8 Times Joy Reid Unapologetically Dragged Trump on MSNBC

L–R: Donald Trump, Joy Reid. Source: Getty.

The bombshell announcement in February of the cancellation of Joy Reid‘s MSNBC show, TheReidOut, sent shockwaves throughout the Black community and media industry. MSNBC had major changes occur after Rebecca Kutler was newly president of the channel.

While she is staying within the network itself, Katie Phang was also affected by the changes with the cancellation of her show The Katie Phang Show. Host Alex Wagner was also cut and replaced by former President Joe Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki. Reid’s staff are not the only ones out of a job. MSNBC also abruptly cut much of the staff at Rachel Maddow’s show.

The news shocked Reid’s supporters, but her opponents such as President Donald Trump and his loyalists celebrated. This is mainly because Reid, 56, has taken digs at Trump and his role as a leader of the United States over the years. Let’s take a look at some of those moments.

RELATED CONTENT: Joy Reid’s Show Cut In ‘Racist’ MSNBC Shakeup, X Explodes In Disbelief: ‘Joy Can Never Be Cancelled’

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1. Joy Reid Discusses Trump’s Response To A 2017 White Supremacist Rally

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A white supremacist rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, which included neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Violence broke out and the event turned deadly when a vehicle plowed through a group of counter protestors. People flung into the air and the crash resulted in the death of three people and with 35 others injured. 

Trump’s initial response was to call out the wrongdoings of all groups. He said, “I think there’s blame on both sides. You had a group on one side that was bad and you had the group on the other side that was also very violent and nobody wants to say that but I’ll say it right now.” 

In response, Reid criticized Trump and his team’s shortage of holding the right more accountable on her show AM Joy. “I think that this White House would have no problem calling this terrorism if it had been a Muslim driving a car into a group of people. Or a Black person somebody that associated with Black Lives Matter they would immediately call it terrorism instantly. So I think that would have been a slow pitch over a home plate. But I think you have to realize when you look at Donald Trump responding to the incidents in Charlottesville, what was he doing? Reading. He was reading a response. You have to ask yourself, well who was writing what he was reading.” 

Reid pointed out that in Trump’s government people like Steven Miller and Michael Anton were there. Miller is now Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy & Homeland Security Advisor for the White House. However, in Trump’s first campaign and administration in 2016, he was the 45th president’s speechwriter and his senior adviser for policy. Anton also joined Trump in his first term but was a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication on the National Security Council Staff at the White House. Now, he has become the 33rd Director of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff. 

“So the problem is he’s reading what they’re writing,” Reid said. 

2. Joy Reid Calls Out Donald Trump For Mismanagement Of Covid-19

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Five years ago, the coronavirus plunged the world into uncertainty and major loss, causing a sudden shift in normalcy. The disease took the lives of millions of people worldwide between the years of 2019 and 2022. Health authorities advised citizens to stay indoors, wear masks in public, and maintain a six-foot distance from others to prevent the spread of the virus. 

Last year on MSNBC, Reid reflected on Trump’s poor mismanagement of the pandemic. He majorly downplayed the severity of the crisis, which led to a delayed response. He also opposed wearing masks, despite health experts like the CDC recommending them to slow down or stop the spread of the disease

“Donald Trump had one job. He had one crisis,” Reid said reflecting on this. “It was called the pandemic, and you know what you did? You bollixed it completely. You did so poorly at managing your sole crisis. The one hard thing you had to do.” 

Reid suggested that Trump doesn’t handle business at the White House, which is why he looks as refreshed as he does. “The reason he doesn’t look old like Biden looks older, she says the presidency ages when you do the job. Obama went gray because he was doing the work. Donald Trump looks the same as when he ran because he was playing golf the whole time.” 

Reid pointed to the stimulus checks the government gave U.S. citizens to help them financially through the pandemic. “The reality is he had one job manage this crisis and he he messed it up so badly that they had to do the stimmy.”

3. Joy Reid Drags Trump And Elon Musk About Plane Crashes

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Trump wasted no time in sweeping different areas of federal agencies by firing key officials and replacing them with people who were loyal to him and his views. He let go of military leaders, inspector generals and federal employees. Then he fired hundreds of workers in the Federal Aviation Administration in February. 

The move comes weeks after the frightening air collision of an American Airlines flight and a Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 people on Jan. 29. Two days later, another concerning flight crash occurred in Philadelphia. A medical jet crashed in a northeastern neighborhood taking the lives of seven people.

Reflecting on Trump’s abrupt firing of the FAA, Reid said on Feb. 12, “Since Donald Trump returned to the White House and he and his co-President Elon Musk started gutting the federal aviation administration and freezing hiring, including of air traffic controllers while terrorizing the whole federal government, planes seem to be falling out of the sky.” 

After Trump and Musk removed hundreds from the FAA more plane crashes occurred, including one in Alaska and another in Arizona that killed several more people. This week, planes in Chicago and D.C. successfully aborted landing to prevent colliding with another plane.

She added, “Not being a conspiracy here but it sure doesn’t give me confidence knowing that Sean from MTV’s The Real World Boston is in charge of transportation and that Elon is vowing that his band of tech bros are jumping into the nations aviation system to perform ‘rapid safety upgrades.’”

Sean Duffy officially took office as Secretary of Transportation, replacing Pete Buttigieg. Before that he was a host of a few shows including MTV’s The Real World. He then went into law and later served in Congress from 2011 to 2019. He then co-hosted The Bottom Line on Fox Business. 

Musk on the other hand is the CEO of Tesla, founder of Space X, and currently owns X – formerly known as Twitter. He’s a supporter of and buddies with Trump, which ended up securing him a role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in his second term.

