Reputation is More Than a Taylor Swift Album

Why the Ronna McDaniel/NBC News Hire Blew Up

I’m not entirely sure WHEN it happened. It used to be that when you took a job, signed up to promote something, became a speaker for someone or something, it was them paying you to lend your credibility and integrity to the product; the idea being that if x liked it/him, you should like it/him too. The main thing though was that it was your own reputation that you were lending, not some hollow connection through which the public at large can get the same messages and soundbites through you for a fee as through anyone else. Somewhere along the line, it became perceived that to be a spokesperson for a person or product was to be a paid mouthpiece, one that you can completely change and contradict as soon as the contract was over. You are nothing but a passthrough conduit for someone else to the public.

To be sure, the money is huge! Many famous product endorsers get paid millions even though they don’t even use the product; the biggest “celebrity” endorser right now is Kendall Jenner who gets paid a ton just to make a “mention” of a product on her Instagram account, and Jenner is now a billionaire on paper.¹ Does she actually drink Pepsi?—Who knows? Who cares? Nobody buys the idea that Jenner is a huge fan of Pepsi, only that she is a paid spokesperson for the product appearing in their ads. That’s one of the reasons this ad is as hollow as the relationship between Jenner and Pepsi is. In simple terms, she lacks any credibility.

Which brings us to Ronna Romney McDaniel. You see, back in 2015, Reince Preibus was in charge of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Reince was essentially an establishment lackey from Wisconsin, tight with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, then WI Governor running for President Scott Walker and many of the other GOP bigwigs who wanted to turn Wisconsin red. He was the one who concocted the idea of the “Pledge” in the GOP primaries requiring everyone to promote the winner of the primaries; everyone signed it thinking Trump would have to support them(!) but then it backfired horribly when Trump won.

When Trump won the White House, he had an integrity problem. You see all the hacks (like Steve Bannon) and charlatans (ike Roger Stone) and criminals (like Paul Manafort) who backed Trump during the campaign made people nervous about handing the reins over to them to run the country. So the Trump people went out and tried to put established GOP people in key positions to show the nation and the world that the country had not gone off the rails. He put Priebus in as Chief of Staff (a job he lasted six months in) and hired McDaniel to be head of the RNC. She came from a solid established GOP family (she’s Mitt Romney’s daughter and who is more inside than the family of the previous Presidential candidate) and had the credentials for the job. She leant her name and integrity to Trump, as the new President, to help establish his credibility with the American public and the world.

Now as Trump proved to be the incompetent boob that he is, and many of his more sane hires left shaking their heads at the moron and the depths of his depravity,² McDaniel stayed. Trump was the biggest fundraiser for the RNC, downballot canididates relied on him and McDaniel basically became a mouthpiece for everything Trump wanted to push out to the public. She became a passthrough messenger, giving credence to every ridiculous position that Trump spouted, which only enabled his worst impulses further. Whereas others have at some point had a moment of conscience (especially after 1/6) or just broke with the orange one altogether, McDaniel stood by him as RNC chair FOR 7 STRAIGHT YEARS. At any point in those years she could have pushed back and never did.

Once Trump secured the GOP nomination, he fired McDaniel and placed his daughter in charge (the subject of tomorrow’s substack article). McDaniel, ever the professional, bowed her head and was pleasant as she walked out the door knowing this was just how “the game” was played. NBC News then went out of it’s way to hire her as a paid analyst.³ Taking the uproar from liberals out of it,⁴ it was a horrenous hire, one that the executives at NBC should have known better than to make. They thought they were just hiring another talking head who can present the GOP position. To be an analyst, one has to be at least somewhat objective, lending their integrity to the arguments they make; McDaniel no longer has any. She backed every ridiculous statement Trump made over the years, including when he called Nazis “very good people,” when he demurred repeatedly on Trump’s COVID remarks, when she played down but supported Trump’s statements about the January 6th insurrection. She demonstrated absolutely zero objectivity over seven years, and now NBC News was hiring her because of her name and past position. That hire was as hollow as Kendall Jenner’s was with Pepsi.

