At NewsBusters, we use the term "MSNBC Republican" to describe the kind of tame Republican the liberal network can count on to echo its talking point o' the day.
But even "MSNBC Republican" is stretching it when it comes to Susan Del Percio. Appearing on Saturday's edition of The Weekend, co-host Symone Sanders introduced her as [see screencap] a "Republican" strategist, with emphasis on the R-word.
Del Percio is no kind of "Republican strategist" at all. You'd have to go back almost 20 years to find a Republican for whom Del Percio strategized. For that matter, she hasn't advised any politician in over a decade. And that was Andrew Cuomo—when he was the Democrat governor of New York.
But MSNBC uses her fake-GOP labels for opinion pieces like "I’m a Republican strategist. Here’s why I'm confident about Kamala Harris’ campaign."
Demonstrating just how abjectly Del Percio has thrown in with the Dems, co-host Michael Steele quoted Susan Glasser from The New Yorker about USAID: "The point is not a policy fight. It's an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others." Trump: executioner!
Del Percio readily agreed: "Well, that's absolutely the case because it makes headlines."
And there are at least 1,000 federal agencies in addition to USAID? That alone demonstrates that the government has metastasized beyond anything the Founders could have imagined.
Then, exemplifying just how far Del Percio has moved from being anything recognizably Republican, Del Percio propagated an anti-Trump theory so far-fetched as to be bizarre:
"He nominated a cabinet to make him 25th Amendment-proof."
Steele [an actual MSNBC Republican!] absurdly agreed: "Good point." And Sanders could be heard murmuring her approval.
If ever there were a 25th-Amendment-worthy president, it was Joe Biden -- but Democrats didn't have the courage to press the ejection seat button. Instead all these MSNBC Democrats and former Republicans eagerly covered everything up.
The utterly incapacitated Woodrow Wilson, another Democrat, would also have been a prime candidate for 25th Amendment action -- but the Amendment hadn't yet been adopted at his time in office.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
The Weekend
2/8/25
8:02 am ETSYMONE SANDERS: Joining us now is MSNBC political analyst and Republican strategist, Susan Del Percio.
MICHAEL STEELE: Good morning, Susan. You know, I thought that Susan Glasser summed this up so perfectly in her New Yorker piece, noting, "[If] cutting the federal government is what this is all then Trump and Musk would not be bothering with tiny USAID, whose estimated budget is less than 1% of the federal government's. The point is not a policy fight. It's an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others."
Your thoughts?
SUSAN DEL PERCIO: Well, that's absolutely the case because it makes headlines. This an agency which, USAID does so much good around the world. But like a lot of government agencies, there are things that you can pick out and pull that thread and say, why are we funding something like this? And I think that's why they chose it to go after.
. . .
STEELE: Marco Rubio at the State Department. I've always looked at Donald Trump selecting him as a way to punk the hell out of him. Because this is a guy I'm going to tell you why, because this is a guy who has a core. I've known Marco a long, long time. And this is a guy who always, as particularly in the Senate, fought very openly about the democracy piece, and how important it was for the U.S. to use its soft power through agencies like USAID.
. . .
[Quoting a New York Times story] "Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long been a champion of policies that advance human rights and promote democratic practices. In the Senate, Rubio was a lead sponsor of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which had broad support from both parties in Congress."But now, here he is firing 60 contractors working on those very issues. Those little issues are no longer a priority because they aren't a priority for this president. What do you make of this?
I call it the punking of Republicans by Trump to get them to do the things that they know they would never do otherwise.
DEL PERCIO: Well, they should have known going in, Michael, that they were going to have to bend to Donald Trump's will every single time. They are not there to be a, to inform and to advise, they are there to carry out orders.
Frankly, I think he nominated a cabinet to make him 25th-Amendment-proof if anything should really go by. That's what I think it's all about --
STEELE: Good point.
DEL PERCIO: That's it. So that way he had everyone falling in line behind him.
