MSNBC host Joy Reid said on Monday that she had very real concerns about the aftermath of Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump — namely that media would “acquiesce” and allow Trump to “rewrite himself” as a sympathetic victim.
Reid made the comments during a panel discussion that included fellow MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Nicolle Wallace along with former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and she said people she’d talked to were afraid that media would allow Americans to forget that Trump was “the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence … since George Wallace.”
WATCH:
Joy Reid fears that, after the assassination attempt on Trump, “the media will acquiesce” to Republicans and not label Trump “the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence…since George Wallace.”
She doesn’t want Trump to “rewrite himself as a victim.” pic.twitter.com/f5QSVcYwkO
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 15, 2024
“The universal kind of reaction that I am getting, whether from civilians or you know professionals, is really a deep concern and lack of confidence in — not us at this table or us at MSNBC, but us as the media write large — and fear that what’s going to happen now … is that the media will acquiesce to trying to convince people that the thing they’ve been experiencing you know for the last five, six years didn’t happen,” Reid explained. “That the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence, really you know since anyone can remember, since George Wallace, I think, you know that we just haven’t experienced this kind of open you know sort of citing, or incitement of violence or sort of luxuriating in the idea of violence.”
Reid then claimed that people were expressing concern that media would not “be the guardians of memory” and would “allow Donald Trump, as he’s you know bathed in the glory and grandeur of his party to rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim that people who are the most vulnerable to not just the things he’s done but the things he’s promising to do, and that that will happen without a guardian saying wait, stop, and then the media will acquiesce to this rewrite.”