MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell eviscerated CNN and its star host, Jake Tapper, in a blistering opening monologue to his show on Monday night.
O’Donnell signaled he was dumbfounded that Tapper’s Sunday morning show included an “interview” with President Donald Trump that was entirely over text, with no proof that it was actually the 79-year-old president who sent the minimal effort replies.
“When the history of Donald Trump’s mental decline is written, it will no doubt include that so-called interview yesterday as a turning point in Donald Trump’s White House dealing with the challenge of Donald Trump trying to answer questions during this period of obvious mental decline,” O’Donnell said.
The MSNBC host continued, “Trump was allowed to become, by CNN, the first president in history to get questions in writing for an interview. Questions that he could take home… and then Donald Trump was allowed to take, we don’t know how much time, to reply to those questions. We do know CNN is still waiting for some [answers], something this particular interviewer would be outraged about if Joe Biden had ever done that, or someone pretending to be Joe Biden had done that.”
O’Donnell dedicated nearly 10 minutes to trashing Tapper and accusing him of giving Trump preferential treatment. He noted that Tapper was an author of Original Sin, a controversial book that included anecdotes of Biden’s cognitive decline in office.
“This particular interviewer wrote an entire book condemning Joe Biden because he didn’t like the way Joe Biden answered questions,” O’Donnell said. “He thought Joe Biden wasn’t up to the job of answering questions as a presidential candidate, particularly in the presidential debate… if Joe Biden had ever answered, ‘Complete Obliteration,’ to what happens next in Gaza or anywhere else in the world, that same interviewer would have pointed to it correctly, I think, as proof of mental incapacity to do the job of president.”
O’Donnell was especially outraged that CNN informed its viewers that Trump had refused to answer some of the questions it texted, but also did not reveal what those questions were.
“The final slow-pitch softball question was, ‘How do you think the government shutdown is going to end?’ That question got the empty answer it deserved,” O’Donnell said.
He continued, “The interviewer then said, ‘I asked a few other questions on text, still waiting for a response on those, Mr. President.’ OK, what were those questions? Exactly which questions did Donald Trump refuse to answer? What could be more relevant in reporting an exchange—that is supposed to be with the President of the United States—than including the questions he refused to answer? We have no idea. Any questions about Jeffrey Epstein or his sex trafficking friend, Ghislaine Maxwell? We don’t know. We have no idea. We have no idea what the other questions were that Donald Trump refused to answer, or whoever was on the other end of that phone refused to answer.”
O’Donnell, 73, is not the only person who is calling out Tapper, 56, over the incomplete interview-by-text.
Megan Coyne, who was the deputy director of platforms during the Biden White House, also called Tapper out.
“Writes a whole book on Biden being unfit to be POTUS. Then turns around and does a TEXT MESSAGE interview with Trump and can’t even confirm it’s actually him, not his team,” she posted to X, replying to a video of Tapper’s segment. “Like, come on, if Biden did this, it would’ve been an entire chapter in a book that completely flopped.”
O’Donnell said that Trump has caused irreparable harm to Sunday morning shows, starting with his ability to run out the clock—by literally talking until a commercial break comes—and, now, by getting shows to interview him by text since they are so “desperate” to have him come on.
“Every time they lower their standards for Donald Trump, that becomes the new standard,” he said, “and so the other Sunday morning shows, desperate to get Donald Trump will, according to all their past practices in following each other into decline, accept written answers from Donald Trump or a person impersonating Donald Trump.”
This, O’Donnell said, is a “complete failure” by the networks.
“The deviancy of Donald Trump only moves in one direction—down,” he said. “People working for Donald Trump choose to go down with him, but apparently they’re not the only ones.”
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