MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell took a subtle shot at Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) while describing his experience Monday attending Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial, wryly commenting that the former president’s ally was “taking it all in as best he can, whatever sense he can make of it.”
Monday’s proceedings saw Tuberville and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) follow in the footsteps of Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by making themselves seen at the first criminal trial of a former president. O’Donnell, outside the courtroom during a midafternoon break, recalled the lawmakers’ time there.
The pair sat a few rows in front of him, O’Donnell said, in the “vice presidential nominee audition bench” behind the “Eric Trump bench.”
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“As soon as there was the first recess of the morning, the senators disappeared, and that row became completely empty once again,” the anchor of The Last Word said.
The senators went on to do Trump’s bidding during that break. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, Vance questioned former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s credibility as a witness and criticized Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, while Tuberville questioned the citizenship of members of the jury, saying there were “supposedly American citizens in that courtroom.”
On MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell contrasted the political futures of Tuberville—who last year gave a muddled response when asked if white nationalists are racist—and Vance, who has transitioned from a Trump skeptic—having once called him “cultural heroin”—to a full-throated supporter.
“Senator Tuberville, who has been ridiculed for his lack of knowledge through his tenure especially on key issues such as defense and holding up all of those Pentagon appointments—he has been ridiculed, but J.D. Vance is a serious contender, maybe considered top of the list,” she said, referring to Trump’s potential running mates.
O’Donnell then described Vance as being “on his phone the entire time.” Not so with his colleague.
“Tuberville, to his credit, [looking] straight ahead, listening, taking it all in as best he can, whatever sense he can make of it,” he said. “But J.D. Vance—there was really no reason for him to come if he wasn’t going to take in anything that was happening.”
After anchor Katy Tur pointed out that Vance made several social media posts while in court, like how even he—being just half Trump’s age—was feeling tired after having only been seated for less than a half-hour, O’Donnell summed up one of Vance’s duties as “sleep defense.”
“There you go. So they’re there to…help with the sleep defense. Okay, I guess that’s where the vice presidential auditioning begins: ‘Can you come in the courtroom and please help with the sleep defense?’”
Trump garnered headlines for nodding off on the very first day of his trial, leading to widespread mockery.
That, O’Donnell claimed, spurred Trump to change his behavior to make what happened seem less embarrassing.
The indicted former president’s activities in court amount to “the most absurd defendant behavior I’ve ever seen,” O’Donnell said.
“First of all, there is the eye closing, which he now does about ten minutes into the proceeding, and I think he’s doing that to try to prove to us that he’s actually not sleeping because it’s only 9:40 a.m.,” he said. “But the eyes are closed for extended periods of time, the head starts to tilt.”
At other times on Monday, O’Donnell went on, it seemed as if Trump was feeding his obsession with crowd sizes.
“I actually saw him looking at photographs—and I could see over his shoulder—of what appeared to be crowds, possibly photographs of his rally this weekend,” he said.
Trump, who couldn’t even make it 24 hours into his first term as president before harping about photographs of his inauguration crowd, held a rally Saturday in New Jersey, where he baselessly claimed that Bruce Springsteen couldn’t fill as many seats.
