MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell relished not only the way Vice President Kamala Harris handled Tuesday night’s debate against Donald Trump, but how the ABC News moderators fact-checked the “raging racist” former president to his face in front of millions.
The anchor of The Last Word showed several debate clips in his opening block Wednesday. First, there was the pair’s handshake, which Harris initiated, and therefore “instantaneously establishe[d] domination over him,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell praised Harris’ nonverbal presentation throughout, and how she—unlike Trump–-turned to look at her opponent “the way a human being would.” Trump, on the other hand, went another way.
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“Trump chose two modes at the podium: the angry and bitter 78-year-old man while he was speaking, and the mugshot face while he was listening. He did not once dare to turn and look at the vice president of the United States when she was speaking. Just mugshot face,” O’Donnell said.
“He wasn’t looking at the moderators, either. He wasn’t looking at us through the camera. He was looking at nothing, just lost in the wilderness of his own confusion of what was happening to him, and what was happening to him was that he was being beaten much worse than any losing candidate in any presidential debate in history.”
Trump being fact-checked by ABC News anchor Linsey Davis for falsely claiming that Democrats are “executing babies”—after Harris had admonished him for proudly facilitating the overturning of Roe v. Wade—was a “panicked” moment for him, O’Donnell said.
“Imagine, in that moment, the panicked workings of the mind of that raging racist being corrected on the debate stage last night by two Black women,” O’Donnell said. “The racism that Donald Trump grew up with told him—promised him—that that kind of thing could never happen to him.”
