With his customary absence of any grace or human sensitivity, President Donald Trump helps shove MSNBC’s fatally wounded Joy Reid out the door with a callous sneer.
Our heavyweight in the White House can’t see a belt without hitting below it.
After about five years as nightly anchor of a cable news talk show, Reid has been fired. MSNBC’s being a little vague about its reasoning, but no doubt it centers on ratings. They’re low. They’re low for just about everybody at MSNBC and CNN, too.
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an obvious reason for this. Millions of people are still upset over the results of the last presidential election, sickened by the cruel slashing of federal programs aimed at helping the poor and the sick, and furious over Trump’s lies and his arrogance. They cannot bear to turn on their favorite cable news stations anymore.
Who wants to have a nightly reminder of America getting its heartstrings cut by a president who stands there gloating over each new outrage he’s committing?
For five years, Reid delivered news and analysis with intelligence, insight and historical perspective. She had her facts straight, and she had something else rare in TV news — a Black woman’s perspective.
And so as Reid gets shoved out the door, we have Trump, on one of his rabid statements from his social media platform Truth Social, calling her, “one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid. Based on her ratings, which were virtually non-existent, she should have been canned long ago, along with everyone else who works there.”
Somewhere along the line, Trump might have noticed that the New York Times, during the first Trump administration, called Reid “a heroine of the resistance to [Trump’s] leadership.”
You know what’s funny about all this?
We used to think presidents were far too consumed by important matters — war and peace, poverty and injustice, stuff like that — to notice even for a moment such trivial things as television ratings.
Yet this president — when he’s not out golfing for three straight days or dispatching co-president Elon Musk to fire thousands of government employees — has always measured TV ratings as the great measure of success or failure in the life of politics.
So he didn’t want to miss a chance to express some of his casual cruelty in the midst of another person’s downfall.
Now we’ll watch as MSNBC, facing ratings trouble, shakes up its veteran lineup. Reid’s out the door, Alex Wagner’s losing her own show but keeping a job as a “correspondent,” and they’ll be replaced by new anchors whose views, frankly, won’t be much different from Reid’s or Wagner’s.
Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez will take over Reid’s spot, and Jen Psaki will replace Wagner.
Meanwhile, Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, launched her own show over the weekend on Fox News, a few months after stepping down as co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She’s married to Eric Trump.
Yeah, we’ll see some real objectivity, fairness and clear-eyed journalism there: Trump’s daughter-in-law casting a critical eye at her husband’s daddy.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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