Lawrence O’Donnell likened President Donald Trump’s loosening grip on Congress to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The MS NOW host began Thursday’s episode of “The Last Word” by highlighting that in the span of a week, Trump has seemingly lost his powerful influence on the Republican members of Congress.
“We saw the first real crack in the Trump wall in the Congress,” O’Donnell said while discussing the bill to release the Epstein files, one that was supported on both sides of the aisle, both in the House and the Senate. “The Trump wall that forbids Republicans from ever voting with Democrats on anything. Never mind something that’s personally important to Donald Trump, which is to continue to hide the details of his friendship with the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who said he was Donald Trump’s closest friend for 10 years.”
He continued: “That was inconceivable just days before. It seemed impossible to imagine that Donald Trump, when he really needed a Republican member of the House to do what he wanted, that he wouldn’t be able to convince that Republican.”
O’Donnell charted the shifting tides of Republican support after Trump’s recent controversial acts. He noted that Trump is now the “first president of the United States to call for members of Congress to be put to death,” that the Epstein files will not go away for him and that he was president during the country’s longest government shutdown in history. This avalanche of controversies led to what O’Donnell thinks will be his political downfall.
“It’s impossible to see the weakness of a dictatorship until defiance exposes that weakness,” he added before comparing the moment to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
“The collapse of the Trump dictatorship in the Congress, the collapse of the Trump wall in the House of Representatives and the Trump wall down the center aisle of the United States Senate, the Trump wall that prevented Republicans from ever voting with Democrats,” O’Donnell said. “The collapse of that wall happened as dramatically and quickly as the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”
Watch the clip below.
O’Donnell was referencing the Soviet Union-controlled East German government building the Berlin Wall mainly as an attempt to stop a mass exodus of its citizens to the West. As the Soviet Union’s new policies began to weaken its control over the zone, the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989 after an East German official mistakenly announced new travel regulations, which led to crowds demanding they be allowed to pass through.
“After 29 years of people being shot in the back trying to climb over that wall to escape East Berlin, murdered by a Soviet-controlled dictatorship, suddenly, it was all over,” O’Donnell said.
“No government tore that wall down, no politician tore down that wall, the people tore down that wall,” O’Donnell said. “Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell’s victims, almost all of whom are now survivors, tore down the Trump wall in the House and in the Senate, and we watched them do it. And a week before the unanimous vote against Donald Trump, no one saw it coming. Just like no one saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall coming a week before it fell.”
You can watch the full “The Last Word” segment in the video above.
