MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed on Wednesday that he’s never heard a comment more “indicative of dementia” from a president than one recently made by President Donald Trump.
O’Donnell opened The Last Word with a monologue where he insulted Trump’s cognitive state and questioned whether anyone would know if the president, 79, was suffering from “dementia” as he took issue with Trump floating the idea of appointing himself as Fed chair.
“If Donald Trump gets dementia, how will we know? Donald Trump’s mental decline, which is more and more obvious, started from such a low level of mental processing power that it’s hard to track his decline. It’s from low to lower,” the MSNBC host said. “And then there are days like today when Donald Trump asks himself out loud in public if he is allowed to appoint himself chair of the Federal Reserve.”
At the White House, Trump said, “Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed? I’d do a much better job than these people.” This followed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell move against cutting interest rates. Powell also warned this week that Trump’s tariffs will fuel higher prices.
According to O’Donnell, no president has ever made a comment more “indicative of dementia” than Trump asking aloud if he can appoint himself to the Federal
He said:
It may be tiresome to hear, but we must not grow weary of making the point that no other president was ever capable of saying anything as stupid or as indicative of dementia as that. Am I allowed to appoint myself chair of The Federal Reserve? And we must not grow weary of reminding ourselves what the White House press corps would have done if Joe Biden ever said anything like that and how big the headlines would be in the next day’s print editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post and every newspaper in the country, because if we grow weary of making the point of how singularly stupid and possibly clinically demented Donald Trump’s statements are. Then we will become part of the normalization process of those statements, which most of the American news media has unwittingly participated in, and 14-year-olds in this country will think it’s perfectly normal for a president to say those things.
O’Donnell’s Trump and Biden comparison comes in the wake of the explosive Original Sin by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, which dives deep into Biden’s White House and the alleged efforts taken by officials to keep Biden insulated amid
Tapper has admitted the media, including himself, did not cover Biden’s cognitive state enough leading up to his first debate with Trump, shortly after which he dropped his reelection campaign. Biden’s final interview as president was conducted with O’Donnell in January.
Watch above via MSNBC.