‘Just think about how stupid you have to be to say that’: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell efficiently guts Donald Trump and his MAGA minions, but there’s still one problem

What happened to us? No, seriously, what happened? What can possibly be said about the state of American politics that hasn’t been repeated ad nauseam at this point?

In what world does it make any sense that Donald Trump‘s never-ending influx of faux pas are excused under the guise of political neutrality? How can this whole situation possibly, conceivably be regarded as anything other than out-of-control and unacceptable? How did we get to a point where we’re not only clawing each other’s eyes out on the political front, but doing so with utter nonsense like this as the backdrop?

No more, said MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, albeit not exactly in those words.

In the video above, O’Donnell can be seen enduring a clip featuring Trump saying that, should the Democratic Party win the upcoming election, the next Economic Club of New York meeting should be held in Caracas, Venezuela because they’d “be safer there.” This, to the sound of moderate applause from said members of the club, to whom he was speaking at the time. He remarked earlier that Caracas “has almost no crime,” and while it’s true that recent years have seen Venezuela’s crime rate drop by a fairly substantial rate, the notion that Caracas has “almost no crime” is utterly ridiculous, and does not account for how severely violent the city was just a decade ago. Indeed, any violent crime rate decrease from 2014-era Caracas is going to be a noticeable one.

O’Donnell is having none of it, wondering out loud how stupid someone has to be to say something like that, and also how stupid someone has to be to clap for something like that. But the thing is, none of this — be it the claim or the clapping — has to do with stupidity. It has to do with power, control, or some semblance of the two. Trump knows exactly what he’s doing when he incoherently rambles about Venezuela, having the best words, or anything else; he knows he can say whatever he wants and he’ll never get well and truly punished for it. The stupidity act is a distraction from the venomous workings of the political machine.

As for his supporters, they don’t support him because they’re stupid; they support him because they’re afraid. These people do not have the emotional tools they need to safely and confidently exist within their own experiences, and therefore feel threatened by the mere presence of diverse viewpoints. As it becomes more and more apparent that the human experience is actually quite nebulous and varied, they don’t know how to handle that. “Am I doing life right? Am I a bad person?” Enter Trump, who takes a boneheaded sledgehammer to this notion of the human experience by confidently asserting falsehoods that, if they don’t directly line up with the reality his supporters live in, at least oppose the one that they’re afraid of. If such a man were in charge of the country, they would no longer need to face their insecurities about their own lives, because Trump validates their experiences for them.

This excuses nothing, of course, but this is nevertheless worth considering as we all try to play our parts in healing from this tumultuous period in history. Do we engage with one another on a platform of compassion or one-up-manship? Empathy or schadenfreude? Security or retribution? We may never know what happened to us, but on some level, we all have a say in what will happen to us.