Lawrence O'Donnell Says Trump Is Unworthy of Being President After Memorial Day Message
MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell took a scorched-earth approach Monday night to discussing President Donald Trump's inflammatory Memorial Day message on his Truth Social account.
In his post, Trump called former President Joe Biden and so-called 'U.S.A. hating judges' throughout the country 'scum' for their border and immigration stances, writing, 'Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.'
Near the end of his post, Trump wrote, 'Hopefully, the United States Supreme Court, and other good and compassionate judges throughout the land, will save us from the decisions of the monsters who want our country to go to Hell.'
'Today, Donald Trump proved once again why he is unworthy to be President of the United States by posting on Memorial Day this poison on social media,' O'Donnell said in response. The 'Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell' host went on to note, 'Think back to Richard Nixon, who was literally driven out of the presidency by the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruling against him. Richard Nixon never once dreamed of using language like that.'
You can listen to the full 'Last Word' segment yourself below.
O'Donnell was eventually joined by Norm Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who similarly slammed Trump's Memorial Day post. 'It's what a narcissistic sociopath would do,' Ornstein bluntly stated. He additionally criticized Trump's Saturday commencement address at West Point, calling it 'unhinged.'
'[He] wore his campaign hat and then left before doing what every other president has done when they've given that address, which is to shake the hands of the people who are graduating from West Point,' Ornstein explained. 'He said, 'I have to deal with China and Russia,' and then went off to play golf.'
'The contempt that the Commander-in-Chief we now have has for our fallen heroes and for emerging military leaders is sickening,' the political scientist concluded. O'Donnell, for his part, once again questioned Trump's mental capacity, calling it 'completely inadequate for the presidency on any level, be it intelligence or knowledge or emotional stability or even appreciation of very fundamental things about what it means to be American.'
'That is relentlessly on display non-stop,' O'Donnell insisted. 'Some people want to just keep the focus on Joe Biden and what condition was he in in the final year of his presidency, when Joe Biden never, ever, ever said anything like what Donald Trump just said.'
The post Lawrence O'Donnell Says Trump Is Unworthy of Being President After Memorial Day Message appeared first on TheWrap.
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When you look below the hood, it's primarily about the interests of people who can buy their way into Trump's golf clubs and private pay-for-play dinners—and, especially, about the enrichment of Trump and his family. On the phony populism side, Democrats in the House did a generally good job of highlighting the costs of provisions in the bill that hurt so many of Trump's voters, particularly the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance, or SNAP. Senate Democrats have already ramped up similar efforts as that body's Republican leaders prepare to grapple with the steaming pile of incongruities the House has sent their way. You can tell that Republicans know how unpopular the Medicaid cuts in the bill are because they delayed their effectiveness date to minimize their electoral effect, repeatedly denied they are cutting Medicaid—and don't want to talk at all about how slashing subsidies within the Affordable Care Act would take health coverage away from millions more Americans. They are hiding the Medicaid cuts behind 'work requirements' that are really bureaucratic paperwork requirements that would make it much harder for people with every right to coverage to access it. They would make it more difficult for others to maintain continuous coverage. And if these rules were not about 'cutting' Medicaid, the GOP couldn't claim to be 'cutting' roughly $700 billion in Medicaid spending. But the GOP thinks it has a winner in its work argument. It's a tired but tested replay of a very old (and, yes, offensive) trope about alleged grifters among supposedly 'lazy' poor people. House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a remarkable version of this defense of the 'work' provisions: He said they were aimed at 'the young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.' If ever there was a quote that should go viral, this is it. Young men, after all, shifted toward the Republicans in 2024. They should know what the party many of them voted for thinks of them. More important, progressives need to take the work argument on directly, not only by showing that the work provisions aren't really about work but also by offering amendments replacing the Medicaid cuts with provisions that actually would expand the availability of well-paying opportunities for greater self-sufficiency. Restoring the clean energy tax credits are important not only to battling climate