Lawrence O’Donnell ripped President Trump on Wednesday for failing to address the American public about the now-ongoing government shutdown and Vice President JD Vance for excusing the president’s behavior on social media.
“How many flashes of insanity from a president should we tolerate?” O’Donnell asked. “That sounds like something that deserves a zero tolerance policy, and we have never seen public flashes of insanity from any president other than Donald Trump. We now see them every day.” The “Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” host went on to call out Trump’s recent social media attacks on U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“The president gives every indication that you could possibly ask for that he has lost his mind, and every single elected Republican official in Washington excuses it,” O’Donnell observed. “Most of them run away from it. They don’t even want to talk about it.” The MSNBC host then turned his attention to Vance, who addressed the media in Trump’s place Wednesday and excused the president’s AI-generated videos mocking Jeffries and Schumer as harmless “fun.”
“Of course he thinks it’s okay. James David Vance wants to start publicly acting as president as soon as possible, as he did today when Donald Trump was totally invisible,” O’Donnell remarked. “Perhaps [Trump was] slumped over in exhaustion, too weak from yesterday’s exertion of giving a speech, to slather on his homemade orange makeup and to think of something to say to the American people about why he shut down the government.”
You can watch the full “Last Word” segment yourself in the video below.
O’Donnell noted that Trump himself did not bother to continue publicly blaming the shutdown on Democrats’ federal health care goals. “Donald Trump didn’t even have the energy today to lie again about Democrats trying to provide health insurance for undocumented immigrants. That is a lie,” O’Donnell told MSNBC viewers. “Donald Trump thinks that lie is brilliantly underlined by him tacking mariachi music and sombreros onto videos of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and the vice president thinks it’s funny.”
The “Last Word” anchor shifted his focus back to Vance, slamming the vice president for trying to excuse and explain away Trump’s social media antics. “JD Vance could not explain the joke. Jokes never have to be explained. JD Vance had to explain that one and couldn’t, because it’s not a joke,” O’Donnell explained. “There’s nothing funny about it. The president has lost his mind. That is the clearest explanation for what Donald Trump is doing.”
While Americans’ ability to compromise and come together over shared goals and interests has long been what has kept the country from falling apart, O’Donnell said that the government’s ongoing shutdown is evidence of how much Trump and his administration have hampered citizens’ ability to continue doing so.
“We all know how to do it, and Congress used to know how to do it and Congress used to do it,” O’Donnell concluded. “But Donald Trump doesn’t want to do it. And so the government of the United States of America has shut down.”
