MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has noticed an interesting tic involving Donald Trump: If the president is sitting next to a world leader, and Trump starts to say something untrue, his counterpart will put his hand on Trump and get him to stop. In the last couple of weeks, this has happened with both French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer. O’Donnell calls it “the humiliation touch.”
Macron “reached across to put his hand on Donald Trump, to stop Donald Trump from lying about France,” in regards to Europe’s contributions to Ukraine’s war effort.
“Three days later, Donald Trump walked into exactly the same humiliation trap in the Oval Office,” this time with Starmer, although the British prime minister did not literally touch the president.
Lawrence O’Donnell called the move the “humiliation touch,” and showed how it’s been deployed twice in the past week. https://t.co/AUCNooV7k7
— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) February 28, 2025
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
“He’s British, so he’s not touchy-feely, he’s not gonna touch him, but he does interrupt him just like the French president did.”
How effective is this tactic?
“There is a kind of person whose humiliation reflex simply doesn’t work,” the host said. “That might be what’s going on with Donald Trump… The world sees it as humiliating to Donald Trump.”
“Trump became the first American president in history fully humiliated on the world stage by instantly getting caught and corrected in his lie,” the host said.
Also this week, in a different segment, O’Donnell criticized the White House press corps for not challenging Trump in the recent cabinet meeting that was essentially hijacked by Elon Musk.
“Donald Trump took questions from very tame, very well behaved, mild mannered members of the White House press corps in the Cabinet Room — who did not scream questions at him the way they always screamed their questions at Joe Biden,” O’Donnell said of that event. “They didn’t. And the way they screamed their questions at Joe Biden’s press secretary. They didn’t do that. And to every question, Donald Trump gave a response that included at least one lie. Every single one of them.”
While there has been a great deal of turmoil of late with MSNBC, with new management, the spinoff of Comcast’s cable assets, and the exit of Joy Reid and other hosts, Lawrence O’Donnell has hosted his show on MSNBC since 2010, back in the Keith Olbermann era of MSNBC.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
