Lawrence O’Donnell further denounced former President Donald Trump’s threats against MSNBC while visiting “Morning Joe” Monday, slamming the Republican politician for believing that spreading lies is what “works for him.”
The “Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” host went on to criticize what he saw as mainstream media’s double standard in reporting such threats made by Trump, hypothesizing that it would be the “leading story in the country” if President Joe Biden said anything remotely similar about Fox News.
On Nov. 28, Trump posted an anti-MSNBC rant to his social media platform Truth Social, saying that the government should “come down hard” on media organizations that are critical of him, specifically stating that MSNBC should “pay” for their reporting.
O’Donnell notably did a segment Wednesday covering the presumed 2024 Republican presidential nominee’s threats to liberal media, but reemphasized his thoughts on the matter Monday, considering major networks like ABC, CBS and NBC, by his estimate, did not cover the threats themselves.
“I did a long piece the other night, Joe, about how the leading Republican presidential candidate came out and said, ‘I want to close down a news network,’ and there was nothing. There was nothing. The three national news broadcasts — NBC, ABC, CBS — did not mention it,” O’Donnell said, pointing to the double standard mainstream media tends to set against President Biden.
“Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine Joe Biden came out and the language he used … [He] says, ‘I am announcing that I am using the power of government to come down hard on Fox,’” O’Donnell continued. “How long would it be that that was the leading story in the country before any other story ever got air? That’s the world we’re living in.”
“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough began the segment by calling out Trump’s seemingly anti-Democratic actions and called on his guest panelists to “talk about Donald Trump and the rising threat he poses to democracy, regardless of what he tries to project onto Joe Biden.”
That’s when O’Donnell chimed in, highlighting that Trump thinks his continued condemnations of journalists and their networks is a topic that could successfully sway voters against him.
“This is what he believes works for him, is to actually just tell these lies so directly,” O’Donnell said. “And it almost seems that the more his lies about Joe Biden mirror what Donald Trump has actually done, the happier he is, when he’s actually just delivering it right back with absolutely no substance to it whatsoever.
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