4. Joy Reid Confronts Trump On Avoiding Election Fraud Arraignment

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In August 2023, Trump was due to appear for his arraignment in his election fraud case. Trump waived his right to appear in August in court and instead took to his social media to post videos. In one video, he showed off a T-shirt for his supporters to purchase to fund his campaign and legal defenses. In another video, he showed gratitude to voters in Atlanta for “showering” him with support. 

Reid called Trump out on her show for dodging the arraignment. She said, “As for Trump’s avoidance of his arraignment, perhaps he’s too busy preparing more of those bizarre and random social media video posts that he’s been posting that show that he continues to live in the Upside Down.” The Upside Down is a reference to the alternate world in the Netflix series Stranger Things. It is a world which mirrors the real world but is a darker and more sinister version of it. 

She even challenged his second video. She said, “Of course, there’s no evidence that there was even a sprinkle of support from the same city he repeatedly called ‘horrible’ and ‘crime infested.’”

5. Joy Reid Questions Trump’s Mental State

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In 2023, she discussed the GOP debate with her MSNBC colleagues when the conversation segued to Trump’s mental state. 

She said, “No one is really talking about it, people talk about it with Biden, but Trump thinks that he ran against Barack Obama. Trump is not always sure where he is.”

During his second presidential run, Trump mistook Biden for former President Barack Obama as he was attempting to take shots at Biden. President Joe Biden’s mental abilities at the time raised concerns as well. People noticed that Biden would sometimes not complete his sentences. Or he would repeat himself in public engagements leaving supporters to wonder if he was capable of being president a second term. 

But to Reid, Trump was not exempt from this same concern. 

“There is this sort of—the Biden conversation about his age is a tad about Trump, Trump is only three years younger,” she said.

“And Trump is arguably not all there. Not there even the way he was even in 2016. His lack of ability to sort of get through a sentence, he slurs his words. There’s a lot there. If one of these candidates wanted to try to take him down, if they had the political skill, I don’t know if any of them have the political skill, there’s so much there that it actually is political malpractice that they’re not even trying.”

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6. Joy Reid Condemns Trump’s Tax Cut As Only Being Beneficial For The Rich

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On The ReidOut, Reid called out Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which he said he would plan to extend if he won the presidency come Nov. 2024. Many criticized the agenda as the highest cuts went to people with higher income earnings.

Reid was one individual who made this a talking point about Trump on her show.

She said, “None of those people got the tax cut. Ok Let’s just be clear.. The tax cut went 80% to corporations and the super rich. If you are not really really rich you did not get a tax cut. You may have gotten a few pennies here and there. If you lived in a blue state your taxes went up because they took away the salt deductions so you can no longer deduct you state taxes. If you own a home your taxes went up because they reduced the ability for you to write off your home mortgage interest. So the tax cut literally only helped you if you are really really rich.”

7. Joy Reid Says Donald Trump Can Not Win The Election

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Last July, months ahead of it being announced that Trump would become the 47th president, Reid explained to her show’s audience why the then-presidential candidate should not be allowed to return to the White House. 

“What I know is that Donald J. Trump cannot be allowed back into the White House, full stop, period,” she said. “Because Donald Trump is a dangerous, felonious, wannabe autocrat who is vowing to release hundreds of violent insurrectionists from prison by pardoning them, to open internment camps on U.S. soil and round up millions of undocumented migrants to put there, and stick the Justice Department on his declared enemies.”

She said Trump “has called for the execution of people he doesn’t like, including former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley. He has admitted he wants to be a dictator like his favorite dictators, Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.” 

8. Joy Reid  Shares Thoughts On America After Trump’s Projected Win

Source: The Washington Post / Getty

Last November, Reid spoke on a panel during MSNBC’s Election Night Coverage. She challenged the country to do a self-examination following Trump’s win as president for the second time. 

In her reaction to the win she said, “It is fairly shocking.”

She quickly reminded her audience of what they may be walking into with starting January 2025.

In reaction to the outcome of the election, she said, “I don’t think something that should make us super proud that despite all of the things that just we’ve seen in the last two weeks, forget, even, if you could somehow forget January 6th and an attempted coup to overthrow the country. Even if you could forget taking classified documents and hiding them in your bathroom, even if you could set aside, which is very hard to set aside, an acute adjudication of sexual abuse against a woman and then a two dozen other allegations and, you know, Jeffrey Epstein saying it was his best friend, you name it.

“You just think about just the last two weeks and the things that Donald Trump has said into, into the TV that people could hear him say and do the vulgarity in front of families with young children and the threats to do mass deportation and a violent, a start, violent start to his dictatorship on day one.” 

She added, “And you name it. If all of that gets you half of the votes, 48, 49%, what does it tell you? I mean, we need to really take a step back and think about what does that say about us?”

Reid was clear that she is standing by all that she stood up for on the show in an emotional statement

On the Feb. 23 Zoom call with the Win With Black Women podcast, she explained why she has no regrets.

“I’ve been through every emotion from, you know, anger, rage, disappointment, hurt, you know, a feeling that, you know, guilt. You know, that I let my team lose their jobs,” she said.

She said she had “gratitude” and it was “Not just because people would take the time to get on a call like this or to take care of me. But also that my show had value and that I’m sorry that if what I was doing had value.” 

According to her speech, she would not change “going hard on so many issues.” She addressed topics like the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, Gaza and even critiqued the president on many occasions. 

“And where I come down on that is I’m not sorry,” she said. “I am not sorry that I stood up for those things because those things are of God.”

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