A little more than two weeks after resigning as the chairperson of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel admitted Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election over her party’s candidate “fair and square”.
But the newly-hired NBC News contributor maintained it is acceptable to also say there were “problems” in the manner that the US president defeated Donald Trump – even after the former president’s supporters translated such sentiments into the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021 that has been linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.
McDaniel delivered her contradictory remarks Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press in what was her debut on the network as a paid pundit. Show moderator Kristen Welker spent much of the session pushing McDaniel to address why she had waited until now to concede that Biden justly defeated Trump in 2020 – and to express disapproval over Trump’s promise to free those who were convicted or still facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack if he returned to the White House.
“When you’re the RNC chair, you – you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel said.
And while she said: “I don’t think violence should be in our political discourse,” she also contended that it was acceptable for Republicans to continue to question certain aspects of the 2020 election.
Though nonpartisan voting integrity experts consider that race to be the most secure election ever, McDaniel said it remained “a concern” for her that Pennsylvania could go from recording 260,000 mail-in ballots for Trump’s Oval Office victory in 2016 to 2.6m in 2020.
McDaniel omitted mentioning that mail ballots heavily favored Biden after Trump discouraged his supporters from using mail ballots and instead urged them to vote in person.
Democrats who generally obeyed measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 during that relatively early phase of the pandemic, on the other hand, availed themselves of mail ballots. Trump and his Republican allies then used the disparity in mail ballots to fuel lies about how electoral fraudsters had vaulted Biden to the presidency.
Welker at one point asked whether McDaniel regretted getting on a phone call with Trump in which they apparently sought to pressure two local-level election officials in Wayne county, Michigan, to refuse to certify the state vote that Biden won. On the call, which the Detroit News reviewed late last year, McDaniel promised the officials “we will get you attorneys” as long as they declined to certify the vote.
McDaniel stood by her actions on the call, saying the discussion wasn’t for the officials to decline to certify the outcome of the election in the state – but rather to demand an audit of the vote. She said what concerned her was that the officials reported being called “vile names” as well as “being threatened” when they went public with their wishes for an audit.
Ultimately, McDaniel said, while she believes Biden won and is “the legitimate president”, she insisted “there were issues in 2020”.
“I believe that both can be true,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel’s performance did not impress former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who was on a panel of commentators for Sunday’s episode. He questioned the wisdom of NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel, saying to Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation … She has credibility issues that she still has to deal with.”
Todd said many NBC journalists are uncomfortable with the hiring because some of their professional dealings with the RNC during McDaniel’s tenure “have been met with gaslighting, [and] have been met with character assassination”.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the “internal backlash” happening within the NBC family of networks. Citing “people familiar” with the controversy, the Journal reported that Rashida Jones, MSNBC’s president, had told employees that McDaniel would not be welcome to appear as a guest on NBC’s sister network MSNBC.
after newsletter promotion
MSNBC would not comment on that report on Sunday. An MSNBC executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person would not publicly discuss internal matters, said it would be up to individual network shows to decide whether or not the bring McDaniel on – not that there is a network-wide ban.
NBC had no comment on Todd’s statement. In announcing McDaniel’s hiring on Friday, Carrie Budoff Brown, NBC’s senior vice-president for politics, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.
A niece of US senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who is the only Republican to twice vote to convict Trump at Trump’s impeachment trials, McDaniel became the first woman to serve as RNC chairperson in 2017.
But she resigned on 8 March, saying in part that she was stepping down to afford Trump the opportunity to select a chairperson of his choosing as he attempts to take back the presidency in November.
The RNC subsequently installed as its chairperson Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trumpists’ claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was voted in as co-chairperson.
Trump has claimed he does not intend to use the RNC to pay off the legal bills that he has run up while facing more than 80 criminal charges for election interference, retaining classified materials after leaving the Oval Office and hush-money payments. He has also been grappling with multimillion-dollar civil penalties handed to him over lawsuits centering on some of his business practices that were deemed to be fraudulent as well as a rape allegation that a judge has found to substantially true.
But as the Associated Press has reported, the Trump loyalists in command of McDaniel’s former organization are in firm control of the Republican party’s political and fundraising levers without facing much – if any – internal oversight.
Asked why NBC viewers should trust her voice after her RNC tenure, McDaniel said a substantial number of Americans shared her viewpoints. “I think,” she told Welker, “you should be able to hear from different voices.”
