This Youtube video also has O’Donnell’s show. The first 16 minutes of the video covers what’s described above, then he goes on to address additional matters. It’s worth watching to hear/see the way he delivers his talking points — but look below the video for another option.
I don’t know about you, but I can read faster than I can listen — and I also like to be able to go back and confirm that I read what I just read. I’ve taken the liberty of creating a transcript of O’Donnell’s remarks, using this one weird trick... I don’t know if they are available from MSNBC, but I figured this is worth having in print. It’s a little over 2,00 words long.
Please note that words alone don’t convey all the message — emphasis, timing, tone also add meaning. I’ve had to punctuate and break into paragraphs the talk in ways that make reading easier. If you have time, you can try playing the video while looking at the transcript.
Enjoy.
MSNBC https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-we-are-clearly-seeing-madness-pouring-from-the-darkness-of-donald-trump-s-mind-248978501947
Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, October 2, 2025
Well the New York Times is lost. The New York Times is still the greatest newspaper in America by far and one of the greatest newspapers in the world, but tonight the New York Times is lost. The New York Times has no idea how to cover the madness of Donald Trump and so the New York Times ignores it just as the madness of King George the third had to be ignored by the London times in 1789.
The Washington press corps is lost along with the New York Times. There is no one working at the New York Times tonight who when they were editing their high school newspapers and dreaming about one day working at the New York Times ever imagined they would have to cover a president of the United states who uses the official social media communications tools of the White House - government communication paid for by the taxpayer - to post fake videos of the first black Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives and the first Jewish Minority Leader of the United States Senate.
When they were working on their high school newspapers they had no idea there would be a president of the United states who would post videos on a government operated social media account that put fake words into Chuck Schumer’s mouth which A.I. makes sound exactly like Chuck Schumer and that fake language in that video would be filled with Donald trump style profanity, language Chuck Schumer would never use in public but language that the current president of the United States has shocked the world with repeatedly. Donald Trump is the 1st president of the United States who has been heard publicly and deliberately using profanity, repeatedly, words that I can but I will not use on this program, because as every adult is supposed to know there are places where profanity is not appropriate. No one taught Donald Trump that.
Who's going to bother to stop to talk about Donald trump's use of profanity when he is sending troops into American cities that he lies about being a war zone? I agree that it's just too small an item in the daily transgressions of Donald Trump but remember don't ever forget that the American news media almost unanimously agrees that Hillary Clinton lost her presidential campaign because she used the word deplorable once to describe some Trump voters some of whom proved themselves willing to behave deplorably and violently for Donald Trump on January 6th when they became the only people in American history to attack the capital of the United states on behalf of their presidential candidate.
There are people working at the New York Times today who will insist to you that Hillary Clinton's use of the word deplorable was in and of itself deplorable; those same people have nothing to say about Donald trump's use of language. Absolutely nothing. Those people believed that you cannot possibly be elected president in this country if you use the word deplorable to describe any voters in America.
Donald Trump calls us vermin. Donald Trump got elected president calling American voters vermin if they didn't vote for him. Hitler's word vermin. Donald Trump is now using fake A.I. sound of Chuck Schumer saying that all Democrats are pieces of crap, and of course he doesn't use the word crap - I just cleaned that up - but all Democrats.
All those wise pundits who've been telling you for years that Hillary Clinton couldn't possibly be elected in this country if she's going to use a word like deplorable in a political campaign referring to voters on the other side, can only make that argument now by completely ignoring every single thing Donald Trump has said publicly about voters who do not vote for him. Every single thing he said.
When Hillary Clinton used the word deplorable, it was in a private fundraiser. She did not intend for it to be heard outside of that room. Sure she was way too relaxed in that fundraiser, it's not the kind of thing she would have said publicly, but Donald Trump says deliberately and clearly into microphones for all the world to hear that all Democrats are lunatics. That's his word lunatics.
Donald Trump thinks 75,000,000 Americans are lunatics for voting for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump has said the ugliest things about American voters that any American politician has ever said and Donald Trump went on to win the Electoral College after saying those things and the New York Times simply doesn't know how to handle what Donald Trump says and does.
I don't know how to handle it either. I feel my way through the Trump mud every day. I don't confidently know what to ignore or what not to ignore but I do know I have to think about it. I have to think about it all the time. I have to think about it every day. I have to face all of it and I have to decide what aspects of the Trump poison we should examine in this hour that we have on this program tonight.
Tonight the New York Times and the Washington press corps are drowning in the deviancy and perversity of Donald Trump and his White House, all of whom, everyone working in that White House supports this deeply perverse use of government operated social media to put out poison and what is clearly raw insanity from the darkness of Donald trump's mind - and the White House press corps has just drowned in it. They're lost in it. They have internalized it. They have fully accepted it.
That is what the New York Times and the Washington media have done so far this week. They have accepted it to the point that when the New York Times wrote its big editorial about the government shutdown - everything it wanted to say about it titled “The Real Stakes of the Shutdown” - they didn't mention what Donald Trump did instead of negotiating a way out of the shutdown. They didn't mention what he has done on social media putting a sombrero on Hakim Jeffrey's head, putting fake words in Chuck Schumer's mouth, profane awful stupid trump words. They didn't even mention it.
The real stakes of the shutdown are insanity versus sanity and the press corps does not know how to face that.
