As is often the case during MSNBC’s primetime line-up, The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell attempted on Tuesday to take an error made by President Trump and turn it into a sign that he's mentally unfit to lead the country.
He began the segment by airing a video of Trump stating he’s not “a normal President” or “a stiff” like previous White House occupants. O'Donnell responded by asking: “How often do you ear a normal person say ‘I think I’m very normal?’ Does that mean he knows he’s not normal?”
The liberal host tried to add fuel to the fire by describing Trump as “a 72-year-old man whose father had Alzheimer’s and died in New York 93 years after he was born in New York.”
He then added that the President keeps a picture of his father -- whose first name was Fred -- “right behind his desk in the Oval Office.”
O’Donnell then played a video of the 45th President discussing his father, whom he claimed was born in “a very wonderful place” in Germany, which is why “I have a great feeling for that country.”
As you might expect, the MSNBC host grimly asked: “What does it mean when you confuse where your father was born with where your grandfather was born?”
Instead of stating that Trump had just made a mistake, O’Donnell noted (click “expand”):
My father was born in Boston. My grandfather was born in Ireland, and I have never once confused that. But I’m not 72 years old, I don’t have Alzheimer’s in my family history and I’m not the President of the United States trying to convince NATO that I’m not just being mean when I ask NATO countries to spend more money on their military....[Trump] repeatedly said that the United States spends much more on defense than we actually do, and that is the kind of Trump falsehood that we probably wouldn’t even mention tonight, but in any other presidency, that would actually be the hot news of the day. The President doesn’t even know how much we spend on defense. That would be big news in any other presidency.
“There are a bunch of important questions, urgent questions about the President today that political analysis cannot answer,” the host added, promising that he would later be having a psychiatrist analyze the President.
As if that wasn’t serious enough, the liberal MSNBC pundit stated that if you saw Trump’s behavior, “you had a right to wonder whether the President likes to exaggerate how much we spend on defense, or actually, cannot learn the real number” or “if there is something wrong with the workings of the President’s mind.”
And on the subject of Trump confusing the word “origins” with “oranges” when discussing how that inquiry began, O'Donnell was left horrified by this. “I have my own struggle with words. You see that here....It’s not that I try to say a very simple word, and I can only get out the first two letters before I change that simple word into a completely different word....repeatedly.”
Okay, sure, Lawrence.
