MS NOW host Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday called out President Donald Trump following a Washington Post report that he snuck off Air Force One last month amid an assassination threat — but left White House staffers and press members who didn’t know about the potential danger on board.
“And so, Donald Trump sadly failed his own self-imposed test, the Hollywood hero test — the standard he pretends to achieve in his fake images of himself as a brave, gun-toting tough guy,” O’Donnell said during a lengthy “Last Word” segment on the matter.
O’Donnell noted that even screenwriter Andrew Marlowe, whose 1997 film “Air Force One” envisioned the American president as a selfless man who takes terrorist threats into his own hands without leaving anyone behind, has rejected the image of Trump as a tough guy.
“If the threat were that great, it’s hard to imagine an audience rooting for any character who would trade his own safety by treating the remaining civilians on board as potential sacrificial lambs, especially without their informed consent,” Marlowe told The New York Times.
Trump, who frequently shares artificial intelligence-generated images on social media that depict him as a valiant hero, was departing Turkey last month following a NATO summit there when an Iranian assassination threat reportedly forced him to take extraordinary precautions.
The president was secretly transported inside a catering truck onto a smaller plane “unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staffers” aboard Air Force One, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter and material reviewed by the Post.
The exact moment Trump snuck off the plane appears to have been captured on video. The president has since tried to argue that he was acting selflessly when he left staffers and reporters behind and that he “was at greater risk” on the plane he left in than they were.
O’Donnell previously covered the bombshell story on Monday to argue how much control Trump has lost as a result of his ongoing war on Iran. On Tuesday, the MS NOW host noted just how thoroughly the secretive departure deflated the president’s macho persona.
“To Donald Trump, heroism is something defined by movies, not by real life,” said O’Donnell. “And so he thinks of heroism as nothing but movie tough-guy heroism, a purely fake kind of invented heroism. That is why Donald Trump posts fake images of himself.”
He added, “No president has ever done more than Donald Trump to reveal himself to be a deeply cowardly man, and no president other than Donald Trump would ever dream of trying to create a courageous image of himself by turning himself into a fake movie character.”
Watch the full “Last Word” segment on MS NOW’s YouTube account.