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Ronna McDaniel has little hope for a media career after her spectacular flameout from NBC News, according to executives and media personalities across the political spectrum who spoke with Mediaite.
McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee who was hired by NBC News and then fired within days after her addition to the roster at the network and its liberal-leaning cable sister MSNBC sparked a revolt, is now a free agent. But demand isn’t high, despite her major profile and résumé as the longest running RNC chair since the Civil War.
Even if she does mount a media comeback, you’re unlikely to see McDaniel on the air anywhere soon. She has told people that despite being dropped by NBC, she remains under contract, which means she cannot appear on other networks for now. She’s also not moving quickly to find another home. As the NBC deal imploded, McDaniel was dropped by her agent at CAA, and has yet to speak out publicly about the fiasco as she seeks legal representation to handle her exit.
Yet conversations with well-placed sources across the industry revealed just how scant McDaniel’s opportunities are at this point.
CNN has already shot down the possibility of signing her. CEO Mark Thompson told media reporter Oliver Darcy that the network would never even consider hiring McDaniel. A source at ABC News concurred, telling Mediaite that the network has no interest in tapping McDaniel.
CBS News faced its own micro-version of the Ronna crisis when it hired ex-Trump official Mick Mulvaney as a contributor. The network faced blowback both internally and externally, including a high-profile dissent from CBS star Stephen Colbert, who attacked his parent company on air. Last year, Mulvaney decamped to NewsNation, the upstart cable news network that has positioned itself as a centrist alternative in the industry. NewsNation declined to comment on whether it would consider hiring McDaniel when reached by Mediaite.
Fox News, perhaps the most obvious cable news home for a Trump-boosting ex-RNC chair, did not rule out the prospect.
“We routinely have conversations with people of all different professional and political backgrounds for on-air contributor roles,” a Fox News spokesperson told Mediaite.
A source told Mediaite that Fox News was not one of the networks pursuing McDaniel when she was being courted by NBC News for a contributor role. The prospect is even more unlikely now, said one network executive who dismissed her as “Ronna Romney,” a reference to her relation to Mitt Romney that she attempted to scrub in an effort to appease Trump.
“I can’t imagine Fox would hire Ronna Romney and want to deal with managing her with Trump and his base and invite the inevitable incoming fire they’d be on the receiving end,” the executive said. “Her track record of failure at the RNC is not a ratings draw worth the risk.”
An obvious problem for McDaniel, according to sources across the industry, is that her performance at the RNC made her radioactive for both supporters and critics of Trump.
“Ronna at this point doesn’t have much of an audience, whether in legacy media, new media, right or left, there just isn’t much eagerness to hear her perspective,” one industry veteran said. “She isolated herself from MAGA and the mainstream media certainly showed where they stand. And there’s no signs of a lane in independent media like Rumble or X either. Remember, in politics, it’s not about what you say but what the audience hears. But right now for Ronna, no one is even listening.”
One place where McDaniel could find a soft landing is conservative network Newsmax.
“Newsmax would be interested in having a conversation with her about joining us,” Newsmax chief Chris Ruddy told Mediaite in an email. “She’s been an important voice in the GOP for a long time.”
A source at the network said that, at least for now, there have been no conversations between Newsmax and McDaniel.
One senior producer there, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said McDaniel will have a tough time whether there’s interest or not.
“Ronna has painted herself into an unemployable corner. She sold her soul [to Trump] to save her RNC career,” they said. “And before she was able to re-sell it for a TV job like Alyssa Farah [Griffin], Nicolle Wallace, Ana Navarro and most blatantly Joe Scarborough, she was tossed out. She has the unenviable position of being unwanted by both pro-Trump and anti-Trump media.”
They said that hiring McDaniel would be a mistake: “Trump dislikes her, and [Newsmax viewers] bow at the altar of Trump.”
For all the hand wringing last week about McDaniel’s mendacity, her attacks on the press, and her complicity in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, there remains another major hurdle in her quest for a career in television: executives just don’t think she’s very good on air.
One veteran of the business put it bluntly: “She has limited talent so I don’t see the path forward in the media.”
McDaniel did not respond to requests for comment.
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