change; they're also about preserving and creating well-paying jobs. A package of proposals on affordable housing, job training, and access to community colleges, particularly in economically depressed areas, would make a nice contrast to those who deny that government has the capacity to improve lives. What the Financial Times' economics columnist Martin Wolf nicely termed 'pluto-populism' when the GOP passed the 2017 tax cuts that this bill extends is alive and well. That populist rhetoric is being married to plutocratic policies is still not recognized widely enough. This is certainly a commentary on the rightward tilt of the media system the editor of this magazine has called out. But it also reflects a failure of Democrats to take the argument to the heart of Trump's base. It's political common sense that parties focus most of their energy on swing states and swing districts. Yet there will be no breaking the 50-50 deadlock in our politics without a concerted effort to change the minds of voters who have drifted to Trump out of frustration with their own economic circumstances and the condition of their regions. The fight over Medicaid and SNAP cuts directly implicates these voters and these places. And these voters pay more attention to these issues than either the Republicans who take them for granted or Democrats who have given up on them believe. When Andy Beshear won his first race for governor of Kentucky in 2019, he not only mobilized Democrats in urban areas; he also flipped many rural counties and cut the Republicans' margins in others. Typical was Carter County in eastern Kentucky. The county went for Beshear even though it had backed his GOP opponent and then-incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin four years earlier and gave Trump 73.8 percent of its ballots in 2016. Breathitt County in Appalachia also flipped, having gone for Bevin and voted 69.6 percent for Trump. Fred Cowan, a former Kentucky attorney general and a shrewd student of his state's politics, told me then that these voters understood where their interests lay. 'In a lot of these counties, the school systems or the hospitals—or both—are the biggest employers,' he said 'The Medicaid expansion helped a lot of people over there.' Sure, it's easier for Democrats like Beshear with strong local profiles to make their case. But the national party needs to learn from these politicians that giving up on whole swaths of voters is both an electoral and moral mistake. The emptiness of Republican populism speaks to the larger problem of mistaking Trump's ability to create a somewhat new electoral coalition with intellectual and policy innovation. Some conservative commentators are honest enough to admit how the BBB demonstrates that the 'old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas are still dominant,' as Ross Douthat observed in The New York Times. But even Douthat wants to cast the bill as an exception to a bolder transformation the president has engineered, particularly around immigration and a 'Trumpian culture war.' The problem here is that none of this is new, either. The GOP was moving right on immigration well before Trump—when, for example, it killed George W. Bush's immigration bill in 2007 as right-wing media cheered it on. The culture war and the battle against universities are old hat too. The real innovator here was the late Irving Kristol, whose columns in the 1970s introduced Wall Street Journal readers to the dangers posed to business interests by 'the new class' of Hollywood, media, and university types, along with activist lawyers. True, Trump is taking this fight to extreme places Kristol would never have gone. But, again, there's no new thinking here. And the attack on trans rights is just the latest front in the LGBTQ+ debates, now that the right has had to abandon its opposition to same-sex marriage because Americans have come to support it overwhelmingly. Even the contradictions aren't new. Since the Reagan years, Republicans have always talked about the dangers of deficits when Democrats were in power but cast those worries aside when they had the power to cut taxes. 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter' is the canonical Dick Cheney quote from 2002 when he was pushing for more tax cuts in W.'s administration. The exception proves the rule: George H.W. Bush made a deal with Democrats in 1991 that included tax increases because he really did care about deficits—and conservatives never forgave him for it. In an odd way, you have to admire Cheney's candor: At least he admitted what he was doing. The Freedom Caucus members have the gall to yell at the top of their lungs about how they care so very much about the debt—and then vote in overwhelming numbers to pile on billions more. As the debate over the BBB moves to the Senate, the immediate imperative is to expose the damage the bill does to millions of Trump's voters to benefit his Mar-a-Lago and crypto-wealthy friends. But it's also an occasion to shatter the illusion that Trump is some sort of brilliant policy innovator. Extremism and authoritarianism are not new ideas, and his legislative program would be familiar to Calvin Coolidge.