McDaniels’ first interview with Meet The Press was this last Sunday, and is in its entirely below. Kristen Welker was right to distance herself from the debacle as much as she could in the first couple sentences of the show.

What was particularly galling was when McDaniel expressed that now that she was out as Chair of the RNC, she had the opportunity to speak her mind instead of what someone else told her to say. No Ronna, you should have been doing that all along, you just chose not to. Now here you are, without a shred of integrity left.

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

Many liberals have loathed Chuck Todd over the years for essentially doing his job and giving alternate viewpoints a platform. I actually have tended to like Todd who asks good questions and as its not his job to provide a safe space for liberals, he got unfortunately maligned.

Nonetheless, I think he nailed it in his remarks on the show (I’m a little disappointed the only clip I could find was from CNN covering the show). Todd nailed everything and described in detail everything I covered in this piece today.

In another context, let’s look at some of the most well known mouthpieces who disdained objectivity for political loyalty.

There was Tokyo Rose promoting propaganda during WWII. During the Vietnam War there was Hanoi Hannah.

During the Persian Gulf War, there was “Baghdad Bob.”

And then there is Tucker Carlson.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

One of the greatest films to demonstrate the need for personal integrity and one’s reputation was the Robert Redford directed, “Quiz Show” about the 1950’s Game Show fixing scandal. At it’s center was the scion of an academic family, Charles Van Doren. His father was one of the nation’s most esteemed, reknown literary academics at the time, and all the Van Doren children were seen as prodigies. Charles, enamored by the new world television brought tried out for the show “21” and was brought in. Producers, wanting the young, handsome, intelligent man to stay on because of the higher ratings fixed all the shows he was on. At first, they gave him questions they knew he knew the answer to, and then gave him the questions directly. In fact, they had been doing it all along for previous contestants as well. You see, Game Shows in the 1950s were rigged, and not meant to be competitive but shows solely meant to bring in ratings and ad dollars.

When the DOJ began looking into this based on complaints of past contestants, Van Doren was caught amidst a huge scandal. His FAMILY had built their reputation up on being educated and demonstrating integrity, and here was one of their own caught up in a fraud regarding thier intellect with the American public. In probably the best scene, when he breaks the news to his father, Oscar winner Paul Scofield,⁵ Scofield thunders “Your name IS MY NAME TOO!” Van Doren’s career, future and reputation never recovered. When many thought he would pick up the family mantle and be an Ivy League educator of some fame, ultimately one of the few jobs he could get was as a writer for Encyclopedia Britainica.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

The most valuable baseball card today is a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card.

Is it valuable because he was the best in his day? No. Although one of the greatest players of his era, others outshone him.

So why is it so valuable?

Because of its rarity. Wagner didn’t want kids purchasing tobacco to get the card. Back in the day, baseball cards were distributed through tobacco products, and Wagner objected to it. He pressured the American Tobacco Company to cease making the card.

That’s integrity.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. At this point, I think its important to mention that Jenner and her family are complete hollow shells who stand for nothing anyway. For a fee, they’ll endorse whatever, even if it conflicts with what they previously said they liked or hated. That people still pay them for it is insane to me, but that’s the empty world we live in today.

2. My favorite is still Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who referred to him as a “f**king moron.”

3. Which is a fancy way of saying when they have panels, she would be taking the GOP position as some trumped up debate format.

4. NBC News and in particular MSNBC being their “safe space.”

5. Sometimes I really love casting like this. Ever since “The Seventh Seal” Max Van Sydow was often cast in roles relating to the duality of good and bad. In the case of Paul Scofield, the movie that he won an Oscar for was “A Man for All Seasons” where he played Sir Thomas More. More’s morality and beliefs were so rigid and fixed, that when King Henry VIII (played wonderfully by Robert Shaw) wants to get a divorce, More flat out refused as it was against the Church at the time. When Henry didn’t like that, he threated More with death. More held firm. And when Scofield dies, it is a testament to his incorruptibility. When Scofield was cast in a film after that, it was that quality directors and casting agents tried to convey— that integrity and reputation are important virtues.