Ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel: Biden won 2020 election ‘fair and square’

A little more than two weeks after resigning as the chairperson of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel admitted Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election over her party’s candidate “fair and square”.

But the newly-hired NBC News contributor maintained it is acceptable to also say there were “problems” in the manner that the US president defeated Donald Trump – even after the former president’s supporters translated such sentiments into the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021 that has been linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.

McDaniel delivered her contradictory remarks Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press in what was her debut on the network as a paid pundit. Show moderator Kristen Welker spent much of the session pushing McDaniel to address why she had waited until now to concede that Biden justly defeated Trump in 2020 – and to express disapproval over Trump’s promise to free those who were convicted or still facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack if he returned to the White House.

“When you’re the RNC chair, you – you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel said.

And while she said: “I don’t think violence should be in our political discourse,” she also contended that it was acceptable for Republicans to continue to question certain aspects of the 2020 election.

Though nonpartisan voting integrity experts consider that race to be the most secure election ever, McDaniel said it remained “a concern” for her that Pennsylvania could go from recording 260,000 mail-in ballots for Trump’s Oval Office victory in 2016 to 2.6m in 2020.

McDaniel omitted mentioning that mail ballots heavily favored Biden after Trump discouraged his supporters from using mail ballots and instead urged