MSNBC’s hell week: Lord of the Rings racism, Covid and no Joe

It’s been a rough few days over at MSNBC. Since the attempted assassination on Donald Trump over the weekend, the network seems to be the one unable to regain its footing. From J-13 truthers to The Lord of the Rings conspiracies, here’s Cockburn’s rundown of everything that’s gone wrong so far.

Much like Joe Biden’s weekly routine, MSNBC got off to a shaky start on Monday after it pulled Morning Joe from air following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Executives were worried Mika Brzezinski planned to pull out her hand-stitched Trump voodoo doll.

Whatever the couple had cooked up, Joe Scarborough was not happy that they weren’t able to pull it off. “We were told, in no uncertain terms, on Sunday evening, that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC News channels yesterday. That we were going to stay as a network in breaking news mode throughout all day yesterday. That did not happen,” Scarborough said upon returning to air on Tuesday. “We don’t know why that didn’t happen.” 

The pair threatened to quit if MSNBC ever tried to pull their show again. “Let me just say: next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”

The network barely cleared that hurdle before things took a turn for the worse at the RNC. On Wednesday night, Joy Reid put her Harvard education to use with a piercing syllogism comparing Trump’s assassination attempt to Joe Biden’s Covid-19 diagnosis: if a gunshot and covid are both dangerous, surviving either shows strength. Of course, for Biden, even getting over a cold is a miracle. Reid explained in full: 

Donald Trump is an elderly man who, for whatever reason, was given nine seconds to take an iconic photo-op during an active shooter situation. His survival of that and bouncing right back and going right to his convention is being conveyed in the media world as a sign of strength. This current president of the United States is eighty-one years old and has Covid. Should he be fine in a couple of days, doesn’t that convey exactly the same thing?  That he’s strong enough, older than Trump, to have gotten something that used to really be fatal to people his age. So, if he does fine out of it and comes back and is able to do rallies, isn’t that exactly the same?

When Reid explains it like that, it’s so obvious that Cockburn can’t believe he see it. The video of Biden doddering down the steps of Air Force One after his diagnosis is no different from Trump brandishing his bloodied fist. In fact, Team Biden is already weighing selling T-shirts with the rousing image of Biden clutching the jet’s railing. 

Reid must have been exhausted after her mental gymnastics, but she wasn’t done for the night. In a video posted to X after leaving the convention, she seemed to insinuate the shooting was an inside job and suggested Trump was hit by glass fragments, not a bullet. Reid also wanted to get a peak under Trump’s gauze. “Where are the FOIAs? Why isn’t the New York Times aggressively pursuing his medical records?” Reid asked. “It’s just a strange thing I’ve noticed.” 

Then there was the coverage of vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech. Although it was by all accounts a triumph of the American dream — and even a bit dull in Cockburn’s opinion — MSNBC identified several dog whistles weaved in between stories about Mamaw’s tough love. As Alex Wagner explained, Vance’s seemingly sentimental hope to be buried in his family’s plot in Kentucky is actually racist. 

“It reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit, and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family, is the history of the eastern Kentucky Vances and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from.” Wagner said. “But in America, it doesn’t always have to be the white male lineage that trumps that, that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else.” 

Vance’s love for J.R.R Tolkien also isn’t as innocent as it appears to be. “Lord of The Rings is sort of a favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right, alt-right figures within Europe and the United States,” Rachel Maddow explained, stopping short of adding Orc Lives Matter. Maddow pointed out that Vance named his venture capital firm after the Ring of Fire. “He called it Narya, which you can remember because it’s Aryan, but you move the ‘n’ to the front.” 

Maddow forgot to mention that the trilogy also happens to be a favorite of liberal darlings Stephen Colbert, Neil Gaiman and even Barack Obama — Cockburn imagines they were practically salivating during Vance’s speech. For the Shire!