Talking Points Memo

A ton of important stuff is happening at the moment. Surely you have seen that the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore. The right-wing Supreme Court is grappling with how they can toss a bone to the anti-choice crowd in a self-evidently ridiculous court challenge about mifepristone. Trump is in court for one thing or another nearly every day. And of course, right-wing Christian nationalists continue their scheming. Paul Manafort is even back.

But let's talk a bit about the storm raging across your television sets and X (Twitter) feeds: NBC hiring Ronna McDaniel, the former head of the RNC who went so out of her way to align with Trump she changed her last name and decided to tell lies nonstop for multiple consecutive years about the 2020 election. This week Josh Marshall wrote a really good and thorough post about how this could happen, why this could happen and what it means for the broader news economy.

That post contained an important nugget that's worth expanding on. Josh explains how the problem with McDaniel is that a lot of the journalists at NBC don't feel like she accurately represents a view from either political party, so she is outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse. However, this is an overly simplistic way of looking at it — because the GOP is in thrall to Trump.

Because one of the two major political factions of the country supports election denial and, at least to an extent, the January 6th insurrection itself. So one of those two factions is itself outside the bounds of legitimate democratic political discourse. But that's an impossible position for the owners of NBC and the executives who run it.

In other words, who is supposed to represent the half the country who actually loved everything McDaniel has been saying as head of the Republican National Committee for the last several years? Or, put another way, how do you have a political discourse when half of voters supports a candidate who does not believe in democracy?
 

Now, let's go back to something in the Morning Memo earlier this week from David Kurtz. Commenting on a New York Times story that suggested Attorney General Merrick Garland and Co. were caught off-guard that Trump would be politically viable after Jan. 6th, Kurtz writes:

I really struggle to buy the assertion that the political world had written Trump off as politically dead in 2021. But I really don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that his future political viability was "inconceivable" at the time.
 

These comments are related. They are related in the sense that a lot of the political establishment — and the political media landscape — have no idea what's going on, what the stakes are or how politics and government have evolved since Donald J. Trump strolled down that escalator in 2015. 

Publications like TPM have to exist because otherwise it's the political establishment holding all the cards and as is pretty clear, they are clueless about the moment.