MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday knocked President Donald Trump’s “completely indiscriminate” act of throwing around accusations at a press briefing tied to the deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C.
“It is the first time in history that a president in the United States has assigned blame for an aviation accident on his own, immediately, based entirely on his own profoundly, ignorant, prejudiced guess,” said O’Donnell of Trump, who blamed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts for the midair collision.
O’Donnell stacked Trump’s move up against Democrats who didn’t blame Ronald Reagan for Air Florida Flight 90 crashing into a D.C. bridge and falling into an icy Potomac River below in 1982. The crash left 67 people dead.
The crash occurred just months after the then-president made what the MSNBC host called “the single stupidest, tough guy move” on domestic policy in the ’80s when he fired thousands of air traffic controllers amid a labor dispute.
O’Donnell then went after Trump for thinking he knew the “answers” to Wednesday’s crash despite an investigation just getting underway.
“Every previous president in reacting to such events, such tragedies, has always begun with sympathy including the only president who could have been blamed for an accidental plane crash and wasn’t,” he declared before playing a 1982 clip of Reagan remarking on Lenny Skutnik, a bystander to the Air Florida crash.
Skutnik, a Congressional Budget Office employee at 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 address less than two weeks later.
“Lenny Skutnik was the worst thing you can be in Donald Trump’s Washington,” said O’Donnell of the federal worker who became “an American hero” and served the government for decades before his retirement in 2010.
O’Donnell turned to a 1982 article published seven months after the crash in The New York Times where Skutnik was asked if he’d do the rescue again.
“I separate it into two parts,” Skutnik told the Times. “The rescue, I’d do again in a minute. But all the stuff that came after, the fame and all that, I could do without. If it ever happened again, I wish the cameras weren’t there. The whole thing has been kind 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 could ever understand.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number dead in the D.C. plane crash. The crash left 67 people dead.