MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Flays CNN’s Jake Tapper Over Trump Texts — Suggests They’re Not Really From Trump

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell went off on CNN and Jake Tapper over an interview with President Donald Trump that O’Donnell suggested could very well have been faked by the White House.

Tapper presented what he called an “exclusive text interview” with Trump on Sunday’s edition of CNN’s State of the Union that consisted of several questions about the Israel-Hamas deal, one question about the government shutdown, and an unknown number of questions on unknown topics to which Tapper received no responses.

On Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, the host savaged the network over the interview and heavily insinuated that the responses may have been from an imposter.

O’Donnell also called out what he saw as a double standard around Tapper’s treatment of Trump’s “insanity,” versus his handling of former President Joe Biden:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Yesterday morning, CNN presented a so-called interview with CNN that they can’t even prove was Donald Trump.

They called it breaking news. They called it, quote, an exclusive new interview with President Trump. That’s what they called it before the interviewer said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: The president answered my questions on text about his hopes for this nascent deal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’DONNELL: What? You gave him the questions in writing. So now, instead of letting Trump hide in a phone call where we can at least know that it’s him talking, Donald Trump gets to hide behind the black screen of texting.

We actually have no idea who texted the replies in that so-called interview. CNN is unable to prove that Donald Trump was actually doing that texting. CNN has not revealed how long it took to get a reply to each of the five written questions that apparently got replies from someone who texted those replies, or someone who told Donald Trump what to text in those replies. Or maybe, maybe it was from Donald Trump.

The first question was, what happens if Hamas insists on staying in power in Gaza? To which the text reply, we don’t know how long this took or and we don’t know who did it. The text reply says complete obliteration.

The final slow pitch softball question was how do you think the government shutdown is going to end? That question got the empty answer it deserved. Someone texted this reply as an answer to that question of how the shutdown is going to end. Good. We are winning and cutting costs big time, exclamation point.

The interviewer then said. I asked a few other questions on text, still waiting for a response on those, Mr. President. Okay, what were those questions exactly?

Which questions did Donald Trump refuse to answer? What could be more relevant in reporting an exchange than that is supposed to be with the president of the United States, then, including the questions he refused to answer? We have no idea.

Any questions about Jeffrey Epstein or his sex trafficking friend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Any questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell? We don’t know. We have no idea. We have no idea what the other questions were that Donald Trump refused to answer, or whoever was on the other end of that phone refused to answer.

When the history of Donald Trump’s mental decline is written, it will no doubt include that so-called interview yesterday as a turning point in Donald Trump’s White House dealing with the challenge of Donald Trump trying to answer questions during this period of obvious mental decline for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was allowed to become by CNN, the first president in history to get questions in writing for an interview, questions that he could take home, as it were, since he was at home, questions from a reporter and then Donald Trump was allowed to take — we don’t know how much time to reply to those questions. We do know CNN is still waiting for some of them.

Something this particular interviewer would be outraged about if Joe Biden had ever done that, or someone pretending to be Joe Biden had done that. This particular interviewer wrote an entire book condemning Joe Biden because he didn’t like the way Joe Biden answered questions. He thought Joe Biden wasn’t up to the job of answering questions as a presidential candidate, particularly in the presidential debate.

But in fact, every one of the answers that Joe Biden did give in that presidential debate in content was better than every answer given by Donald Trump, all of which were insane.

But this same interviewer apparently thinks Donald Trump is capable of answering such questions. This same interviewer has never doubted that if Joe Biden had ever given the answer, quote, “complete obliteration,” end quote, to what happens next in Gaza or anywhere else in the world, that same interviewer would have pointed to it correctly, I think, as proof of mental incapacity to do the job of president.

But Donald Trump, or the person playing Donald Trump in that text game yesterday, took the time to carefully type out complete obliteration. It wasn’t a quick and ill-considered reply. It was a carefully typed and written reply, a written reply.

And in a world where as the Wall Street — as Wall Street puts it, on the illegal Trump tariffs, Trump always chickens out anything Donald Trump says in response to a what if question is always meaningless. And so, the insane and reckless and inhuman phrase “complete obliteration” is also meaningless because Donald Trump said it, or the person playing Donald Trump in that text game typed it.

In the Sunday morning interview business, and it is a business, every time they lower their standards for Donald Trump, that becomes the new standard. And so, the other Sunday morning shows desperate to get Donald Trump will, according to all their past practices, in following each other into decline, accept written answers from Donald Trump or a person impersonating Donald Trump in reply to their written questions to Donald Trump. And they won’t tell us how long it takes Donald Trump or his stand-in to deliver those answers. And they won’t tell us what questions Donald Trump or his stand-in refuses to answer.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Last Word.