Lawrence O’Donnell began his Wednesday night broadcast of “The Last Word” with a question: “If Donald Trump gets dementia, how will we know?”
The MSNBC anchor didn’t hold back on that point, citing numerous confusing comments the president has made in recent days about everything from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the Declaration of Independence. “Donald Trump’s mental decline, which is increasingly obvious, began from such a low level of mental processing power that it’s hard to track his decline,” O’Donnell argued. “It’s from low to lower.”
O’Donnell specifically called out the moment when Trump wondered aloud this week whether or not he might appoint himself the Federal Reserve chairman in Powell’s place. “It may be tiresome to hear, but we should never tire of arguing that no other president has ever been able to say anything as stupid or indicative of dementia as that,” O’Donnell noted.
You can watch the full “last word” segment in the video below.
“We should never tire of reminding ourselves what the White House press corps would have done if Joe Biden had said something like that and how big the headlines would have been,” O’Donnell added to Trump’s Fed comment. “If we tire of emphasizing how singularly stupid, possibly clinically deranged, Donald Trump’s statements are, then we will become part of the process of normalizing those statements.”
O’Donnell went on to mock Trump for seemingly implying during a recent Oval Office press conference that the Declaration of Independence was written during the American Civil War. “We’ve always known that Donald Trump couldn’t pass a high school AP history course. We’ve always known that Donald Trump couldn’t pass any high school history test,” O’Donnell remarked. “But now we know that he couldn’t have passed a history test in my third grade at Saint Brendan’s Elementary School in Boston.”
“Psychiatrists promised us in the first year of Trump’s first presidency that there was only one direction his mental health could go,” the MSNBC host concluded. “Every day, Donald Trump proves them right.”
You can watch the full “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” segment in the video above.
