Donald Trump's attack on MSNBC, in which the former president encourages the federal government to "come down hard" on the cable news network, has not gone unanswered.
Trump on Tuesday evening suggested MSNBC should be hit with government force for its "illegal political activity" in the course of reporting news related to the ex-president. Without citing which interview or report caught his attention, the former president took to social media to slam the news network and its CEO.
"MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Brian Robert’s, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years."
Now, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell is hitting back.
At the start of his show on Wednesday, O'Donnell took some time to correct falsehoods spread by Trump.
"Last night at 11:13 pm, 13 minutes after presumably watching this show, Donald Trump posted an attack not just on me this time, which he has done many times in the past, but on this entire network. Saying the government should come down hard on MSNBC," O'Donnell said. "And we know what Donald Trump means by come down hard. He means completely destroy, he means violently attack, attack the way he wanted Trump supporters to come down hard on congress on January 6th."
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O'Donnell continued:
"Last night 11:13 pm, Donald Trump began his attack on this network this way: MSNBC uses free government approved airwaves. I would call that a lie if I didn't think Donald Trump was too stupid to know that was a lie."
He added that Trump "was born years before television, before it came into American homes."
"And when it finally did arrive, in his living room in Queens, New York, what he was watching, a black and white, and a tiny box, was a broadcast coming over the airwaves from this building as television did in those days, when there were only three networks. Then when Donald Trump was 40 years old, cable television arrived in his neighborhood in New York city, obviously no one explained to Donald why they called it cable television, so to this day he does not know that cable television has never been broadcast over free government approved airways, which is why cable television, unlike the old broadcast networks, has never been subject to FCC jurisdiction."
