MSNBC host Joy Reid suggested on-air Monday that former President Trump bore the “consequences” of “promoting” violence during a discussion about the assassination attempt over the weekend.
Reid, who joined MSNBC’s live coverage in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, made the comment after Rachel Maddow said she hopes a level of “sobriety” will emerge surrounding political violence, calling it “no freaking joke” and “nothing that anybody should play with, ever.” She, too, seemed to imply Trump reaped the whirlwind.
“Violence, among everything else, is very unpredictable. Once it’s part of your political system, you never know which direction it’s going to go,” Maddow said. “Nobody can harness it in one direction only, it doesn’t work that way.”
Reid agreed and proceeded to relay the “one time” in her career that she felt afraid on the job, at the 2016 RNC in Cleveland, when armed men were “pacing” near her booth in a “menacing” manner to “send a message.”
She likened her experience to reports of voter intimidation in the 2022 midterms where a group of armed members of Clean Elections USA were ordered to stay at least 250 feet away from certain polling locations in Arizona, after complaints that people carrying guns and wearing masks were intimidating voters.
“I think about the people who tried to vote in Arizona when men with long guns were standing outside of the polling places to send them a message,” Reid said. “‘If you don’t vote the right way, I’m here with this gun.’”
“The idea of political violence that we’ve been nursing really since then, is so dangerous,” she continued. “It’s so dangerous that you cannot avoid the consequences of it, even if you’re one of the people promoting it.”
Critics on X condemned Reid for appearing to characterize the assassination attempt on Trump as a “what goes around comes around situation.”
Reid’s comments on MSNBC are particularly surprising after the network benched its staunchly anti-Trump show “Morning Joe” in the aftermath of Saturday’s assassination attempt. A person familiar with the decision told CNN that the show was replaced with live programming, in part, over fear that one of the show’s many guests over a 4-hour broadcast “might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.”
The call by MSNBC to keep “Morning Joe” off the airwaves shocked political observers, with some conservatives saying it demonstrated a lack of trust in one of its most high-profile shows to sensitively cover a fraught situation.
An MSNBC spokesperson vehemently denied the CNN report.
Trump was wounded in the ear by a would-be assassin’s bullet on Saturday at his Pennsylvania rally. The shooter killed one attendee and critically wounded two others before being killed by law enforcement. Trump appeared at the GOP convention Monday with a visible bandage on his right ear.
