Lawrence O’Donnell Shreds Jeff Flake for Being Six Years Late on Trump, GOP Criticisms

For the last few days, Republican Senator Jeff Flake has done numerous TV interviews while promoting his new book Conscience of a Conservative. The Arizona politician has expressed regret about the GOP’s politicking over the last few years, and he criticiz ed President Trump for reflecting some of the most odious parts of the party’s behavior.

As for Lawrence O’Donnell, Flake’s contrition comes six years too late.

The MSNBC host pointed out how Flake chose not to say anything negative about Trump until the mogul took heat in 2016 over his years of promoting the birther conspiracy theory against Barack Obama. O’Donnell also observed how Flake’s criticisms were somewhat half-hearted since the senator said Trump was an “unapologetic birther” who was willing to pander to Republicans who believed the unfounded rumor.

“If Republicans as a party had stood up against Donald Trump’s lies about President Obama’s birth six years ago, they could have stopped Trumpism in its tracks, but they didn’t, and Jeff Flake didn’t,” O’Donnell said bluntly.

O’Donnell continued to hammer Flake for saying in a recent interview that he thought he did enough to stop the birther movement. Some criticism was also thrown towards the media for not calling Trump an “outright pathological liar” on this and other topics.

“It would have been much more important for Jeff Flake to say something that night, on Debate Night, than it was yesterday now that Donald Trump is the most unpopular first-year president in the history of polling. It takes far less political courage to say that now, but this is not the ‘where were you when we needed you’ segment, it is the ‘better late than never’ segment. So this is one of those moments where graciousness should overrule other feelings. So it’s time to say thank you, Jeff Flake, because ‘better late than never.’ But we are never going to count Jeff Flake as part of America’s early warning system that will try to save us from the worst poisons in our political system.”

Watch above, via MSNBC

[Image via screengrab]

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