Former MSNBC host Joy Reid has thoughts on MSNBC’s new name, MS NOW, and its logo, which she thinks “the new corporate suits” chose in hopes Donald Trump will “like” it.

Reid told Kara Swisher on Swisher’s On podcast, “The logo, the red, white, and blue, is giving a little Newsmax,” she said of the right-leaning streaming channel. “It’s a little America, you know? I feel like they’re like, ‘Will Trump like this?’ I feel like that’s in the minds of all marketing people right now, is ‘Will Trump be mad?’”

New Logo for MS NOW.Versant

The new name, expected to be implemented by 2026, stands for “My Source for News, Opinion and the World.”

Reid said changing the network’s name overall is a bad move since for “MSNBC fans,” the network is “like The Muppet Show to them. It’s Sesame Street. It is such a brand that is meaningful to people.” She added, “I don’t know what they’re trying to do… they were willing to keep the Microsoft, but not the NBC, you know, which tells me they’re still using Teams.”

The ex-Reidout host who was unceremoniously let go from the network in February for reasons she insists are unbeknownst to her as her show’s ratings were on the rise at the time, has since taken her audience to YouTube and Substack, where she hosts “The Joy Reid Show.”

Reid was fired following the 2024 election, after which MSNBC followed up her axing with the removal of several other hosts of color from the networks’ lineup. Reid told Swisher that “the new corporate suits” at her former employer “answer to a higher authority named Donald Trump,” which she said explains the ill-advised rebrand amid NBC’s handoff of the brand to Versant.

MSNBC’s top star Rachel Maddow has admitted to not knowing “how to pronounce” the new name, but thinks the change itself is “good for us,” she told Variety. “What NBC is doing in its legacy timeslots… is just a world away from the 24/7 totally independent news operation that we’re able to stand up now, thanks to the spin-off,” she explained.

MSNBC ELECTION COVERAGE -- 2022 Midterms2022 MSNBC ELECTION COVERAGE — 2022 Midterms Election Coverage — Pictured: (l-r) Chris Hayes, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Ari Melber in Studio 3A at Rockefeller Center on Tuesday, November 8, 2022 — 

“If she’s down with it. If she likes it, I love it,” Reid said Thursday. “God bless them. I wish them all the best of luck… But I guess I’m sad for the people who come up to me in the airports who are like, ‘I love MSNBC!’”

“I kind of feel for the new corporate suits that are running that place,” she went on, “They’re under a lot of pressure…Donald Trump is a vengeful, vicious, vindictive man.” Reid also noted that Trump’s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr “wrote this part of the Handmaid’s Tale files, Project 2025, he wrote that part of it and it was very clear that vengeance against the media was part of it.” And even though the FCC “doesn’t control cable,” Trump’s administration could still “mess with their business in a very ugly way.”

That said, there were still better options than MS NOW for the network’s rebrand.

“I guess if I had to pick something… I might have called it something like ‘Blue News,’ you know what I mean? Or something that had the ‘blue’ word in it. Because people who watch MSNBC are on the blue side of the red-blue divide, so it would sort of fit with Bluesky.”