NBC's Ronna blunder: A failed attempt to appeal to MAGA voters — except they hate her too

I was a MAGA volunteer and activist from the beginning of the Trump campaign in 2015 right through to 2022. Here’s what you might not know: The MAGA faithful I knew loathed Ronna McDaniel, who led the Republican National Committee through most of that period, nearly as much as they (and I) loathed the Democratic Party and everyone else perceived as enemies of Donald Trump and his movement. 

To us, in fact, she was never Ronna McDaniel. As the niece of 2012 Republican nominee turned U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, a well-known Trump skeptic, she was always Ronna Romney, with added emphasis on that name. It was something of a political scarlet letter, and like her uncle, Ronna was regarded as a Vichy-style quisling, a RINO who was worse than almost any Democrat, with the possible exception of Barack Hussein Obama.

In every conversation I had about her with my fellow MAGA countrymen and women, we poured our contempt and mockery on McDaniel; never was there a scintilla of pity or empathy. 

NBC News’ recent attempt to hire McDaniel, after Trump had driven her from the RNC chair, enraged Democrats, liberals and  several of the network’s pundits. From my former MAGA perspective, however, McDaniel’s since-terminated $300,000-a-year contract came as no surprise. 

When I first heard about McDaniel’s hire, I said out loud what I’ve been saying for a few years now: So many in the national press have never recovered from the shock of egregiously missing Trump’s grassroots momentum in 2016. Especially over the last year, the mainstream media has become obsessed with “saving” the Republican Party from the Dark Side of the Force, rapturously awaiting a GOP savior to seize control of the party from Trump. Maybe it would be former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. No? Maybe former Vice President Mike Pence. No? Fine, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — she was the one! Until she wasn’t. 

It was this infatuation that led NBC’s executives to employ McDaniel, seemingly overlooking that she had accused America’s media, writ large, of “stealing our faith in the election process.” 

The awkward NBC/Ronna dance was only slightly more intimate than a one-night stand: After massive internal pushback at the network, McDaniel’s contract was abruptly terminated on Tuesday, less than a week after her hiring was first announced. As journalist Aaron Rupar joked on X, McDaniel lasted “less than a Scaramucci,” referring to Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day stint as White House communications director under Trump. 

So much for the “liberal media”

I won’t exactly claim that our legacy media wants Trump to win this year. But if he’s elected again, those journalists and editors want to be able to claim that they didn’t miss how many Americans wanted Trump back in the White House.

The myth of the “liberal media,” imagined as a monolithic bogeyman that colludes and conspires with Democratic leaders and left-leaning “elites” to suppress the voices and views of Republicans and conservatives, is one of the most pervasively held delusions within the MAGA community.  

I pay for content from several American media outlets (including, of course, Salon). Despite my criticisms of the press, I still think most legacy media produces net-positive work. I truly want to believe that NBC News had good intentions in hiring McDaniel; wisely, they aborted the mission before the sunk-cost fallacy hit the point of no return. 

The network’s initial claim was that McDaniel was brought on to provide an “inside baseball” right-leaning perspective. Pray tell: A perspective for whom, exactly? MAGA Americans hold both McDaniel and NBC in equal disdain; put them together, and the hatred only multiplies. As the brief history of McDaniel’s TV career suggests, this was an unforced error, proving once again that leaders in mainstream media lack any understanding of the dynamics of loyalty between Trump, his voters and all their perceived enemies. 

McDaniel is no fool; she knows how MAGA Americans feel about her. She reportedly dropped the use of “Romney” as her middle name at Trump’s request before assuming her RNC post in 2017. Last weekend, she said on air that she disagreed with Trump’s promise to pardon those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot if he regains the White House. In other words, she self-censored while at the RNC under the influence of cancel culture — the MAGA variant. As for the Republicans who will now claim that NBC canceled McDaniel, allow me to remind them that that’s how the free market is supposed to work; The right and left should be held to a consistent standard, and should support freedom of association even when they don’t like the outcome. 

