Froma Harrop, syndicated columnist

Ronna McDaniel’s conduct following the 2020 election was shocking enough, but NBC’s decision to hire her as a paid political analyst almost topped it. The blowback from the company’s own commentators prompted the executives to turn around and send McDaniel packing.

The problem for NBC and its decidedly liberal MSNBC news channel wasn’t that McDaniel headed the Republican National Committee. It wasn’t that she supported Donald Trump’s bid for reelection.

It was that when Trump lost, she worked to overturn the results. There are misdeeds political players can explain away. Trying to overthrow the democracy shouldn’t be one of them. What on earth were the NBC bigwigs thinking?

Almost as repellant as McDaniel’s claims that the election was stolen was her excuse for knowingly lying about it. As she explained on NBC’S “Meet the Press,” “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team, right? Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”

On exactly what team was McDaniel playing? It sure wasn’t Team America. And given McDaniel’s total lack of character, her vow to be “more myself” was hardly reassuring.

NBC political analyst Chuck Todd put it exactly right. In an interview with his “Meet the Press” replacement, Kristen Welker, he said: “I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract. … Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who’s paying her?”

The world is full of Ronna McDaniels, amoral individuals out for power and money with no concern for the greater good. To snag an estimated $300,000-a-year gig with a big TV presence, she was willing to publicly state that the voters indeed chose Joe Biden as president. She didn’t even bother denying that she knew that the stolen election business was baloney from the start.

McDaniel is what she is. But what exactly is NBC News?

We get that the network wants more conservative voices, even Trump supporters. But there were Republicans who weren’t going along with the attempted coup even as they backed Trump’s reelection.

McDaniel’s uncle, Mitt Romney, is an honorable conservative unafraid of drawing lines for decency — and thus willing to criticize Trump. So concerned was McDaniel of retaining Trump’s trust in her servility that she dropped “Romney” from her name. She used to call herself Ronna Romney McDaniel.

Really, what would be the use to NBC, or Fox News for that matter, of a political analyst who lacks a shred of conviction and is so cynically self-serving she didn’t even think to hide it? As a pure business decision, this hire was inexplicable. Yes, the news shows need a wide range of views. Even MSNBC invites conservatives to the set, and most of its audience seems cool with it. But would the audience be cool with hiring a paid political analyst who tried her hardest to throw out their vote for president?

Do the chiefs at NBC even know the serious incompetence behind their decision to employ McDaniel — someone who joined Trump on a phone call pressuring Michigan canvassers to reject the election results? There would have been massive boycotts of NBC News, never mind MSNBC.

Do note that Todd and Joe Scarborough and other NBC/MSNBC commentators risked their contracts by publicly berating the parent company executives for their harebrained choice of an election denier as a political analyst.

That goes double for taking on someone who knowingly lied about who won a presidential election, but also admits that she lied. Whatever team Ronna McDaniel is playing on certainly shouldn’t have been team NBC. Not even for a day.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.