President Trump’s droning State of the Union reeked of “raging dementia,” according to TV host Lawrence O’Donnell, who also savaged Republicans for applauding it.
Analyzing the record-breaking address on MS NOW’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday evening, O’Donnell joked that Trump’s lofty ambition of replacing income tax with revenue from his sweeping global tariff scheme appeared to suggest cognitive decline.
The president’s health has become a cause for concern, and the Daily Beast has long pointed to incidents that raise uncomfortable questions about Trump’s fitness for office, even while other media outlets chose to turn a blind eye.
O’Donnell also said that Trump’s short-yet-rambling policy segment wasn’t even the “nuttiest” part of the evening. That title, he said, was won by “lost” members of the GOP cheering him on as he went.
The West Wing star noted that Trump had given, “In proportional terms, the least amount of governing policy per minute of speech,” in what was the longest address to a joint session of Congress for at least 60 years, NPR reports.
“So you’ve got about two hours. The biggest applause in the speech is for a goalie. It’s not for the president, it’s for a hockey player and his team, and 20 percent of it maybe is about policy. All the rest of it is introducing people in the audience and stealing the applause that way. And when you get to the policy, the policy is: he wants tariffs to replace the income tax.
“OK, so you are in raging dementia when you’re in the policy section of the speech, like out of control. He’s gone.
“And here’s the nutty thing: The Republican party in that room could have just winced and been quiet. They clapped for it. They clapped for it because they are lost. And so the policy piece of the speech was absolute zero, and all the rest of it was just trying to cheat applause from people he brought to the show.”
During the 108-minute speech, Trump praised the Team USA men’s ice hockey team, saying, “Here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud.”
It came after he caused anger by making a comment to the squad in the White House, saying he “guesses” he’ll have to invite the women’s team to meet him, too, after they also won gold.
Elsewhere in the speech, which has been torn to shreds by fact checkers, including BBC Verify, Trump also bragged that the economy was “roaring like never before” and that “cheating is rampant in our elections.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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