it as the biggest news of our time. Hayes there said that even on the days he wasn’t working, he was following closely the developments. I can just see him at home, his wife asking questions about the New York Times crossword puzzle, and he says, “Not now, honey, I-”

Matt Taibbi: “I just got a text.”

Walter Kirn: Yeah, “I just got a text about the McDaniel affair.”