NBC's decision to hire Ronna McDaniel — the former RNC chair who supported Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the election — was stunning. And it caused "outrage" among the network's staff, according to Rachel Maddow, who called the new hire "inexplicable." But actually, says historian Timothy Snyder, it can be explained in very simple terms: Hiring McDaniel is NBC's "trial run" in preparation for a Trump dictatorship.
"This is like a trial run for NBC and everyone else to say, 'Okay, we're going to practice appeasing a dictator, and then when the dictator comes, we're going to be better at it,'" the Yale professor and author of On Tyranny told MSNBC.
"What NBC is doing is saying, 'Well, could be that in '24 our entire system will break down. Could be we'll have an authoritarian leader," he explained. "Oh, but look, we've made this adjustment in advance because we've brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down." (See video below, posted by The Lincoln Project.)
In other words, the idea that NBC or any other news outlet in the "free" press is for democracy above all else is idealistic, to say the least. Sadly, the reality is that NBC is a business, and this is just business as usual.
