Like other primetime hosts at MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell spends most of the time during his Last Word weeknight program slamming President Trump as guilty of committing treason and therefore deserving immediate impeachment.
Of course, it came as no surprise that he used an interview with The Hollywood Reporter website and magazine to assail the GOP occupant of the White House as “illiterate” and having no ability to handle complexity.
The conversation was led by media and politics reporter Jeremy Barr, who asked O’Donnell about “the President’s unusual obsession with television news.”
The MSNBC anchor replied that Trump has said he “doesn’t read books” and added:
It's a deadly accurate measure of his intelligence level, of his ability to handle complexity, which is to say: zero.
It's an illiterate man's window on the world, television.
“Do you think there's value in bringing Trump supporters on cable news to provide ‘the other side?” Barr asked.
“It has zero value,” the liberal host asserted. “I've never understood the value of putting someone on television to lie, knowing that they're going to lie ahead of time, knowing that that is their deal to lie ahead of time.”
Barr also questioned O’Donnell on whether “things will slow down if a Democrat defeats Trump,” and the liberal host replied that life “will return to normal very quickly.”
The MSNBC anchor then drew a curious parallel between what happened after World War II and the close of Trump’s presidency.
He expressed surprise regarding “how quickly the United States and Europe returned to normal” even though they had “a lot more to get over” than when the GOP President leaves the White House.
The interviewer noted that “Trump has said that if he loses, major media companies will all go out of business because they need him for clicks and ratings.”
Of course, O’Donnell strongly disagreed with that assessment:
Every cable news channel was a very big business success before Donald Trump started lying about Barack Obama's birth certificate.
And they were all making more money than they knew what to do with then and more money than Donald Trump has ever seen in his life.
While Barr then inquired what lessons O’Donnell had learned from the 2016 Trump upset, the liberal host instead responded with his view of the upcoming 2020 election.
“I am approaching the Democratic field with a feeling I've never had before, which is that I don't know anything,” the liberal guest replied. “I do think it's going to be one of the recognized top-tier people: Joe Biden, one of the senators.”
Also, “I think Beto [O'Rourke] has a chance,” he continued. “I think virtually all of them could end up as the vice presidential nominee.”
Of course, Barr noted that “NBC News will be co-hosting the first primary debates on June 26 and 27. Are you bullish on the moderating team your company has put together?”
“With good debaters, the moderators don't matter that much,” O’Donnell replied. “The NBC teams doing these debates will do a superb job. I'm glad they have the first one.”
“One of the challenges of that debate as a candidate is [that] some of them might be lucky to get four minutes of speaking in the whole thing,” he added. “And there is a second place in this contest, and it is called vice president.”
Of course, O’Donnell doesn’t consider the “illiterate” and “obsessed” Republican incumbent as a threat, but then again, he didn’t see that in 2016 either.
