Gordon Sondland, former Trump administration ambassador to the European Union, broke decisively with the former president and current GOP nominee after the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Needless to say, that made Sondland a friend of the media, at least temporarily. As proof, witness the fact that practically anyone with the last name “Cheney” has gone from being called a fascist to being feted on CNN and MSNBC.
Sondland had his moment in the sun. However, he’s also a man who apparently has some contact with reality — something that MSNBC host Ari Melber found out the hard way on Wednesday after the former ambassador said he’d be supporting Donald Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris because of the current administration’s attacks on democracy.
Melber was interviewing Sondland, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro and White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews for what the network billed as “an extended interview on Donald Trump, Jack Smith’s new coup filing, the 2024 election and more.”
The entire clip runs roughly eleven and a half minutes, but it was one minute of Sondland talking some reason that got Melber in a huff.
Melber asked “why was it important for you to say ‘no more Trump’ after his January 6th conduct, and do you stand by that?”
“No, I don’t stand by it,” Sondland said.
He explained: “I’ve now lived four years under the Biden-Harris policies, and I have to say that not only are those policies becoming an existential threat to our country’s way of life, but to our allies’ as well.”
Heated crosstalk ensues!
Do you think the media treats Trump unfairly?
MSNBC’s Ari Melber loses it after the anti-Trump impeachment witness he invited on his show said he was voting for Trump because of how bad things are
Melber: You said it was a no from me after J6. Now you say it’s a yes?
Sondland: It’s an absolute yespic.twitter.com/aMx1x5jfER
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 2, 2024
“This is so striking! You said ‘it was a no for me’ after that,” Melber exclaimed. “Here we are right now, and you’re saying it’s a yes for you?”
“It is a yes for me,” Sondland said. “It is an absolute yes for me. That is how badly the Biden-Harris team have prosecuted their job.”
“But the whole point you seem to be making was January 6th and that kind of attack on democracy are bigger than any problems,” Melber said.
“I am seeing so many attacks on democracy that eclipse January 6th,” Sondland swiftly replied.
Now, just to be clear, here’s what he had to say previously about Trump in 2022, as per The Wall Street Journal: “We are the most admired around the world for the way we turn over the keys to the next leader,” he said. “And he really f***ed that up … I won’t support him.”
That was before the 2022 midterms and as he was releasing a book titled “The Envoy: Mastering the Art of Diplomacy with Trump and the World.” Since then, the war in Ukraine has dragged on without end, we have a new war in Israel and one brewing with Iran, China hasn’t been contained in any way, shape or form, and this is to say nothing on attacks on free speech or the filibuster at home.
Sondland was not the staunchest of NeverTrumpers; in his book, according to Foreign Policy, he said that Trump was “kind of a d***” and “a man with a fragile ego who wants more than anything to feed that ego the way an addict would feed a habit,” but that the 45th president was “essentially right about many things, including how out of whack our relationship with Europe has become.”
According to the Foreign Policy profile of Sondland in May, he said that “that Trump has a tendency to lavish praise on strongmen in public—be it the North Korean leader or Russian President Vladimir Putin—but in the end, the former president knows the stakes of the game and has a sober realpolitik approach to national security.”
“He does not like Putin at all. At all,” Sondland said. “And while he compliments Putin publicly, he does it because it’s a contrarian strategy.”
Sondland, it’s worth noting, is now a self-described “pro bono” registered lobbyist for Ukraine, so it’s not exactly like he’s just spitballing here. He’s seen the threat Biden-Harris policy has caused in Eastern Europe, and he thinks Trump is better.
“As a [U.S.] citizen who believes strongly in Ukraine’s survival and total victory, I felt it’s my duty — given where the Republican Party is headed right now, some members of the Republican Party — to forcefully advocate with members of Congress and with others to support Ukraine,” he told the outlet. This is, one guesses, one of the motivations behind his decision, since he told Foreign Policy he believes Trump’s deliberate unpredictability might have deterred Putin from an invasion.
But no: To the professional punditocracy, where the only stakes are posturing, the Capitol incursion must (pun unintended) trump all. It’s been compared to the worst attack on America since 9/11, Pearl Harbor or worse, even though it was a minor interruption in a congressional proceeding that wasn’t encouraged by the president himself and that other challengers and defeated parties have questioned the results of elections in the past.
Remember the hues and cries in 2000, 2004 and 2016? Guess which party lost then?
If Melber is shocked by this, remember that not all of us get paid to pontificate on cable news in the loudest and most reductionist way possible. Sondland is one of these individuals. He’s seen how the sausage is made, and he knows four more years of Biden-Harris has the potential to make sausage out of many democracies, including our own.
If that’s news to him, the problem is with him and the news, not Sondland.
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