Yes, all the world’s a stage, and for all their invective against Hollywood, MAGA and the far right are America’s premier political performers. McDaniel’s comments during her inaugural, one-and-done “Meet the Press” guest spot point at a poorly-concealed truth: The vast majority of GOP politicians, pundits and party officials don’t believe the pernicious myths that Trump peddles.

Old habits aren’t easily conquered, though: McDaniel admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but claimed there were “concerns” and “issues” that had eroded electoral “safeguards.” Those are essentially codewords for the Republican insistence that America is a “republic, not a democracy” and for Republican attempts to restrict voting access. 

Leaving MAGA: The long goodbye

I volunteered for the Trump campaign in both 2016 and 2020, and I never believed the election was stolen. I realize that many readers will recoil at this, but most MAGA adherents are good and decent people; I spent more than half a decade meeting or communicating daily with them. Many were and are intelligent, educated, urbane, successful and accomplished professionals.

My doubts about supporting Trump, Ron DeSantis and MAGA seriously began during the summer of 2021. What followed was what I call my “Year of Heaven and Hell.” I left MAGA for good a year later, in the summer of 2022. (If you want to know why, read this.) I recently formed a new organization, Leaving MAGA, aimed at building a community for those who have recently left, like me, or are in the nascent stages of remorse. 

I allowed myself to be duped. MAGA Americans have been exploited and traumatized into believing Trump’s falsehoods; they have been made to feel perpetually desperate and panicked, as I was. I neither defend my past or anyone’s current ignorance. But to say that MAGA Americans have been manipulated doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent, or morally turbid. That just reflects the GOP’s abject shamelessness in regurgitating lies about virtually everything, as I later came to discover after leaving MAGA. That infinite repetition eventually begins to win over many people who aren’t naturally or inherently right-wing; perhaps that’s the demographic NBC longs for.   

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Leaving MAGA hopes to foster reconciliation between MAGA Americans and their friends and family. It may be difficult for me to accept the supposedly reformed Ronna McDaniel; she has yet to show genuine penitence. While I remain steadfast in my belief that most MAGA Americans are not the caricatures of evil portrayed by liberals, it’s admittedly a challenge to reconcile that with their fervid devotion to a man who has done and said so many indefensible things.

McDaniel led a Republican Party that deemed an attempted coup-d’état, orchestrated by the world’s most powerful person, to be “legitimate political discourse,” and insisted that avoidable death and suffering — from the COVID pandemic and mass shootings, among other examples — was acceptable. McDaniel wasn’t the steward of a misguided party that meant well. No, the GOP was and is unequivocally on the wrong side of life-and-death issues, and while she is not uniquely culpable for that failure, she is nonetheless responsible.  

In pursuit of some fantastical notion of journalistic impartiality, NBC News management created a precedent that, to their credit, they rapidly came to regret. They legitimized someone, at least briefly, who has led tens of millions of Americans astray with a series of increasingly outrageous and disingenuous lies, and continues to do so — all so it wouldn’t be labeled as “activist” or “biased.” 

I believe the day will come when many or most of the tens of millions of MAGA Americans will renounce the movement they so devotedly followed. We at Leaving MAGA will welcome them — yes, even McDaniel, if she is sincere. Her formal political career is likely over, and her next gig may be as a rotating guest on Fox News’ “The Five,” more or less the media equivalent of the late Jake LaMotta singing out of tune to the same audience nightly.  

I can only wonder if McDaniel’s uncle feels some guilt as well, as onetime standard-bearer of the GOP. Mitt Romney is leaving the Senate and leaving politics, having done much to rehabilitate his legacy. In this case, the apple seems to have fallen some distance from the tree. 

Don’t construe this prognostication as a reason not to vote, but Romney knows his party is terminally ill, and may well breathe its last gasp come Election Day this November. NBC will probably try to keep the dying party alive, stuck in a pre-MAGA yesteryear and scrambling to appeal to a nonexistent demographic, while the rest of America keeps at the work of perfecting our union and rebuilding democracy.