MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell laid into news outlets on his show Thursday night, comparing their collective failure to call out Donald Trump’s falsehoods to 2016.
“It was 2016 all over again, today,” he told his viewers. “Donald Trump spoke at his home in Florida for over an hour and all the major cable news networks, including this one, carried it live. Just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence that Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie.”
O’Donnell acknowledged that some networks attempted to fact-check the MAGA leader, but only after he finished his speech.
“That of course is way too late and utterly useless,” he said. “No network tried to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told.”
And even then they could (and arguably should) have pushed back way harder. Even in the NABJ interview he got to bulldoze the hosts with “nasty woman” rants and spew his usual tirade of bullshit lies unchallenged.
The right has its persecution complex narrative. Better to not play into that and just get him unlimited rope to hang himself with. Which he promptly did and has continued to do. Republicans have been trying to crack the Black vote for decades and Trump lost any hope of that this cycle.