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MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell hit CNN with a thinly veiled on-air attack Monday as he accused the network of failing to cover questions about President Donald Trump’s mental acuity like it has tackled Joe Biden’s reported health decline.
O’Donnell kicked off “The Last Word” with talk of Trump recently reposting a bonkers conspiracy theory that Biden died in 2020 and was replaced with clones, calling the Truth Social share a “complete collapse” of Trump’s mental acuity.
“The insanity of the current American president is now officially taken for granted in the news media, no huge banners on the cable news network that recently devoted itself to the issue of presidential mental acuity,” he said.
“That network did not dare devote itself to the mental acuity of Donald Trump, that network decided that the mental acuity of Joe Biden is a more important story now.”
Trump’s repost, which has been subjected to a sea of criticism, is just the latest episode that’s fueled questions about his cognitive ability.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump rambled to the press, served up a word salad when asked about child care and bizarrely ranted about sharks and electric boats.
Two of Trump’s biographers, less than a month before his election win, also sounded the alarm on his “degrading” cognitive ability on MSNBC.
In recent weeks, CNN has highlighted a book co-written by host Jake Tapper on an alleged cover-up of a decline in Biden’s health, coverage that began just before the former president announced his prostate cancer diagnosis.
O’Donnell noted that “no one” at the network suggested Biden was “incapable of doing the job as president.”
Rather, O’Donnell said, the network’s critique focused on the former president’s incapability of “delivering a sharp and polished television debate performance,” noting that this would have been true of every president before John F. Kennedy.
What was “lost in the relentless coverage” of the debate moment, he added, was that Biden made “perfect sense” for the rest of the face-off while Trump did the opposite.
“Donald Trump did not tell one true thing during that debate but that doesn’t seem to matter,” O’Donnell stressed.
He remarked that while Biden showed himself to be four years older and “much slower” in the debate, he was still “way more than four times smarter and more capable” than Trump.
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CNN did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.
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