Trump is 'a profoundly lawless individual': Presidential biographer tells Democrats to wake up and go after president

On MSNBC's "AM Joy" Saturday, in the wake of the Ukraine scandal, presidential biographer Bloomberg Opinion executive editor Tim O'Brien laid out how President Donald Trump's presidency has become a pure exercise in criminality — and how House Democrats need to treat this as the threat that it is.

"The Democrats are looking at this as a chess board," said O'Brien. "Republicans see it as a knife fight. They're not even trying to play chess. They've been playing politics at the electoral level and in the Congress by simply trying to rip the spine out of anybody who opposes them. The Democrats are trying to figure out what's the right thing. I honor that, but as long as they sit back and are more concerned about appearances or not upsetting the table, Republicans are going to run circles around them, both electorally and when it comes to Donald Trump."

"And this is right where Donald Trump lives," continued O'Brien. "He is a profoundly lawless individual. And if any opening is given to him where he can self-deal, he'll self deal. You put up the op-ed earlier by Neal [Katyal] and George [Conway] that was in the Washington Post, and one of the graphs in there I thought was most striking is they rightly pointed out that the framers were worried about self-dealing, and a president that self-deals to such an extent that it undermines the national interests."

"You now have a clear example of the president of the United States self-dealing in the Ukraine to get a foreign country to undermine a political opponent to his benefit, even though the Congress has already said we should support this government and this nation militarily. That's a clear undermining of the national interests, and Trump is just self-dealing that circumstance," said O'Brien. "What more proof do they need?"

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