MSNBC host Joy Reid suggested on-air Monday that former President Trump ” bore the consequences ” for ” encouraging ” the violence during a discussion about the weekend assassination attempt.
Reid, who was in Milwaukee for MSNBC’s live coverage of the Republican National Convention, made her comments after Rachel Maddow said she hoped some “calming” would emerge over political violence, calling it “no joke” and “not something anybody should ever toy with.” She, too, seemed to suggest that Trump had been a victim of the storm.
“Violence, like everything else, is very unpredictable. Once it becomes part of the political system, you don’t know which direction it’s going to go,” Maddow said. “Nobody can control it to go in one direction. It doesn’t work that way.”
Reid agreed, then began recounting the “one and only time” she felt scared in the line of duty: at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, when armed men were “prowling” and “messaging” near her booth in a “threatening” manner.
She likened her experience to reports of voter intimidation during the 2022 midterm elections, when a group of armed members of Clean Elections USA were ordered to stay at least 250 feet away from certain polling places in Arizona after complaints that people carrying guns and wearing masks were intimidating voters.
“I think about the people who were trying to vote in Arizona and there were men with long guns standing outside their polling places sending them a message,” Reed said. “‘If you don’t vote the right way, we’re here with these guns.'”
“The idea of political violence that we have had ever since is so dangerous,” she continued, “so dangerous that even if you are one of the promoters of it, you cannot avoid the consequences.”
Critics of X Blame Reid This is because he appears to have described the attempted assassination of President Trump as “what goes around comes around.”
Reid’s comments about MSNBC are especially surprising after the network pulled its staunchly anti-Trump show “Morning Joe” from the air in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt. A person familiar with the decision told CNN that the show was replaced with a live broadcast in part over concerns that one of the many guests on the four-hour show “could make inappropriate comments live on air and potentially harm the show or the network as a whole.”
MSNBC’s call to pull “Morning Joe” shocked political commentators, with some conservatives saying it showed a lack of trust in one of the network’s most highly-watched programs to cover tense situations with discretion.
An MSNBC spokesperson strongly denied CNN’s report.
Trump was shot in the ear by an assassin at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, killing one protester and wounding two others before being shot dead by police. Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention on Monday with his right ear bandaged.
