“Well, Donald Trump was humiliated once again today in the Oval Office,” MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell remarked Thursday night as he talked about the president’s recent comments about aid to Ukraine as well as who actually pays for tariffs.
The “Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” host dedicated 17 minutes of his latest broadcast to President Trump‘s meetings this week with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. O’Donnell said Trump walked into the “same humiliation trap” in both meetings by claiming that America has not only contributed more aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia than Europe but also that both Britain and France’s contributions are loans that will be paid back, whereas America’s have been donations. Trump’s remarks prompted interruptions from both Macron and Starmer.
“Donald Trump made history on Monday by being the first President of the United States to lie publicly about America’s oldest ally, France, with the President of France sitting right beside him,” O’Donnell told viewers. “Because Donald Trump is not now and never has been educable, three days later [he] walked into exactly the same humiliation trap in the Oval Office today with the British Prime Minister sitting beside him.”
After playing a clip of Starmer refuting Trump’s claim that Britain is getting its money back from Ukraine, O’Donnell continued, “Once again, Donald Trump told the deranged lie that the aid supplied to Ukraine by the British will have to be paid back by Ukraine, and that is the only thing Donald Trump said today that forced the British Prime Minister to actually interrupt him.”
You can watch the full clip below:
O’Donnell shifted his focus away from Trump’s Ukraine remarks to lambast the president’s non-response to a question during his press conference with Starmer about how American tariffs are eventually paid by American consumers. “The sad truth is we don’t actually know if Donald Trump is so deeply stupid that he believes what he is saying,” O’Donnell lamented. “I’ll leave it to you to decide which would be better: a president stupid enough to think that foreign countries pay American tariffs or a president who knows the truth but lies about it.”
In response to a clip of Trump saying that his tariffs will stop America from continuing to be a “laughingstock all over the world,” O’Donnell declared, “Donald Trump is a laughingstock all over the world for claiming that tariffs he imposes are paid by foreign countries instead of American consumers.”
“If Donald Trump puts a tariff of 50% on a Samsung TV coming into this country, then you will pay 50% more for that TV. Tariffs are sales taxes. That’s all they are, and the buyer pays the sales tax,” he added. “The man who is a laughingstock all over the world is the only head of state in history anywhere in the world who believes he has the power to tax other countries.”
You can watch the full “Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” segment in the video above.
