At last night’s White House Correspondents Dinner, the reboot of the 2024 campaign took another step toward credibility. Here’s where this may have started:
A few weeks ago, the mainstream media woke up and led a mini-rebellion in the face of the trance we find ourselves in as the 2024 election comes down to the short hairs. For months we’ve been lulled into submission by Trump’s relentless improvisation known to some as the death of democracy. The Big Lie, where the previous presidential election was stolen by the Democrats hellbound on overturning the will of. the people. Somehow the current resident of the Oval Office, a former reality TV star on the NBC television network, had won the 2016 election by tapping into about a third of the electorate. His innovation was to predict his loss to the Democrat candidate, thus bulletproofing his loss as a conspiracy to steal power. Unfortunately Trump actually won in the Electoral college but not the popular vote, which has never been used to determine the winner. After 4 years of this coup, the 2020 election went the other way as Trump established himself as the former president in waiting. Somehow the media bought this and established a mediocracy where the split screen looked real on the right and the left followed the right’s script. Apparently the founding fathers in their prescient wisdom had anticipated this, and left it up to a small but dedicated team of podcasters and newsletter publishers to fix things.
This episode of the Gillmor Gang deconstructs the efforts by NBC News and its two political networks to establish a new Big Lie for the fourth estate. Fearing a victory in 2024 by Trump, NBC took steps to ingratiate themselves with the incoming administration by hiring the former head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna (Help me, Rhonda) McDaniel as keeper of the Big Lie. In the wake of the Biden administration, she was invited to be a spokesperson for the right-leaning corporate side of NBC’s NBC News programming, as delineated from the MSNBC left-leaning cable news operation. When the two divisions collided on the Sunday show Meet The Press, Rhonda was interviewed by new moderator Kristen Welker while former moderator and now political director Chuck Todd sat on the roundtable that followed. Kristen did her usual methodical job of asking the same questions over and over until it became clear that Rhonda had not changed one iota from her aggressive support of Trump’s Big Lie and participation in meetings with Trump that pressured states to support a fake electors scenario to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
At that point, Todd went full elephant in the room and suggested that NBC News should apologize for putting Welker in the position of making nice with Rhonda and nobody else at NBC in validating Rhonda’s credibility. At this point, MSNBC hosts had already begun a series of individual shows decrying NBC’s hiring, led by MSNBC star Rachel Maddow with the rest of the left-leaners. Over the years the failure of Never Trumpers to dislodge the Trump coup of the GOP had led to a string of moderate Republican and Democrat operatives joining MSNBC as hosts and frequent guests including Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki, and former RNC chairman Michael Steele. Help me, Rhonda yeah.
2 days later she was fired. An awkward silence descended on Washington as we waited to see how the politics of this shook out. For months, CNN has been doing the Rhonda in show motion with dueling lower thirds from Trump World and fact-based information. Trump’s success in delaying his court cases keeps the pressure on NBC to still try to make nice with Rhonda and company, but Chuck Todd’s big foot approach seems to have made it impossible so far to get him or any of the other MSNBC anchors in job trouble. And just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show reboot went full Monty on AI and the bigtechers trying to say it’s nothing to worry about as long as you’re not about to be laidoff. It’s the AI, Stupid coming to a screen near you.
Help Me Rhonda