TBT: Trump Just Claimed Lawrence O’Donnell Was ‘Crying’ During Apology to Him in 2015, But the Video Shows a Very Different Story

President Donald Trump Thursday claimed that “crazy” Lawrence O’Donnell was previously forced to apologize to him by NBC, and did so while crying, but the clip shows otherwise.

Crazy Lawrence O’Donnell, who has been calling me wrong from even before I announced my run for the Presidency, even being previously forced by NBC to apologize, which he did while crying, for things he said about me & The Apprentice, was again forced to apologize, this time…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019

….for the most ridiculous claim of all, that Russia, Russia, Russia, or Russian oligarchs, co-signed loan documents for me, a guarantee. Totally false, as is virtually everything else he, and much of the rest of the LameStream Media, has said about me for years. ALL APOLOGIZE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019

Wednesday night MSNBC host O’Donnell issued a somber apology for conveying thinly vetted claims to his viewers that Russian oligarchs had cosigned on Trump’s loans from Deutsche Bank.

In 2015, O’Donnell apologized not so much to Trump as to MSNBC viewers and appeared to almost chuckle at times throughout, as first pointed out by CNN’s Daniel Dale, via video from Archive.org.

O’Donnell had been apologizing for a spat he had with Trump in which he claimed that NBC likely did not pay Trump nearly what he said they had for Trump’s reality show The Apprentice.

The MSNBC host prefaced the apology with detailing all the reasons he liked Trump. “When I was a kid, the first columnist I ever read was The Boston Globe’s George Frazier who said he never wanted to meet politicians because he was afraid he might like them and couldn’t write about them objectively. I understand what he meant,” said O’Donnell.

O’Donnell then went on to present a time when Trump had gone out of his way to shake the host’s hand even after threatening to sue him and when Trump told him he’d done a great job on the show when returning after a car accident.

Trump had challenged O’Donnell to a bet — he asked O’Donnell to bet 100% of his salary if he was wrong about how much Trump made from The Apprentice. O’Donnell turned down the bet and agreed on Twitter with those who pointed out that it doesn’t really matter.

“Then I stupidly jumped in to talk about it again on Morning Joe where I hijacked a few minutes to talk about this thing that I know doesn’t matter,” said O’Donnell.

“Others have expressed doubts about Donald’s claims about money… but no one with harsher words than I have. I’m not proud of that,” O’Donnell continued. He expressed that he had been trying to have fun poking at Trump’s claims about money but he only later realized it didn’t come across as such.

Watch above, via MSNBC/Archive.org