When President Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk to hold a joint press conference with him from the Oval Office on Tuesday, world leaders, political pundits and the American people took notice.
Just ask Lawrence O’Donnell, who spent a large portion of Tuesday evening’s “Last Word” eviscerating the pair for documenting what he called “the most powerless image of a President of the United States ever created by a camera.”
“King Abdullah of Jordan had to sit in the Oval Office and listen to the absurdity of Donald Trump saying that he would take Gaza,” the MSNBC host recapped. “King Abdullah knows that Donald Trump will not take Gaza. King Abdullah knows that everything Donald Trump said today about Gaza will not happen. Donald Trump will not take Gaza, he will not take Canada, he will not take Greenland and he will not take Panama.”
O’Donnell continued, “That is the nonsense that Donald Trump throws out there to try to distract the news media from what he really is doing, which includes literally taking food away from starving babies, from starving children, starving grandparents.”
“The person who is helping him do that stood over Donald Trump in the White House today, thereby delivering a picture of presidential subservience, the likes of which we have never seen; the most powerless image of a President of the United States ever created by a camera,” he said. “There it is in that shot, Elon Musk is doing everything he possibly can to tell the world, without saying a word, that Donald Trump is not the boss of me.”
“Donald Trump is the boss of the other adults in that shot — Stephen Miller and Will Scharf — and that’s why they are following Donald Trump’s lead on the dress code for the Oval Office, which is the same dress code that has existed for every previous president,” O’Donnell added. “Elon Musk owns suits and ties, we’ve seen him wearing them, but today he decided to do the billionaire thing.”
On Wednesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin similarly scolded the DOGE pair over their blatant authoritarian tendencies, especially after the AP was barred from covering the White House event due to their newsroom’s decision to refrain from referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” as ordered.
“The wrecking ball of right-wing authoritarianism is swinging right through Congress and coming directly at the freedoms of the press and the people,” the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee said, in part. “The self-appointed CEO of this operation is the unelected bureaucrat and aspiring techno-dictator, Elon Musk.”
Watch the entire “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” segment, above.
