Lawrence O’Donnell reacted to reports that President Donald Trump was forced to take a secret military plane in July in response to an Iranian assassination threat, with the MS NOW anchor remarking that America’s commander-in-chief “controls nothing.”
“Donald Trump has lost control and he knows he has lost control,” O’Donnell said on Monday night. “Donald Trump has lost control of everything he thought he could control. He lost control of his war in Iran as soon as he started it. He’s lost control of the Republican legislative process in Congress.”
“Something else Donald Trump has lost control of: His choice of airplane, and it’s much worse than we thought,” he added. The “Last Word” host went on to relay the details of a new report from The Washington Post, which claimed that Trump secretly flew out of Turkey after a NATO summit in July on an alternate military aircraft amid assassination threats from Iran.
According to The Post, Trump swapped planes by riding secretly in a catering truck. Not even the journalists and some of the staff aboard Air Force One that night were reportedly aware that the president was not with them on the plane. O’Donnell also noted the grounding of Trump’s Qatari-gifted jet, which was meant to become his new Air Force One before being sidelined in the wake of security concerns.
“Just imagine what a loss of control Donald Trump must have been feeling in Turkey when he was told that he not only could not fly on the Qatari jet that he illegally accepted as a gift from a dictator, but that he could not fly on Air Force One,” O’Donnell mused.
In the second half of his Monday night segment, O’Donnell turned his attention to something else Trump seems to have little control over: the war in Iran.
“We are now at Day 164 of the war that Donald Trump started and cannot control,” he said. “Trump wanted this war to be over in days. Donald Trump’s initial public estimates of how long his war would take were given in days and sometimes, at the most, in weeks. He never said it would take 164 days.”
As talks between the U.S. and Iran remain unproductive, O’Donnell noted recent reports that Iran may be nearing a deal with neighboring Middle East country Oman that would potentially formalize some of Iran’s claims of control over the Strait of Hormuz. O’Donnell pointed to those reports as evidence of yet another failure on Trump’s part.
“On Day 164 of Donald Trump’s war against Iran, Donald Trump has achieved nothing and Iran is now closer to achieving something it has never had before: control of the Strait of Hormuz,” he concluded. “While Donald Trump controls nothing.”
