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President Donald Trump called for MSNBC hosts Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow to resign after they criticized his decision to make a 13-year-old cancer survivor an honorary Secret Service agent.
The president also took the opportunity to bash the network’s ratings.
“Worse than CNN is ‘MS-DNC,’ which is the worst. And the good news is very few people watch them anymore,” Trump said in the Oval Office Thursday.
“They have lost such credibility; and, frankly, what Nicolle Wallace said — I’ve never been a fan of hers, and she’s not very talented — but I’ll tell you, what she said the other day about that young man is disgraceful. She should be forced to resign,” the president told reporters.
“And Rachel Maddow should be forced to resign. Nobody watches her anyway. I don’t know if — it’s not possible they pay her as much money as I hear — but certainly she’s lost all credibility,” he added.
The MSNBC hosts took exception to Trump’s honoring of DJ Daniel, a teenage brain cancer survivor, during his joint address to Congress Tuesday night.
“Tonight, DJ, we’re going to do you the biggest honor of them all. I am asking our new Secret Service director, Sean Curran, to officially make you an agent of the United States Secret Service,” the president declared.
Wallace and Maddow said they felt the president exploited and politicized Daniel’s cancer survival.
“For the record — and this is disgusting — the president made a spectacle out of praising a young man who’s thus far survived pediatric cancer, as if the president had something to do with that,” Maddow said. “This was in the midst of him praising DOGE. The DOGE cuts, among other things, have cut off funding for ongoing research into pediatric cancer.”
Wallace, a former George W. Bush communications director, added: “Problem is, in the beauty of that child is the tragedy of the Trump presidency, because we don’t know how he survived pediatric cancer, but it is likely he benefited from some sort of cancer research. And it is a fact that Trump has slashed cancer research. It’s a fact, by eliminating NIH and by all the cuts, pediatric cancer trials are halted.”
Wallace then brought up Trump’s pardoning of all January 6 defendants and said that she hoped the 13-year-old never has to defend the Capitol if he one day serves in law enforcement.
“I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer, but I hope he never has to defend the United States Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters and if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide,” Wallace said. “And I hope he isn’t one that has to testify against the people who carried out acts of seditious conspiracy and then lived to see Donald Trump pardon those people.”
The comments outraged right-wing commentators.
“This is genuinely the most repulsive comment I’ve heard in a very long time from anyone on television,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk raged, adding: “MSNBC should fire Nicolle Wallace. Disgusting.”
Megyn Kelly’s executive producer Steve Krakauer labeled Wallace’s remarks the “most odious thing” he’s ever heard on cable news. “Totally broken-brained punditry,” he tweeted.
Former Georgia state representative Vernon Jones decried Wallace as a “liberal racist piece of sh*t” while also urging MSNBC to “fire her effective immediately,” while far-right provacateur Ian Miles Cheong fumed that the MSNBC star was “unhinged.” Other conservative social media personalities, meanwhile, described her as “deranged” and “depraved.”
A representative for MSNBC declined to comment.
