MSNBC pundit Lawrence O’Donnell criticized media outlets, including his own, over how several of them covered former President Trump’s Thursday press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
“It was 2016 all over again today,” O’Donnell said Thursday evening on his weeknight program. “Donald Trump spoke for an hour at his home, and all of the cable news networks, including this one, carried it live just like they all did in 2016.”
The host and political analyst, who is frequently critical of Trump and his allies, knocked major news channels for fact-checking the former president only after it was “way too late.”
“Every network has the capacity to run a live scroll at the side of the screen fact checking many of Trump’s lies,” he suggested before knocking the same networks for not covering Vice President Harris’s Thursday remarks in full.
During the news conference at his resort in in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump appeared irked by Harris’s rise in the polls following President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race and endorse her. Trump’s lead over Biden has been largely eliminated by the vice president, who has also benefited from a fired-up Democratic base and massive fundraising hauls.
MSNBC features a number of top hosts who routinely ridicule Trump and his allies.
The former president has singled out the network’s parent company as part of his ongoing attacks on the press, at one point earlier this year threatening to investigate Comcast Universal for “treason” over the company’s coverage of him.