By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2025 ~
Joy Reid, MSNBC News Host
On Thursday, February 13, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, host of the news program, The ReidOut, said this on air:
“If Donald Trump announced tomorrow that he was selling the United States to Vladimir Putin personally and that we will now be owned by the Kremlin, every single Republican [in Congress] would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and vote for it.”
Reid’s remark came during her interview with Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Minority Leader of the House of Representatives. Jeffries had just indicated that all it would take is three House Republicans to vote with Democrats in order to do the right thing for the American people they represent.
You can watch the exchange here.
Just five days before Reid’s staff learned that her show had been cancelled – by reading about it first in leaked media reports and then having the fact confirmed by management – Trump and Elon Musk had appeared in a bizarre joint interview with Sean Hannity. In that interview, Trump specifically complained about MSNBC, stating the following:
“And the media is so bad. When I watch MSNBC, which I don’t watch much, but you have to watch the enemy on occasion, the level of arrogance and — and cheating and — they’re just horrible people. These are horrible people.”
Reid’s 7 p.m. weekday news program has been running since 2020. Over this past weekend, multiple media outlets reported that Reid’s show would end abruptly sometime this coming week. The abruptness raised suspicions of Trump’s brand of vindictiveness against his perceived enemies.
Variety reported the following:
“There has been growing concern within several news outlets about drawing the wrath of the Trump administration. CNN, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, has parted ways with some anchors who tilted hard against Trump’s policies and media practices, including, most recently, Jim Acosta.”
Reid’s concerns about Trump’s closeness to Putin are not devoid of an evidentiary basis. Last week Trump declared that Ukraine had started the war with Russia. The Associated Press, which is suing the Trump administration itself for banning it from press events at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, and Air Force One, fact-checked Trump’s revisionist history as follows:
“WHAT TRUMP SAID [about Ukraine]: ‘You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’
“THE FACTS: Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by falsely saying it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO.”
Reid is also correct that the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they are prepared to remain silent as Trump makes outlandish threats to take over Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and grab ownership of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian people.
But Reid is incorrect about one thing. Not every single Republican in Congress is prepared to remain silent on the threat posed by Putin. On Thursday, February 20, Senator Thom Tillis stunned his Republican colleagues with a fiery speech against Putin on the Senate Floor. Tillis said this, standing in front of giant photographs of mass civilian graves in Ukraine:
“Vladimir Putin is a liar, a murderer and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. And that’s bad by itself. But, you know what’s worse? It’s when you employ tactics that intentionally terrorize the population.”
A comment under the video summed up the rare nature of a Republican speaking out like this, writing:
“One guy. A house and senate filled with self-righteous republicans, who know this goes against everything America stands for, and what do you get? One guy.”
