It’s a truism in baseball that you can’t swing your way out of a slump. Sometimes, it’s best to take a few games off to clear your mind and reset your stance.
That’s the advice we’d give to a few prominent liberal news anchors: Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Margaret Brennan of CBS News, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN. The trio have been whiffing badly on live television throughout the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term, and it’s time for each to step away for a few games. That’s because, despite our numerous ideological differences, a functional opposition press, or at least the appearance of such a thing, serves the best interest of the republic. The trio’s lamentable performances in recent days show they are anything but functional right now.
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
Maddow began the rough stretch on her Feb. 12 broadcast by suggesting that a $400 million State Department contract for “armored Teslas” amounted to proof that Tesla CEO and Department of Government Efficiency senior adviser Elon Musk was involved in “self-dealing.” She then mocked the truck itself and accused Musk of leveraging his power in the new administration to secure the deal.
“Musk has convinced the government to spend $400 million on armored Teslas,” Maddow asked. “Definitely not corrupt and ripping us all off?”
The problem with this prejudiced theory is that the procurement plan was initiated by the Biden administration in December 2024, a month before Trump took office. Biden’s State Department wanted to update its fleet of diplomatic security vehicles, and its move went unnoticed.
Following blistering criticism online, Maddow issued a correction the next evening. But the damage was done — a lie travels around the world before the truth has got its boots on — and the original clip had gone viral. That’s doubtless good for MSNBC viewership if not for its credibility, and it is certainly a disservice to credulous viewers who watch Maddow.
For her part, Brennan leveled an even more embarrassingly misguided charge against a Trump administration official. Speaking with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Face the Nation on Feb. 16 about Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, Brennan suggested that the Nazis had “weaponized” free speech to conduct the Holocaust and that Vance’s defense of free speech on German soil was therefore culpably unaware and in bad taste.
Rubio pushed back against this decisively: “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime. … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany” — a look of unmistakable and deserved embarrassment swept over Brennan’s face. She knew the clip was about to be distributed widely for all the wrong reasons.
This came on the heels of another embarrassing moment, in her late-January interview with Vance, from which also came the vice president’s viral comment, “I don’t really care, Margaret.” Brennan was unable to pin Vance down despite great effort — and worse, she frequently appeared out of her depth on the substance of the subjects under discussion. The contrast with Vance, who commanded the issues, was stark.
Collins’s slump has not come from lack of effort. Following her promotion to chief White House correspondent in late 2024, she’s been taking hacks at the Trump administration each day, occasionally finding herself on the wrong end of exchanges with the president himself.
Many have noted that Collins appears to be stepping into the shoes of Jim Acosta, the recently humiliated CNN anchor who served as the network’s chief Trump antagonist. But her hostility appears to be serving her as badly as it did Acosta. It also ill serves viewers and the country.
Collins’s national coverage reached new lows this week when she shared a donation link for the defense fund of the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer, Luigi Mangione. She later deleted the post without apologizing following an outcry, saying the fund was not an endorsement but reporting on a “newsworthy” item.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The most charitable interpretation of the post is that Collins did not mean to raise money for a murderer and simply exercised poor judgment, but this suggests a few days off might be in order.
Sometimes, the healthiest thing to do is step back and recollect. Clearly, swinging through the slump isn’t working for some of the most high-profile liberal figures in the news business.