President Donald Trump’s Thursday night address wasn’t met with much noise from the liberal media, mostly because a lot of them chose to ignore or downplay it, but not over at MS NOW. On that failing network, Lawrence O’Donnell of The Last Word has never been good at subtlety, especially not when he gets a chance to bash Trump. He spent the entirety of his Thursday show whining about the orange fascist dictator, using the same kind of dramatic, aggressive rhetoric that he spews every evening, such as describing Trump’s “deeply sick” speech as “political pornography.”
“So, he started off in a typically perverse, Trumpian way, with a typically deeply sick Trump statement,” O’Donnell began, using the phrase 'deeply sick’ for the first time, but nowhere close to the last:
That's the sentence that was put in the teleprompter for him by the deeply sick people who work in the White House. . . It is so deeply sick. Every single beat of this speech is deeply, deeply sick. A deeply sick delivery by a deeply sick person.
Seems like the O’Donnell bot glitched there. Maybe MS NOW should update its software.
I wish Trump would come out as trans so the Dems would be forced to acknowledge him as the first woman president
Source: @MSNOWNews @TheLastWord pic.twitter.com/P7zTzCkfb1— Cici Marie (@Cici_Marie_1776) July 17, 2026
O’Donnell also ragged on Trump for saying that, before he was President, “We had transgender for everybody.”
While that phrase may not have been grammatically perfect, it still made more sense than how O’Donnell chose to interpret it:
So I guess that was, what? Donald Trump's way of coming out as transgender? Because "everybody" means the guy who's saying it. . . That was right at the beginning of his speech, this obsession that he has with transgender issues and transgender people, and suddenly all 300 million people in America were suddenly, in this demented man's hallucination, transgender, and then what? He got us all back to whatever gender he thinks we were before he got to be President?
First of all, Trump should come out as transgender and force the Democrats to laud him as the first woman president. But, unfortunately for the memes, that wasn’t what he was doing. And O’Donnell can’t pretend to not know what Trump was talking about there. After all, zero of Trump’s White House Easter celebrations have involved topless transgender activists. He restored some sanity to America in that way.
O’Donnell wasn’t wrong when he said Trump’s speech was all about pushing the SAVE America Act, which it was. But he overreacted to the extreme, even for MS NOW:
It was an utterly ridiculous thing from start to finish. . . after Mitch McConnell issued a proof of life photograph earlier this week, Donald Trump delivered a proof of dementia video tonight, 25 minutes of it. . . Because Donald Trump's pathological lying and screaming outright insanity on this subject year in and year out has become so easily predictable.
If O’Donnell defined dementia as predictability, then he’s the next Joe Biden. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of watching The Last Word, then you know how predictable O’Donnell’s monologues are. They blend together so much that the only way you can differentiate them is by seeing if the quote on the backdrop changed.
But O’Donnell saved the craziest smear for last, saying that Trump “defiled the White House once again tonight with a 25-minute demented exhibition of political pornography,” just to push the SAVE Act.
Trump addressing the nation with important information is "political pornography"?
Old Larry O'Donnell really is demented.
Pass the SAVE America Act. pic.twitter.com/epw5bGKXbu— Cici Marie (@Cici_Marie_1776) July 17, 2026
Political pornography? It’s rich that O’Donnell called Trump demented, because he seems to have forgotten what Bill Clinton got up to in that Oval Office.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read:
MS NOW's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
7/16/26
10:02:42 p.m. Eastern(...)
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: So, he started off in a typically perverse, Trumpian way, with a typically deeply sick Trump statement. He actually said the words, and he was reading this from a teleprompter, "We had transgender for everybody." So I guess that was, what? Donald Trump's way of coming out as transgender? Because "everybody" means the guy who's saying it.
But that's the sentence that was put in the teleprompter for him by the deeply sick people who work in the White House, who pump that stuff into his teleprompter. He was talking about the state of the world, as he found it when he became president. And he said, "We had transgender for everybody."
That was right at the beginning of his speech. This obsession that he has with transgender issues and transgender people, and suddenly all 300 million people in America were suddenly, in this demented man's hallucination, transgender, and then what? He got us all back to whatever gender he thinks we were before he got to be president?
It is so deeply sick. Every single beat of this speech is deeply, deeply sick. A deeply sick delivery by a deeply sick person. He said this lie, that everyone knows is a lie, written for him in the teleprompter. It wasn't an ad lib. He said, "Now we pay the lowest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world." He put that lie, had that lie written into his teleprompter, and that's how he began his speech.
And it began as what seemed like a State of the Union address halfway through the year, just a State of the Union address. “These are all the wonderful things I've done with this presidency,” including “We won in Venezuela” and “We are winning big in Iran.'
That was there. That was right there in the beginning of his presentation tonight, which was really, as I told Jen, about simply getting to the point where he could make his pitch for this bill that is never going to pass the United States Senate. And Republican senators have said they will never pass the bill.
And that's what he was out there doing tonight, talking repeatedly about what he called cheating and interference in our elections. And there is no American who has tried to cheat and interfere in our election in a bigger way than Donald Trump himself, who was indicted for it.
(...)
10:06:09 p.m.
And it all came down to this moment of just trying to get to pass this bill of his that he wants to pass. And that's really what it was all about. It was an utterly ridiculous thing from start to finish.
The networks who refused to cover it did exactly the right thing. And of course, they got their license, their broadcast licenses threatened tonight by Donald Trump for doing exactly the right thing in refusing to air his stream of madness.
And so here we are after Mitch McConnell issued a proof of life photograph earlier this week, Donald Trump delivered a proof of dementia video tonight, 25 minutes of it. Election dementia anyway, at minimum, election dementia.
Because Donald Trump's pathological lying and screaming outright insanity on this subject year in and year out has become so easily predictable.
(...)
10:10:36 p.m.
And tonight, Donald Trump tried to go back to his big lie, his favorite lie, to climb out of the dark hole that he is in, in the polls. And so he defiled the White House once again tonight with a 25-minute demented exhibition of political pornography, just to say this:
[Cut to video]DONALD TRUMP: Congress must pass the SAVE America Act.