The New York Times refuses to confront and identify the insanity, refuses to even describe it. The Times editorial about the shutdown is a very well-reasoned and clear solid editorial all the way. It says what the two parties are fighting about is whether Americans should have access to affordable health care. President Trump is seeking to deprive millions of Americans of their health insurance and Senate Democrats are refusing to acquiesce. That is a clear presentation of the stakes in the shutdown prior to the outburst of public Trump insanity.
The editorial ends in the classic style that everyone working at the New York Times mastered in their high school newspapers and it reads like something from the 20th century. It reads like something long before the existence of Trump madness in our government. It reads like something you could have written about Bill Clinton in the White House and Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.
It says “It is incumbent on the president and Congress to reopen the government as soon as possible and commit to preventing Americans from having to pay too much for health insurance next year. The only way forward is to negotiate a compromise. It's time to start talking.”
How lost is that? What century are they in, what fantasy world they live in that would allow them to type those sentences?
They could have written that line in any editorial about any government shutdown during any other presidency, but when you read it now you see how lost the Times is. It's time to start talking to a man who refuses to talk to you and only posts social media video lying about you and ridiculing you. Talk to him.
No one in the history of governing in the United States of America has ever had to talk to a person that crazy about anything ever and the Times says it's time to start talking.
The entire editorial does not find the space to make a single reference to the madness of Donald Trump as even a factor in the government shutdown or in the way out of the government shutdown and here I guess is its reference to Donald trump's insane social media posting, quote:
“He mixed bombastic social media blasts and threats to fire thousands of federal workers if Democrats did not provide the votes for his plan to keep the government open.”
Bombastic social media blasts. That's what they are? How very polite.
No they're not bombastic, they are insane.
Democratic Congresswoman Madeleine Dean approached the Republican Speaker of the House [Mike Johnson] to talk about the Trump madness and he appeared to offer nodding agreement that Donald Trump is unwell.
[Video Clip]
Dean: The president is unhinged. He is unwell. What are you doing…
Crosstalk
Johnson: ...A lot of folks are on your side too. I don't control my…
He could have said no the president is not unwell. Maybe he meant to say that but he didn't. It was taken as a given in the conversation. He nods when he hears the president is unwell, and his response as he's nodding is a lot of folks on your side are too. The word too there indicates similarity to what was just said, meaning similarity to Trump. The plain language of that is the Speaker in effect agreeing that Trump is unwell and simply saying that other people are unwell. That's the Speaker's defense of Trump being unwell - he's not the only one.
Of course he is but OK. The Republican Speaker of the House has to be shocked by what Donald Trump has done on social media. We know he is shocked, but like all Republicans in Washington he processed the shock instantly and knows he will never dare publicly say a negative word about it - because he spends every working moment of his life as a coward. He has taken in effect an oath of cowardice to Donald Trump. He's not the Speaker of the House – he’s the Speaker of Trump in the House.
Now if I were running the New York Times which I'm incompetent to do, couldn't do it, I don't know that I could deal with this situation any better than they have done. I really don't. Instead I just have an hour of television where I can say whatever I want. That's a much easier responsibility than editing the New York Times and I had never presumed that I can do a better job than the New York Times. I never presumed that I could do a better job than anyone who's at bat in the Yankee Stadium out there, who strikes out, and so it's not with some sense of superiority that I find the New York Times has struck out in the face of the madness of Donald Trump this week which has reached new extremes that we haven't seen before even from Donald Trump.
The White House staffers who live with Donald trump's insanity up close have obviously decided it cannot be defended and the only thing to do is pretend there's nothing crazy about it. That's what Donald trump's faithful vice president tried to do yesterday - and now the White House says they will continue to post that video at government expense on official White House communications and make the sombrero bigger every day. That's what the children in the White House are going to do.
This is the first president and the first White House that has-has decided, as JD Vance did yesterday, that a shutdown is funny. They've decided it's funny. JD Vance thinks the shutdown is his opportunity for jokes and that sombrero stuff is funny. He didn't explain what's funny about it. Prior to the existence of the Trump White House, whenever the disaster of a shutdown would occur, everyone in the White House took the situation very very seriously. They didn't have to suppress jokes. They weren't making jokes about it no matter who the president was.
So the crisis of this week's publicly flaring madness from the White House is made all the worse by the crisis of the New York Times and the Washington press corps taking it all as business as usual. They have internalized Trump madness in their coverage. They have lost their ability to react to it - but their outrage will be fully revived if the Democratic candidate for president or if a Democratic president ever says a single negative thing about any kind of American voters ever anywhere.
The Washington press corps' outrage mechanism is sleeping tonight but it will be fully operative again once they have a Democrat to aim it at. That's not a partisan statement on my part. It is simply an observable fact. You all saw it. We've all seen it. They cannot pretend this isn't true.
We all saw them scream endlessly at Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe biden's press secretary. We all saw them scream directly at Joe Biden in his face when asking him questions, and we all see that they do not dare ever do anything like that in the trump White House. They can never never deny again that they do indeed have a double standard and the double standard of coverage favors Trump madness. It accepts Trump madness and if a Democratic president gets one word wrong in a sentence he doesn't get a chance to correct it. He's immediately judged to be too old for the job. The double standard is there and it's going to be operating for the next three years of this White House coverage.
They're lost. We could only hope that they find their way.
For all of the attention Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” speech drew from the press, it is only the first part that most people have heard of. Here, via NPR, is a transcript of her remarks:
