WEDNESDAY: They don't know how to report it, he said!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2026

Isn't it phony to think so: They don't know how to report it, he said.   

We're speaking of Lawrence O'Donnell. He said it last night at 10:05, one minute into his opening monologue on his nightly program, The Last Word.

We're willing to give him a B for effort, but what he said just isn't true. 

You can see a partial tape of the monologue at the web site of The Last Word. Here's the headline at the site, along with the first thing it shows O'Donnell saying:

Lawrence: What are Trump’s deranged social media posts if not evidence of insanity?   

The American news media, understandably, has no idea how to cover a possibly insane president of the United States. That's movie stuff, an insane president. 

The American news media has no idea how to cover a president who could be slipping into dementia, as Donald Trump's father did.  That headline basically speaks for itself. Below it, you see the way O'Donnell's monologue began.   

That headline basically speaks for itself. Below it, you see the way the (partial) videotape of the monologue begins. 

What O'Donnell says there is of course absurdly inaccurate. The American news media, including all the other anchors on MS NOW, do in fact know the basic way to cover any topic.

How do you cover any topic? This is what you do:   

You interview carefully selected specialists in the given field. In this case, that would mean interviewing carefully selected medical specialists concerning the (fairly obvious) possibility that President Trump 1) is mentally ill in some serious way, or 2) is experiencing some serious degree of cognitive decline. 

Perhaps at the direction of MS NOW executives, Lawrence wasn't being truthful as he started last night. In fact, everyone in the media knows how to cover those possibilities, but they've all agreed that they won't ever do it. That includes Wallace and Melber and Hayes and Psaki, the anchors whose programs preceded O'Donnell's on MS NOW last night. 

We've shown you where the videotape at the Last Word web site starts. By clicking here, you can see the way the fuller monologue actually started.

The monologue about this topic actually started like this: 

O'DONNELL (9/8/26): The corruption and lawbreaking in the Trump regime is on a scale far beyond what we have ever seen before in American history. 

But 50 or 100 or two 200 years from now, the story that future historians will no doubt be fascinated by and drawn to more than any other Trump regime story...will probably be what appears to those historians to be the insanity of Donald Trump.   

The American news media, understandably, has no idea how to cover a possibly insane president of the United States. That's movie stuff, an insane president.

The American news media has no idea how to cover a president who could be slipping into dementia, as Donald Trump's father did.  

That's the fuller way he began. You'll note the convoluted language, in which he simply speculates about what someone else will probably say way off in the future.

You'll also note that, in Lawrence's assessment, even our historians will be taking a dive on this topic for at least the next fifty years. For the record, that's the way today's historians have behaved with respect to many basic parts of the political and journalistic history of the past forty years.

Again, you can watch the entire monologue about the possible insanity simply by clicking here, then by continuing to click. But make no mistake about the corruption:   

Something resembling a type of corruption is also found all through "the American news media"—all through the orgs which won't report or discuss the astonishing possibility which is staring us all in the face.  

"Understandably," their bosses don't want their news orgs to get sued. The anchors and the reporters enjoy their status and their frequently rather large salaries.

The New York Times isn't reporting the presidential meltdown O'Donnell went on to describe. Quite weirdly, no one at Mediaite has posted the remarkable but fairly obvious assessments Lawrence went on to make.   

Everyone is running from this. Lawrence continues to try.

Also this: Lawrence mentioned "Natalie Harp" six times. We're sorry, but she isn't the story here.

To his credit, O'Donnell is trying harder than all the rest with respect to this fairly obvious state of affairs. 

The others have agreed to take a dive. That includes the historians.