I would blame this on the heat exhaustion I managed to land myself in over the weekend during a family reunion at Bryce Canyon and am only now coming out of, but I actually can’t, because this morning’s epiphany is just the tip of a years-long iceberg.
Recently in the comments of one of the many diaries about the debate and President Biden and the panic going on, I posted a clip from an episode of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, broadcast the night after the debate. Because I was out of town I hadn’t seen the debate; all I had to go on was the multidimensional hair-fire taking place. But something Lawrence said stood out to me, because it wasn’t correct and I knew he knew it wasn’t correct. (2:03 — 3:26 in the video, emphasis added below in bold)
Faithful audiences of this program will know that I have...insisted repeatedly that these so-called debates...do not test anything that is actually part of the daily job of the presidency.
No one ever runs into the Oval Office and says, “Mr. President, you have two minutes to explain your position on (some subject).” Presidents discuss one subject at a time in the Oval Office. They do it in detail for as long as they want or as short as they want. They read briefing papers (if their name is not Trump) about that subject before each of those discussions.
Most presidencies never have an emergency, a run-in-the-room emergency. There is never a moment when someone rushes in, giving the president an immediate emergency problem that the president has to solve.
That did happen to one of those candidates on the stage last night. And when he faced that emergency, his choice was to do absolutely nothing for 187 minutes. He froze for 187 minutes on January 6th while his supporters were attacking the Capital [sic] and trying to overturn the presidential election through violence.
Now, Lawrence knows and the rest of us know that Trump didn’t freeze; he allowed it to happen because he wanted it to happen. So why did Lawrence say it the way he did?
I believe it’s part of a strategy he’s been using for years now.
I’ll admit that Lawrence has mildly annoyed me ever since his show seemed to become nothing more than the “News of Trump Show.” I can’t number the MSNBC surveys I’ve filled out and the tweets I’ve left that say, “For the love of god, can you not start ONE A-block without the words ‘Well Donald Trump...’???” Because I am so sick of hearing about that orange grifter-fascist (I don’t know if he truly believes it or not, but it’s the Grift of the Century, so why not milk it).
But I realized something this morning: as sick as I and all of us are of hearing about Donald Trump, nothing perks up Donald Trump’s ears like his name in the media. He has to go watch, even knowing it’s Lawrence and that Lawrence is going to drag him like no one else can. The legal details, the political details, the outright mockery in a lot of cases—and Lawrence is a master of laughing with his voice without actually laughing. It’s got to goad Trump to no end.
Trump hates Lawrence O’Donnell. I honestly believe that in that fantasy list of executions Trump carries around in what’s left of his brain, Lawrence O’Donnell might just outrank Hillary Clinton. Lawrence was the first journalist to use the word “LIES” when all the others were still milque-toasting about “inaccuracies” and “mistakens.” And he’s continued to use the word LIES every time. Trump made it a point to glare at Lawrence on his way out of the NY courtroom (the false business records case) when Lawrence spent May 2nd in that room (rather than in the overflow room), enough so that Maggie Haberman commented on it in her update of that day’s news.
And to be called a COWARD (“He froze for 187 minutes on January 6th...”) on live air…it’s brilliant. Either Trump froze or he orchestrated it. Either he’s a coward or a traitor. There’s no win.
Lawrence O’Donnell is at the core playing to an audience of one just as surely as Fox “News” does—but with a very different purpose. He’s trolling Trump in real time on nationwide cable television while the rest of us get to watch the floor show and pick up a combined history and law degree on the side. Genius.
For those who’d like to watch it here: