Don’t Use Press Jobs to Rehab Trump’s Flunkies

MSNBC’s top talent, including Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Scarborough, as well as former CBS anchor Dan Rather, have all admonished NBC for hiring one of Trump’s most loyal co-conspirators, while citing the lies she repeatedly told on behalf of the former president, her aiding in Trump’s fake elector scheme, and her efforts to pressure canvassers not to certify the election.

The idea that someone who’d helped overturn an election would then land a cushy contributor role at a news network is and should be repulsive to most people.

McDaniel worked in service of a president who called the press “the enemy of the people,” who celebrated violence against journalists, who praised dictators like Vladimir Putin and regimes like North Korea.

In 2018, McDaniel had her RNC act as master-of-ceremonies for Trump’s “Fake News Awards,” a PR event meant to discredit critical news, and a stunt that even many Republicans mocked and condemned.

McDaniel has since chalked up her actions as mere occupational hazard — “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”

Of course, the “whole team” in that case was Trump — not the party, not America — and taking one meant doing things on his behalf that were dishonest, un-American, and dangerous. If that were truly the job requirement of the RNC chair, she was free to resign at any point. Instead, she fought to hold on to her position.

I’ve long worried about the practice of hiring people who were complicit in Trump’s systematic dismantling of democratic institutions by news outlets — it’s lamentable and deleterious, and one that’s done indelible harm to our business, the business of telling the truth. My network, CNN, is not exempt.

Trump’s former flunkies, whether at the RNC, inside the White House comms shop, or on his campaigns, went willingly into his orbit in search of power, watched him do unconscionable things, and now want to use us, the news business to help launder their reputations. And we do it.

McDaniel, just like others before her hoping to return to polite society after aiding and abetting a political arsonist, wants to use the good reputations of the very people they condemned, villainized and discredited — some of whom chose not to go work for Trump — to reinvent and rebrand.

Putting those people on the payroll of a news organization is a terrible idea, and hopefully one that — with the backlash against McDaniel — may finally come to an end.

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(S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.)