MSNBC’s Katy Tur in new memoir talks family, media and Trump

MSNBC anchor Katy Tur says she is “worried” by the prospect of former President Trump returning to the White House after the 2024 election.

“He is an anti-democracy candidate,” Tur told The Hill. “He tried to overthrow the 2020 election.”

The anchor added: “I think you have to ask yourself, do you want somebody who is anti-democracy in that office again, holding all of that power? I would be worried as a citizen, certainly.”

The former president is reported to be edging toward a 2024 bid, with aides rushing to put a campaign apparatus in place in case Trump makes an announcement soon.

Trump leads most 2024 polls of Republican voters by a wide margin. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has emerged as a serious rival. DeSantis caused a stir last month when he bested Trump in a poll of New Hampshire Republicans.

Tur, who hosts an afternoon show every weekday on MSNBC, first came to national prominence covering Trump’s 2016 bid from the campaign trail. 

Asked whether she thought Trump would run again, she responded:

“The question that sticks in my head is, does he want to hand over the power as the titular head of the Republican Party to somebody else? Does he want to hand it over to Ron DeSantis, who seems like the front-runner right now? And from what I know of Donald Trump, my mind says no.”

Tur, who wrote a best-selling book about her 2016 experiences, spoke with The Hill following the publication of a new book. 

“Rough Draft,” a memoir, ranges across several topics including Tur’s tumultuous relationship with her father. 

Her father, Zoey Tur, is transgender, having made a gender transition within the past decade. 

Years prior to the transition, during Katy Tur’s childhood and adolescence, the MSNBC anchor says her father was physically and verbally abusive.

In the book, Katy Tur recounts an incident in which she intervened when her father, then Bob Tur, was verbally abusing her mother, Marika Gerrard.

Her father allegedly responded by punching his daughter in the mouth. Katy Tur was in her senior year of high school at the time. 

“I remember the taste of blood,” she writes.

“It was difficult to write about,” Tur told The Hill. “There had been episodes of violence or threats of violence earlier than that. And this was kind of a crescendo.”

Zoey Tur has previously told CBS that Katy Tur “looked up to me, and I failed her. No father wants to fail their daughter. … Throwing batteries? Probably, yeah. Punching walls? There were a couple.”

Katy Tur also writes in “Rough Draft” about a conversation in which she pressed her father to discuss the earlier abuse and that her father denied the behavior. 

Zoey Tur has given several interviews on the topic of her gender transition and has, at times, accused Katy Tur of being unsupportive and transphobic.

The anchor denies this was ever the case. She says the real knot in her relationship with her father is the latter’s refusal to own up to the earlier alleged abuse.

“I didn’t want to drag my dad down the way I kind of felt my dad was dragging me down,” she told The Hill.

“I just didn’t want to reveal the real reason — which was that we didn’t get along because my dad was abusive.”

Her father, a pioneering helicopter journalist alongside Gerrard in the 1990s, could also be a caring and even heroic figure, Tur emphasizes.

“He was a hero, but he was also the harm,” she says. “In some cases, he would be fixing you up after he hurt you.”

On less intimate topics, Tur expresses worry about the current state of journalism, noting the widespread public distrust of the media.

Even as she fears a future Trump presidency, she believes the media damaged its reputation during the 45th president’s time in office by failing to be more discerning about which of his actions merited the most amped-up coverage.

“Blowing everything up in a nuclear way made it seem like we were only out to get Donald Trump,” she said. “And I think that hurt our credibility in the long run.”

Tur also is disturbed by a growing tendency in political news — one in which audiences seek reaffirmation of their existing opinions rather than anything that might challenge those views.

“It’s very depressing and I think it’s a big problem,” she said.

She has deleted Twitter from her phone, in part because so much of it voices crude views and “a guttural rage” that she deems unhelpful.

Asked if cable news isn’t also a vector for some of the same forces, she says it is “a fair question.”

MSNBC’s primetime shows have a clear ideological lean. Tur, while not criticizing any colleagues, differentiates the opinion-heavy evening line-up from the dayside schedule of which her show is a part.

“The important thing I’m trying to do with my show, and that we try to do in the dayside hours, is not have an opinion,” she said. “And that’s not to say not be honest [or], you know, give both sides equal weight when maybe both sides don’t deserve equal weight. … But it’s to establish credibility, as in not just saying one party is all good or one party is all bad.”

She adds: “If you are always attacking one side relentlessly and that’s the only position you take, you lose your credibility on that. You lose your credibility, period, because you’re just seen as somebody who’s out to get the other side.”

Tur is now the mother of two young children and married to “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil. 

Becoming a mother, she says, has meant that she “suddenly physically felt some of the stories that I was covering. For instance, Uvalde. I physically felt the pain that I imagined those families were feeling.”

More generally, she adds, “We cover very dark stuff in succession and it seems like it’s getting darker and darker, and it can be hard on your mental health.”

The grating, attritional effect of all those factors has at times pushed Tur close to quitting journalism.

“People don’t trust us, they don’t believe us and it makes me wonder if this job, as I’m currently doing it, is effective, but if it’s doing more harm than good. I don’t have a good answer for that. So those thoughts linger in the back of my mind,” she said.

“They linger, though, because I do love it. And I do think it’s important. And I’m hoping to find a way to better communicate with people.”

“Rough Draft” by Katy Tur, published by Simon and Schuster, is out now.