MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Roasts Trump Over ‘Humiliation’ Of Being Corrected Live By Powell: ‘Clown Being Clowned!’

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell roasted President Donald Trump over the “humiliation” of being corrected live on television by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Trump has habitually attacked Powell and constantly pressured him to lower interest rates. He has also recently floated his removal over claims about a lavish renovation of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC.

But as Trump raised the issue while he toured the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC with Powell on Thursday, the president found himself being repeatedly corrected.

On Thursday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, O’Donnell relished the moment and described Trump as a “clown being clowned”:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Donald Trump, in his failed attempt to defer our attention from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, went to the Federal Reserve headquarters, which is being remodeled, and thought he would shame Jerome Powell because the construction project was over budget according to a piece of paper given to Donald Trump by the most incompetent White House staff in history.

A piece paper that took Jerome Powell seconds to read and seconds more to explain to Donald Trump how wrong his piece of paperwork is. It was the perfect lesson. And why Donald Trump normally avoids confronting anyone who he knows is much, much smarter than he is.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So we’re taking a look and it looks like it’s about 3.1 billion, it went up a little bit, or a lot, so the 2.7 is now 3.1 and —

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: I’m not aware of that.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It just came out.

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: I haven’t heard that from anybody in the Fed.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, it just came out.

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: — This came from us.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yes. I don’t know who does that.

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: You’re including the Martin renovation, you just added in a third building, that’s what that is, that is the third building including the Martin building.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah but it’s — it’s a building that’s being built.

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: No, no. It was built five years ago. We finished Martin five years.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Donald Trump claims to be the real estate guy. Jerome Powell doesn’t claim to be the real-estate guy, but Jerome Powell apparently did very well in arithmetic in elementary school.

By the time Jerome Powell was in the third grade, he could have done what you just saw him do to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was adding in the cost of a third building that was built five years ago!

And Jerome Powell handed Donald Trump a kind of humiliation no president before him has ever suffered.

And so that Trump video humiliation will now be seen by millions and millions and millions of viewers just over the next 24 hours. It’s very likely gonna be on Stephen Colbert’s show and other late-night shows. They’ll be running that video. Then it’ll be on YouTube.

And yes, there’s something especially delicious about a clown being clowned like that.

But what’s important about it… Is that that was the very best move Donald Trump thought he had today to try to turn news coverage away from the birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein that bears Donald Trump’s name and what we now know to be several copies of the birthday book.

Watch above via MSNBC’s The Last Word.