MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Rages At Press ‘Sleeping’ Through Trump’s ‘Publicly Flaring Madness’
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell went off on the press over their lack of outrage over what he called President Donald Trump’s “publicly flaring madness” this week.
O’Donnell has consistently called out what he sees as Trump’s growing incapacity, growing to a crescendo this week amid a series of escalating stumbles, a speech to military leaders, and social media antics around the government shutdown.
On Wednesday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, the host trained his eye on the New York Times over an editorial that insufficiently assessed Trump’s “insanity” and a Washington press corps that is “sleeping” through Trump’s “madness”:
No one in the history of governing in the United States of America has ever had to talk to a person that crazy about anything, ever.
And “The Times” says it’s time to start talking.
The entire editorial does not find the space to make a single reference to the madness of Donald Trump as even a factor in the government shutdown, or in the way out of the government shutdown. And here, I guess, is its reference to Donald Trump’s insane social media posting.
Quote, “He mixed bombastic social media blasts and threats to fire thousands of federal workers if Democrats did not provide the votes for his plan to keep the government open.”
Bombastic social media blasts. That’s what they are. How very polite.
No, they’re not bombastic. They are insane, Democratic Congresswoman Madeleine Dean approached the Republican speaker of the House to talk about the Trump madness, and he appeared to offer nodding agreement that Donald Trump is unwell.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MADELEINE DEAN (D-PA): The president is unhinged. He is unwell. What are you doing —
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: A lot on your side are, too. I don’t control —
DEAN: Oh, my —
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O’DONNELL: He could have said “No, the president is not unwell”. Maybe he meant to say that, but he didn’t. It was taken as a given in the conversation. He nods when he hears the president is unwell and his response as he’s nodding, is a lot of folks on your side are, too. The word “too” there indicates similarity to what was just said, meaning similarity to Trump.
The plain language of that is the speaker in effect, agreeing that Trump is unwell and simply saying that other people are unwell. That’s the speaker’s defense of Trump being unwell. He’s not the only one. Of course he is. But okay.
The Republican speaker of the House has to be shocked by what Donald Trump has done on social media. We know he is shocked, but like all Republicans in Washington, he processes the shock instantly and knows he will never dare publicly say a negative word about it because he spends every waking moment of his life as a coward.
He has taken, in effect, an oath of cowardice to Donald Trump. He’s not the speaker of the House. He’s the speaker of Trump in the House.
Now, if I were running “The New York Times”, which I’m incompetent to do, couldn’t do it, I don’t know that I could deal with this situation any better than they have done, I really don’t. Instead, I just have an hour of television where I can say whatever I want. That’s a much easier responsibility than editing “The New York Times”.
And I had never presumed that I can do a better job than “The New York Times”. I never presumed that I could do a better job than anyone who’s at bat in Yankee Stadium out there, who strikes out. And so it’s not with some sense of superiority that I find “The New York Times” has struck out in the face of the madness of Donald Trump this week, which has reached new extremes that we haven’t seen before, even from Donald Trump.
The White House staffers who live with Donald Trump’s insanity up close have obviously decided it cannot be defended. And the only thing to do is pretend there’s nothing crazy about it. That’s what Donald Trump’s faithful vice president tried to do yesterday.
And now, the White House says they will continue to post that video at government expense on official White House communications and make the sombrero bigger every day. That’s what the children and the White House are going to do.
This is the first president and the first White House that has — has decided, as J.D. Vance did yesterday, that a shutdown is funny. They’ve decided it’s funny. J.D. Vance thinks the shutdown and his opportunity for jokes and that sombrero stuff is funny. He didn’t explain what’s funny about it.
Prior to the existence of the Trump White House, whenever the disaster of a shutdown would occur, everyone in the White House took the situation very, very seriously. They didn’t have to suppress jokes. They weren’t making jokes about it, no matter who the president was.
And so, the crisis of this week’s publicly flaring madness from the White House is made all the worse by the crisis of “The New York Times” and the Washington press corps taking it all as business as usual. They have internalized Trump madness in their coverage. They have lost their ability to react to it, but their outrage will be fully revived if a Democratic candidate for president, or if a Democratic president ever says a single negative thing about any kind of American voters, ever, anywhere.
The Washington press corps’ outraged mechanism is sleeping tonight, but it will be fully operative again once they have a Democrat to aim it at.
That’s not a partisan statement on my part. It is simply an observable fact. You all saw it. We’ve all seen it. They cannot pretend this isn’t true.
We all saw them scream endlessly at Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden’s press secretary. We all saw them scream directly at Joe Biden in his face when asking him questions. And we all see that they do not dare ever do anything like that in the Trump White House. They can never, ever deny again that they do indeed have a double standard, and the double standard of coverage favors Trump madness. It accepts Trump madness.
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Last Word.
