MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace is an inspiration to mediocrities everywhere.
If a network television burnout and former adviser to Sarah Palin’s failed vice presidential campaign can make it as the host of a cable news show, anyone can.
On Feb. 10, Wallace solemnly recited a series of tweets comparing the recent firing of career U.S. intelligence officials to the slaughter of six million Jews. The author of the tweets, the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes, “goes there,” Wallace promised her viewers, “putting the acts of revenge we’re seeing from Donald Trump in a provocative historical frame that you may or may not agree with, but it will make you think.”
I assure you, it does not “make you think.”
“First he came for [former FBI Director James Comey],” Wallace said, giving a word-for-word recitation of Wittes’ Twitter thread, which is just a ham-fisted rewording of an old quote about complicity and the rise of the Third Reich, “and I said nothing because I was mad at Comey because of the Clinton email investigation and blamed him for Trump’s election.”
“Then he came to [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe],” she continued, “and I said nothing because there was this inspector general report that said McCabe lacked candor.”
It goes on like this for another six tweets, the cable host all but tearing up at the thought of Comey and McCabe suffering the grave indignities of lucrative book and television deals.
This is not illuminating. This is not thought-provoking.
This is embarrassing (and maybe a little offensive).
If you are surprised by Wallace’s promotion of a style of political commentary that is as shallow as it is self-debasing, you shouldn’t be. Though she has a lot of competition at MSNBC, Wallace’s program is one of the worst things on television precisely because of her deficiencies as a host and political commentator.
For starters, Wallace is vapid.
After Sen. Elizabeth Warren failed this month to capture even a single delegate in the 2020 New Hampshire primary, the MSNBC anchor declared the Massachusetts lawmaker a masterful campaigner, praising the senator for her willingness to take photos with supporters.
“She’s a really, really, really good candidate,” Wallace marveled, giving everyone a small insight into why the 2008 presidential election turned out the way it did.
Earlier, the cable news pundit told failed 2020 primary candidate Beto O’Rourke that it is “clear” he had “that thing that not all politicians have.” She then asked the former Texas congressman what the media can do better to cover his candidacy. Speaking of 2020 long shots, Wallace was also bullish on convicted felon Michael Avenatti, saying in 2018 that the disgraced lawyer “hit a lot of the right notes” when he tested the electoral waters in Iowa. Democrats “would be foolish to underestimate” him, she said.
Both of Avenatti’s lawsuits against President Trump were thrown out the next year. The disgraced attorney’s client, who alleges now that Avenatti stole nearly $300,000 from her, was also ordered by a judge to pay $300,000 in Trump’s legal fees.
Speaking of utter failures, Wallace claimed elsewhere that a group of children with Twitter accounts was going to change federal gun laws and bring the National Rifle Association to heel. Obviously, this did not happen, which brings us to the next point: Wallace’s show suffers for her general ignorance.
She claimed once that the Second Amendment was created for the purpose of fighting “foreign militias.” Not even close. She said the Parkland shooting was a news story mostly because “17 white kids were” killed. The 17 victims, who were not all white, included three adults. In attacking MSNBC’s right-leaning news rivals, Wallace alleged that the Obama administration never had a “network distorting the truth” on its behalf. She must have slept through all of the 2012 presidential election. Wallace also claimed that the president shared a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump did not share the doctored video. In January 2019, Wallace said there “isn’t a strain of racism on the Left,” which is an exceptionally ignorant assertion considering noted anti-Semite Al Sharpton is still a hotly sought after Democratic kingmaker.
Wallace said in January 2019 that the White House’s contention that there is a crisis at the border is part of a “big scam,” adding bluntly that there is “not a crisis.” Not much later, after reading a New York Times article, Wallace announced there is a “humanitarian crisis” at the border.
The MSNBC host, who once referred to the Second Amendment right to bear arms as a “so-called right,” even mistook the sound of a can of soda being opened for gunshots during a live broadcast.
This leads to yet another one of Wallace’s shortcomings as an anchor and pundit, which is her love of fearmongering.
In August 2019, for example, she claimed Trump was paving the way for the total extermination of Latinos. Wallace told viewers that Trump may try to imprison journalists if he wins reelection in 2020. She claimed the president would have “blood on his hands” if minority members of Congress ever fall victim to a “racially inspired attack.” Wallace also compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, claiming the president’s embrace of the term “nationalist” is just like what happened in Nazi Germany.
“I watch enough History Channel to know that they cheered at Hitler, too,” Wallace said.
But the thing that really inspires fremdschämen, moreso even than Wallace’s vapidity, ignorance, and garish doomsday predictions, is her penchant for pettiness.
“How do you resist the temptation to run up and wring [former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’s] neck?” the anchor asked NBC News’ Kristen Welker in May 2018.
Wallace wondered elsewhere how the Trump women can stand by the men in their lives, suggesting they are either “paid off” or “dead inside.” The MSNBC host asked twice over the course of an hour in a later episode whether Republicans are “dead inside.” Wallace once spent an entire segment mocking Vice President Mike Pence’s posture, giggling and mining his body language for unflattering clues or meaning. Wallace even declared former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, “chicken soup” for her soul, explaining that one of his many outbursts directed at Pence made her “feel better.”
Why, after all of this, would MSNBC waste so much valuable airtime on someone who is so obviously unfit for the job?
The dirty secret is this: Wallace does not have a show because of her trenchant political analysis or her supposed connections. She has not been involved directly in GOP politics or a campaign since 2008. Wallace has a show on MSNBC because she offers more of what its viewers want, but with the added twist that she has the word “Republican” somewhere in her title. Media love anti-Republican “Republicans” because supposed GOP “insiders” such as Wallace provide audiences with the spectacle of red-on-red violence. It does not matter that her commentary is indistinguishable from what her colleagues at MSNBC have to say, with the added downside that it is also pedestrian. Wallace, who says she will “gladly and easily” vote for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 general election should he win the Democratic nomination, attacks the Right with her lifetime credential as a “Republican,” and that makes for good drama.
Unfortunately for the viewing public, the contrived drama is about all that Wallace has to offer.
The woman whose career before MSNBC includes a failed run as a co-host on The View and a failed run as an adviser to a failed GOP presidential campaign is now a top host on MSNBC, and all because she markets herself as an anti-Republican “Republican.” Never mind the fact that Sarah Palin’s former adviser rarely, if ever, has anything interesting to say.
Wallace is a professional “Republican” who parrots the news industry’s generally held beliefs about the Right, and that, apparently, is good enough to win her a spot anchoring a politics news show.
