Lawrence O’Donnell tore into President Donald Trump for his “dazed and confused incoherence” during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday’s “The Last Word.”
O’Donnell focused on one section of the president’s remarks, in which he discussed the “most-favored-nation” policy that he has adopted for prescription drugs. According to Trump, the plan would lower drug costs in the U.S. while pushing other nations to pay more.
The president spoke about a recent phone conversation he said he’d had with French President Emmanuel Macron in which he’d threatened France with tariffs if Macron refused to raise drug prices there.
But O’Donnell didn’t buy the anecdote, calling it a “hallucinated conversation.”
“He made up a conversation with the president of France in which he forced the president of France to raise drug prices in France — something no politician would ever do — and, by the way, something that is impossible for the president of France to do,” he said. “But Donald Trump, in his publicly disintegrating brain today, believed that he found the way to sound tough about something.”
According to O’Donnell, Wednesday’s speech showed the president’s “ignorance is getting bigger.”
“Trump hears the phrase ‘most favored nation’ and has no idea what it means, throws it into a hallucination about drug prices, has no idea how they work and thinks he’s somehow doing Americans a favor by convincing the French president to raise the cost of drugs,” he said.
“Knowledge is actually the antidote to ignorance. Ignorance gets reduced through knowledge. But Donald Trump is uneducable,” O’Donnell added.
The MS NOW host also brought up what he called one of the president’s “favorite phrases” to use during public remarks.
“He said, ‘I’ll be honest with you’ — he throws that in from time to time,” O’Donnell explained. “Whenever Donald Trump says ‘to be honest with you,’ what he says next is never honest. The impulse to say ‘I’ll be honest with you’ comes from his pathological lying. It is a trademark line of lying salesmen like Donald Trump.”
While Trump’s “pathological lying” has taken its toll on the U.S., O’Donnell argued that Wednesday’s speech showed the global ramifications of his behavior. “Imagine a president of France having to respond to the hallucinations of a madman. Imagine leaders of countries around the world having to deal with that madman in one way or another for the next three years.”
“It was Republican President Gerald Ford who used the phrase ‘long national nightmare’ to describe the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon,” O’Donnell said. “The presidency of Richard Nixon was a long national nightmare, but the presidency of Donald Trump is worse — much worse.”
“He is the world’s nightmare now,” O’Donnell said.
You can watch O’Donnell’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”