Lawrence O’Donnell described Trump as utterly powerless, both in his administration and on a larger global stage, during MS NOW’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday.
The longtime news anchor lit into the president’s latest moves—or non-moves—regarding secure transportation, the Iran war, and his own plunging approval rating. O’Donnell blamed the president’s “ignorance and incompetence” on the “events swirling around him,” he said.
The host focused in on The Washington Post’s revelatory report detailing what it called a “clandestine mission” to fly Trump from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One after an Iranian assassination threat.
The operation occurred after the NATO summit and involved Trump traveling from one plane to the other in a catering truck, the report said.
“Imagine, just imagine tonight 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 he could not fly on Air Force One,” O’Donnell said, adding, “Donald Trump had no control at all of how he traveled away from that NATO summit. No control. In a plane he never wanted to fly in, moving on a catering truck from one plane to another to do that because Donald Trump was not in control of that situation.”
O’Donnell then pivoted to Trump’s apparent cluelessness about the implications of the U.S.’s war with Iran. He criticized the redundancy in Trump’s negotiation tactics, saying the Obama administration’s deal with Iran “to never, ever, ever develop a nuclear weapon” was “working perfectly when Donald Trump, in his first term, decided to withdraw the United States from that agreement.”
“And we are now at day 164 of the war that Donald Trump started and cannot control,” O’Donnell said. “Donald 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.”
O’Donnell called out the imbalance of power over the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit and trade route whose sovereignty has become a major point of conflict and violence in the war.
“On Day 164 of Donald Trump’s war against Iran, Donald Trump has achieved nothing,” O’Donnell said. “And Iran is now closer to achieving something it has never had before: control of the Strait of Hormuz, while Donald Trump controls nothing.”
O’Donnell wasn’t surprised at Trump’s handling of these conflicts. The president, he noted, has a pattern.
“Donald Trump’s reaction to the loss of control is his most reliable reaction to everything: he lies,” he said. “Or, perhaps at this stage of what could be Donald Trump’s neurological decline, he is not lying. He may just be hallucinating.”
