NBC News’s recent hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, has baffled Democrats, journalists, and pretty much all of MSNBC’s star anchors. But to those who remain deep in the thrall of MAGA—and those, like me, who escaped it—it was utterly unsurprising that a mainstream (i.e., “fake”) news organization would shell out $300,000 a year for McDaniel’s point of view.

I became a MAGA activist in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump famously descended that golden escalator. For the next half-decade, I not only vociferously supported Trump and those who pledged fealty to him, like Ron DeSantis, but I also volunteered my time to write part of the Trump campaign call script to prospective voters; made and received calls for Trump and DeSantis; directed citizens to their polling places; helped get others registered; never missed a MAGA-inspired local event; and often spoke at, and financially supported, some Trump clubs. I also donated to Trump.

So I knew a lot of MAGA Americans, as well as their views of various Republican politicians. And I never met anyone who had a kind word to say about Ronna McDaniel. In fact, we all loathed her nearly as much as we did the Democratic Party. To us, she wasn’t Ronna McDaniel, but Ronna Romney, the niece of U.S. Senator Willard Mitt Romney—that quisling RINO who was worse than any Democrat, save for Barack Obama.

Though Trump in 2017 had handpicked McDaniel to run the RNC, we privately mocked McDaniel because we regarded her as a Democrat lite: someone who operated with malleable principles, refused to fight as we and Trump fought, and yearned to be liked. Our desire was to be feared, not liked.

Publicly, we rarely admonished her, because to do so would be to criticize Trump—which would lead to exile, as a MAGA heretic.

McDaniel was finally cut loose in March. (Officially she resigned, but let’s be honest—Trump engineered it as part of his broader overhaul of the RNC, which included installing daughter-in-law Lara Trump as a co-chair.) At that point, the stopwatch started in the........

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