MS NOW’s Maddow and O’Donnell Roast Trump Press Corps Over Quickie Phoners: ‘It’s Just Ridiculous!’

MS NOW hosts Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell roasted the press corps and President Donald Trump over the flurry of reporting on quick phone interviews as “mixed signals from the White House.”

Trump has increasingly relied on what Maggie Haberman calls a “tabloid” strategy of reaching out to reporters for quick interviews to avoid “harder questions” and message in his own terms. The president has already done at least half a dozen of these in just the past 24 hours.

During the toss on Monday night’s edition of MS NOW’s The Last Word, O’Donnell called the press out for reporting credulously on each new utterance, and Maddow compared it to analyzing the barking of a dog:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Rachel, O is not my middle initial. I just wanted to —

RACHEL MADDOW: I know.

(LAUGHTER)

O’DONNELL: The way — the way you say it, you know?

Rachel, so here’s what — here’s what I’d like to see at the — at the White House Correspondents dinner, which I will be missing along with you, and that is — oh, can they all just reach an agreement that they’re no longer going to report on mixed signals from the White House? Can they all just agree that there are no signals?

(LAUGHTER)

It’s like Donald Trump is like a car with a broken directional signal. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what’s blinking when in what direction. It’s like the worst cliche they’ve been delivering, especially during this war, especially during the war, the old mixed signals thing about, hey, he just said he’s going to bomb off the face of the earth. Now he says they’ve won and they’ve got a good deal and it’s over tomorrow — and please stop.

MADDOW: Honestly, I mean, it’s like the reporting on what — I mean, the White House generally, the administration generally, but specifically what the president has to say about the war. It’s like if you were like reporting really intently on when your dog barked, what words it sounded like, you know what I mean? Like you can discern stuff, you can pull some words out of there. You can talk about what those words might mean, but there’s no reason to believe that they have any connection to what’s true in the world.

It’s just — it’s simply just like sound monitoring at this point. And I mean, when he said that he and Iran had a deal about their nuclear material and Iran was like, we did what now? And then — I mean, that’s like, we’re going to have peace talks in Pakistan. And Iran was like, with who?

I mean, the fact that we need to go to the mullahs in Iran to find out whether or not the president is just huffing or whether or not some of these words are supposed to have something to do with something that’s happened in the real world — I mean, it’s dangerous enough in the normal course of government. But when it comes to a live war, it’s just ridiculous.

O’DONNELL: No, it’s — there’s never been anything like it. Like the least, the least interesting source you can have on this war is the president of the United States. Like, hey, I just got off the phone from the president. Well, okay, that doesn’t mean you know anything after that call.

Neal Katyal is going to join us tonight, Rachel, because I’ve invited him for a victory lap on the tariffs case, which he won in the Supreme Court, because the refund process is starting, $160 billion of refunds are coming out thanks to Neal Katyal’s victory in the Supreme Court over Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The day that Donald Trump said would never come, here, it’s coming. And all of those refund checks, none of them none of them are being sent to China. They’re all being sent to Americans here in the United States, because that’s who paid the tariffs.

MADDOW: That’s right. Neal Katyal — I mean, obviously that case is his and the victory lap is deserved. But he’s also really good at explaining how these things work technically and legally. So, he’s perfect guest on this tonight. Yeah.

O’DONNELL: Yeah.

MADDOW: All right. Thanks, Lawrence.

O’DONNELL: Thanks, Rachel. Thank you.

Watch above via MS NOW’s The Last Word.

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