MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday knocked President Donald Trump’s “utterly indiscriminate” act of throwing round accusations at a press briefing tied to the lethal airplane crash in Washington, D.C.
“It’s the first time in historical past {that a} president in america has assigned blame for an aviation accident on his personal, instantly, primarily based fully on his personal profoundly, ignorant, prejudiced guess,” mentioned O’Donnell of Trump, who blamed variety, fairness and inclusion efforts for the midair collision.
O’Donnell stacked Trump’s transfer up towards Democrats who didn’t blame Ronald Reagan for Air Florida Flight 90 crashing right into a D.C. bridge and falling into an icy Potomac River beneath in 1982. The crash left 67 individuals lifeless.
The crash occurred simply months after the then-president made what the MSNBC host referred to as “the only stupidest, robust man transfer” on home coverage within the ’80s when he fired hundreds of air site visitors controllers amid a labor dispute.
O’Donnell then went after Trump for pondering he knew the “solutions” to Wednesday’s crash regardless of an investigation simply getting underway.
“Each earlier president in reacting to such occasions, such tragedies, has all the time begun with sympathy together with the one president who might have been blamed for an unintended airplane crash and wasn’t,” he declared earlier than taking part in a 1982 clip of Reagan remarking on Lenny Skutnik, a bystander to the Air Florida crash.
Skutnik, a Congressional Funds Workplace worker on the time of the crash, dived into the Potomac River and pulled Priscilla Tirado out of the Potomac River.
Reagan would later invite Skutnik to his State of the Union tackle lower than two weeks later.
“Lenny Skutnik was the worst factor you could be in Donald Trump’s Washington,” mentioned O’Donnell of the federal employee who turned “an American hero” and served the federal government for many years earlier than his retirement in 2010.
O’Donnell turned to a 1982 article revealed seven months after the crash in The New York Occasions the place Skutnik was requested if he’d do the rescue once more.
“I separate it into two components,” Skutnik informed the Occasions. “The rescue, I’d do once more in a minute. However all of the stuff that got here after, the celebrity and all that, I might do with out. If it ever occurred once more, I want the cameras weren’t there. The entire thing has been sort of blown out of proportion.”
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O’Donnell weighed in on Skutnik’s quote, “There’s nothing about Lenny Skutnik — not his humility, not his heroism, nothing about him that Donald Trump might ever perceive.”
Correction: An earlier model of this story misstated the quantity lifeless within the D.C. airplane crash. The crash left 67 individuals lifeless.