'Pretentious': Geraldo Rivera Trashes Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd For Protesting Ex-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel's NBC Hiring

Former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera slammed several hosts this week after they protested NBC’s decision to hire ex-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor, RadarOnline.com has learned.

In the latest development after NBC announced McDaniel’s addition to their team on Friday, several NBC and MSNBC hosts complained about the new hire.

Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called on NBC to “reconsider its decision” to hire McDaniel, while Rachel Maddow called on the network to “reverse” its offer.

Rivera slammed hosts like Scarborough, Brzezinski, and Maddow over their “pretentious” protestations. He also called the arguments against NBC’s hiring of McDaniel “bull----.”

“Screw them,” Rivera said during an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show on Monday. “I mean, the whole idea is that they were hiring her to be the ultimate insider, and here she gets washed away, she gets drowned by this tsunami of pretentious bull----.”

“Really, all of these people that have a stick up their behinds, how dare they,” he continued. “And for Mika to say NBC shouldn’t hire them, when did she become management? When did she become the arbiter of who got hired and who doesn’t get hired?”

Rivera also slammed former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd after Todd called the McDaniel-NBC situation “unfortunate.”

“Chuck Todd, I don’t remember his nine years at Meet the Press as being exactly triumphant,” Rivera charged.

“I hope she tells them all to screw it, she’s sticking around, forces them to fire her, and then sues them for millions because they have humiliated her in a very, very unjust way,” the former Fox News host concluded.

As RadarOnline.com previously reported, McDaniel stepped down as chair of the Republican National Committee on March 8 to let ex-President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, ascend as the committee's co-chair.

“I have decided to step aside at our Spring Training on March 8 in Houston to allow our nominee to select a Chair of their choosing," McDaniel said shortly before her resignation. "The RNC has historically undergone change once we have a nominee and it has always been my intention to honor that tradition."

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Flash forward to Friday, and NBC announced that McDaniel was joining the network as a paid contributor to help cover the upcoming presidential election in November – a move that upset many network talents due to McDaniel’s previous remarks about the 2020 election.

“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday,” Joe Scarborough explained on Monday’s episode of Morning Joe. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons.”

“To be clear, we believe NBC News should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage,” Brzezinski added on Monday. “But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier.”

Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd also complained about NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel.

“The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News, to me that is inexplicable,” Maddow said during her show on Monday night. “I hope they will reverse their decision.”

“You got to ask yourself, what does she bring NBC News?” Todd said over the weekend.