MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell criticized Donald Trump’s “utterly insane” and “deeply perverse” decision to refer to himself as a “king” Wednesday after he claimed to have singlehandedly ended New York City’s congestion pricing scheme.
The anchor of The Last Word opened the night’s broadcast by showing what the White House’s official account on X had posted: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
O’Donnell explained, “I’m sparing you what was attached underneath those utterly insane words. It was a deeply perverse rendition of Donald Trump on what was designed to appear to be a fake TIME magazine cover with him wearing a gold crown that he imagines kings wear every day.”
That image was posted after the Trump administration said it would “terminate” the congestion pricing program, which went into effect last month after having been approved at the local, state, and federal level. The program was designed to ease the city’s chronic traffic while raising money to improve New York’s mass transit system.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has already gone to federal court to save the program, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber announced.
O’Donnell then went after Republicans for their relative silence on Trump’s post, which was odd, he said, given how they “will constantly tell you that government is best when left to the state and local officials, especially on health-care issues, or education, for example.”
“None of those Republicans objected today about Donald Trump interfering in the most local possible issue: traffic jams.”
O’Donnell then described a recent positive experience he had with congestive pricing in effect.
“A miracle was upon us: I got into a car in lower Manhattan and speeded up to Midtown on the FDR Drive at the highway speeds that road was designed to allow for, for the first time in my life,” he said. “The ride that normally would take at least 45 minutes took 20.”
Additionally, O’Donnell said a woman in Midtown who had taken a bus from Staten Island told him that her commute, which used to be between 90 minutes and two hours, was now 45 minutes.
Within a few days of the implementation of congestion pricing, O’Donnell said, “most people in New York politics breathed a huge sigh of relief, realizing that not only had the plan worked exactly as intended—even better than intended by breaking gridlock—but it could end up being the most popular thing they’ve ever done.”
“President Biden signed off on the federal government’s OK for New York City’s congestion pricing plan last year,” O’Donnell recalled.
“And today at 2:31 P.M., Donald Trump announced that ‘the king’ was ending it all—or trying to end it... the only new thing ever devised to reduce traffic in New York City in Donald Trump’s entire 78 years of life.”
