O’Donnell: ‘Stupidest’ presidency has ‘stupidest’ White House press corps

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell called President Trump’s second term the “stupidest” presidency in history and said it is being covered by the “stupidest” press corps.

“Well, the possibility of a relentlessly stupid person becoming president of the United States has been underexplored by screenwriters,” O’Donnell said Tuesday on his nightly show “The Last Word.”

“And then Donald Trump came along and went far beyond what Hollywood could ever imagine in the presidency,” he added.

The veteran host compared the current White House to that of the Emmy-winning NBC show “The West Wing” and said, “if I were writing the character of a stupid president in a script, I would simply have had the stupid president completely rely on a smart White House staff and a smart cabinet and just hide behind those people.”

The president, in this fictional scenario, O’Donnell continued, would “absolutely never talk to the press because a stupid president’s stupidity would be immediately exposed by the White House press corps.”

But this is not the case during the current administration, he argued.

“Because it turns out, the stupidest presidency in American history has the stupidest White House press corps in American history, as far as we can tell,” the MSNBC host said.

Many “excellent” reporters don’t get to ask questions of the president, he added, knocking Trump over what he called a “ridiculous” Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

His comments also come as the Trump administration has turned the heat up on media outlets, primarily threatening government funding for NPR and PBS, as well blocking journalists from The Associated Press from the Oval Office and other White House spaces. The administration took control of the media pool earlier this year after the AP refused to use the phrase “Gulf of America,” which Trump renamed from the “Gulf of Mexico.”