Lawrence O'Donnell Spots 'Profoundly Ignorant' Way Trump Made History After D.C. Plane Crash
MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday knocked President Donald Trump's 'completely indiscriminate' act of throwing around accusations at a press briefing tied to the deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C.
'It is the first time in history that a president in the United States has assigned blame for an aviation accident on his own, immediately, based entirely on his own profoundly, ignorant, prejudiced guess,' said O'Donnell of Trump, who blamed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts for the midair collision.
O'Donnell stacked Trump's move up against Democrats who didn't blame Ronald Reagan for Air Florida Flight 90 crashing into a D.C. bridge and falling into an icy Potomac River below in 1982. The crash left 78 people dead.
The crash occurred just months after the then-president made what the MSNBC host called 'the single stupidest, tough guy move' on domestic policy in the '80s when he fired thousands of air traffic controllers amid a labor dispute.
O'Donnell then went after Trump for thinking he knew the 'answers' to Wednesday's crash despite an investigation just getting underway.
'Every previous president in reacting to such events, such tragedies, has always begun with sympathy including the only president who could have been blamed for an accidental plane crash and wasn't,' he declared before playing a 1982 clip of Reagan remarking on Lenny Skutnik, a bystander to the Air Florida crash.
Skutnik, a Congressional Budget Office employee at the time of the crash, dived into the Potomac River and pulled Priscilla Tirado out of the Potomac River.
Reagan would later invite Skutnik to his State of the Union address less than two weeks later.
'Lenny Skutnik was the worst thing you can be in Donald Trump's Washington,' said O'Donnell of the federal worker who became 'an American hero' and served the government for decades before his retirement in 2010.
O'Donnell turned to a 1982 article published seven months after the crash in The New York Times where Skutnik was asked if he'd do the rescue again.
'I separate it into two parts,' Skutnik told the Times. 'The rescue, I'd do again in a minute. But all the stuff that came after, the fame and all that, I could do without. If it ever happened again, I wish the cameras weren't there. The whole thing has been kind of blown out of proportion.'
O'Donnell weighed in on Skutnik's quote, 'There's nothing about Lenny Skutnik — not his humility, not his heroism, nothing about him that Donald Trump could ever understand.'
Marco Rubio Reveals Just How Serious Trump Is About Buying Greenland
Ex-Prosecutor Thinks Trump Is Accidentally Creating The Very Thing He Fears
'Irony Is Dead': Lara Trump Slammed After Clueless Complaint About 'Competence'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
25 minutes ago
- Washington Post
‘Come and get me': Gavin Newsom has entered the meme war
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has found himself in the center of the internet's spotlight after squaring off with President Donald Trump on social media over the deployment of military troops to counter protesters in Los Angeles. While police deployed tear gas and shot at protesters in Los Angeles with rubber bullets on Monday, Newsom shared a screenshot on TikTok of a Washington Post headline reporting that California would sue Trump over the National Guard's presence, paired with a trending sound sampled from the movie 'Mean Girls. ' The video was captioned 'We will not stand while Donald Trump illegally federalizes the National Guard' and was liked more than 255,000 times.
Associated Press
26 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Judge tosses lawsuit over Trump's firing of US African Development Foundation board members
A federal judge has tossed out a lawsuit over President Donald Trump's dismantling of a U.S. federal agency that invests in African small businesses. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., dismissed the case on Tuesday, finding that Trump was acting within his legal authority when he fired the U.S. African Development Foundation's board members in February. In March, the same judge ruled that the administration's removal of most grant money and staff from the congressionally created agency was also legal, as long as the agency was maintained at the minimum level required by law. USADF was created as an independent agency in 1980, and its board members must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 2023, Congress allocated $46 million to the agency to invest in small agricultural and energy infrastructure projects and other economic development initiatives in 22 African countries. On Feb. 19, Trump issued an executive order that said USADF, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Inter-American Foundation and the Presidio Trust should be scaled back to the minimum presence required by law. At the time, USADF had five of its seven board seats filled. A few days later, an administration official told Ward Brehm that he was fired, and emails were sent to the other board members notifying them that they had also been terminated. Those emails were never received, however, because they were sent to the wrong email addresses. The four board members, believing they still held their posts because they had not been given notice, met in March and passed a resolution appointing Brehm as the president of the board. But Trump had already appointed Pete Marocco as the new chairman of what the administration believed to now be a board of one. Since then, both men have claimed to be the president of the agency, and Brehm filed the lawsuit March 6. Leon said that even though they didn't receive the emails, the four board members were effectively terminated in February, and so they didn't have the authority to appoint Brehm to lead the board. An attorney for Brehm did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Another lawsuit over the dismantling of the agency is still pending before the same judge. In that case, two USADF staffers and a consulting firm based in Zambia that works closely with USADF contend that the Trump administration's efforts to deeply scale back the agency wrongly usurps Congress' powers. They also say Marocco was unlawfully appointed to the board, in part because he was never confirmed by the Senate as required. Leon's ruling in Brehm's case did not address whether the Trump administration had the power to install Marocco as board chair on a temporary basis.
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Acting NJ U.S. Attorney Alina Habba says Rep. LaMonica McIver indicted
A grand jury indicted U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver on charges related to an incident at Delaney Hall in Newark last month, according to a social media post made by acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba. McIver was at Delaney Hall with U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman and U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez to "inspect the treatment of ICE detainees at Delaney Hall." All three are Democrats. The congresswoman said in a statement the 'facts of this case will prove I was simply doing my job and will expose these proceedings for what they are: a brazen attempt at political intimidation. 'This indictment is no more justified than the original charges, and is an effort by Trump's administration to dodge accountability for the chaos ICE caused and scare me out of doing the work I was elected to do,' McIver said. 'But it won't work — I will not be intimidated. The facts are on our side, I will be entering a plea of not guilty, I'm grateful for the support of my community, and I look forward to my day in court.' Habba said the federal grand jury 'returned a three-count indictment' against McIver for 'forcibly impeding and interfering with federal law enforcement officers.' 'It is my constitutional obligation as the chief federal law enforcement officer for New Jersey to ensure that our federal partners are protected when executing their duties,' she said. 'While people are free to express their views for or against particular policies, they must not do so in a manner that endangers law enforcement and the communities those officers serve.' The three counts have a maximum penalty of eight years for count one, an additional maximum penalty of eight years for count two and a maximum penalty of one year for count three. Earlier: NJ Rep. LaMonica McIver makes court appearance for assault charges in Newark ICE incident McIver said in a statement on May 19 she and her colleagues were "fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short." "Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka," she said. "The charges against me are purely political -- they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight." Newark Mayor Ras Baraka had been arrested at Delaney Hall for trespassing but the charges have since been dropped. He is suing Habba for 'false arrest and malicious prosecution.' McIver's lawyer, Paul Fishman, served as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey during the Obama administration. He said in May the "decision to charge Congresswoman McIver is spectacularly inappropriate." "She went to Delaney Hall to do her job. As a member of Congress, she has the right and responsibility to see how ICE is treating detainees," Fishman said. "Rather than facilitating that inspection, ICE agents chose to escalate what should have been a peaceful situation into chaos. This prosecution is an attempt to shift the blame for ICE's behavior to Congresswoman McIver. In the courtroom, facts — not headlines — will matter." Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@ This article originally appeared on NJ U.S. Attorney Alina Habba: Rep. LaMonica McIver indicted
