‘Morning Joe’ hosts say Ronna McDaniel won’t be guest after NBC hiring

The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said Monday that former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel — NBC News’s new paid contributor — will not be asked to appear on their show as a guest, pointing to her role in helping former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in their Monday broadcast sharply criticized the network for hiring McDaniel and called on NBC News to reconsider the decision.

“To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage. But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier,” Brzezinski said.

“And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor,” Brzezinski added.

NBC has faced a wave of backlash from within over its decision to hire the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair as a contributor.

Employees — including on-air talent — at NBC News have aired their frustration with the decision, noting both the way McDaniel paid lip service to Trump’s grievances surrounding his 2020 election loss, but also highlighting her attacks on certain NBC News journalists.

Chuck Todd, the former host of “Meet the Press,” appeared on the Sunday morning show and blasted his network over the decision.

“There’s a reason why there are a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination,” he said.

Scarborough, who served as a Republican in the House more than two decades ago, began by saying the co-hosts had been “inundated with calls this weekend” about the NBC News decision.

Scarborough said he and Brzezinski had not been consulted ahead of the decision but that, if they had been, they would have strongly advised the network against hiring McDaniel.

“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday,” Scarborough said.

“We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons, including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Ms. McDaniels’s role in Donald Trump’s fake electoral scheme, and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone,” he continued.

McDaniel joined Kristen Welker on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday for her first interview as a paid contributor. She said she does not support Trump’s promise to free or pardon the so-called “patriots,” as Trump refers to them, who are imprisoned for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“If you attacked our Capitol … and you’ve been convicted, then that should stay,” McDaniel said when asked about Trump’s promise.

McDaniel said, when pressed by Welker, that she is only now voicing her disagreement because she didn’t want to disagree with the former president while heading the RNC.

“When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team,” she said. “Right now, I get to be a little bit more myself. This is what I believe.” 

In a panel discussion following the interview, Todd railed against the network’s decision to hire McDaniel, telling Welker, “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation. Because I don’t know what to believe.”

“She is now a paid contributor by NBC News, so I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract,” Todd said, adding that McDaniel has “credibility issues” and trust problems with some journalists.

When announcing her hiring Friday, the network emphasized that her political background would help provide editorial and ideological balance to its coverage.

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, who leads political coverage at NBC, wrote in a memo shared with The New York Times.