Last Thursday, Cesar Conde, the thoughtful and manicured chairman of the NBC News Group, reached out to former Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel to welcome her to the NBC News family and congratulate her on her new role as a contributor—a role that, as I’ve reported, would not merely furnish her with a $300,000-a-year perch but, perhaps more importantly, also help facilitate her return to the D.C. establishment. McDaniel, of course, had imbibed the MAGA brain poison more than even some of Trump’s most loyal supplicants, and her fastidious election denialism and establishment eye-poking were always going to require complex re-entry choreography. 

Anyway, Conde told McDaniel that her voice and conservative bonafides would be pivotal to NBC’s coverage of this historic moment in American politics, a sentiment that network senior vice president Carrie Budoff Brown echoed in the formal announcement of her hire the next day. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Budoff Brown wrote.