President Donald Trump proved over the weekend that even good news can’t keep him from his manic late-night rageposting.
After it was revealed that MSNBC was canceling progressive stalwart Joy Reid’s show, The ReidOut, as part of a sweeping overhaul of the network’s primetime line-up, the president could have quietly basked in the satisfaction of his on-air foe’s removal.
Instead, Trump went off on a bizarre Sunday night rant on his social media platform Truth Social bashing the network and its talent, and randomly demanding MSNBC pay “vast sums of money” for the “damage” it’s caused.
“Lowlife Chairman of ‘Concast,’ Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid. Based on her ratings, which were virtually non-existent, she should have been ‘canned’ long ago, along with everyone else who works there,” Trump wrote late Sunday night.
(MSNBC is currently being spun off from parent Comcast as part of a new entity that will include CNBC, USA Network and other cable channels called SpinCo. MSDNC, a portmanteau of MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee, is Trump’s go-to insult for the network.)
During Trump’s first term in office, Reid’s scathing criticism of the president both on the air and on social medial led the New York Times to declare her “a heroine of the resistance to his leadership.” Her usual 7 p.m. broadcast will air for the final time later this week, a source familiar with the changes confirmed to the Daily Beast.
It will reportedly be replaced by a new show co-anchored by Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, who currently helm MSNBC’s The Weekend and represent a wider spectrum of anti-Trump constituencies.
Trump’s Truth Social post went on to trash Rachel Maddow, who he said “rarely shows up because she knows there’s nobody watching, and she also knows that she’s got less television persona than virtually anyone on television except, perhaps, Joy Reid,” and “LOW IQ Con Man” Al Sharpton.
In fact, Maddow is back to hosting her hourly 9 p.m. show five days per week for the first 100 days of the new Trump administration, after only airing on Mondays starting in 2022. Originally host Alex Wagner was supposed to return to the 9 p.m. time slot four days per week starting in late April, but with the shakeups that hosting job is now up in the air.
MSNBC’s ratings dropped after the election but have rebounded since Trump was sworn into office. In the four weeks since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, the network’s weekday primetime audience average was 1.4 million viewers, up 77 percent from pre-inauguration viewership of 799,000 from December 30 to January 19.
“This whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country,” Trump wrote.
Meanwhile, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump launched her own Fox News show on Saturday less than three months after stepping down as co-chair for the Republican National Committee.
“Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN!” Trump concluded his rant.
It was quite a bold statement from a man who just last week claimed Ukraine had started its own invasion by Russia in 2022.
