Ultra liberal 9/11 truther Rosie O’Donnell used her platform as a guest on Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to trash the President, whom she described as “evil” and “dark.” O’Donnell suggested orchestrating a military coup against the President in addition to claiming that his “wet dream” involves scaring journalists into “not printing bad news about him, which is also equivalent to the truth about him.”
O’Donnell found herself surprised that she found herself agreeing with host Nicolle Wallace and Never-Trumper Steve Schmidt, whom she described as “former GOP head honcho people.” O’Donnell actually co-hosted The View alongside Wallace, who acted as the in-house conservative of the ABC program, for one season.
Discussing the “caravan” of Honduran migrants making its way through Central America with the goal of obtaining asylum in the United States, Schmidt compared the separation of migrant families at the border to “the separation of families at the slave auction blocks” and “the separation of Native American families” while Wallace invoked Laura Bush’s comparison of the zero-tolerance policy to Japanese internment camps.
Later, when Wallace brought up how President Trump wants to send the military to the southern border to stop the caravan, O’Donnell said that she wanted to “send the military to the White House to get him” as Wallace and her panelists erupted in laughter and The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson muttered that it sounded like a “ pretty good idea.”
The panel also attempted to tie Trump to the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, likely at the hands of people with direct ties to the Saudi Arabian government. After Robinson criticized the President’s response to the situation, O’Donnell said “he’s doing that to try to scare every journalist here who he calls enemy of the people, as we all know.” O’Donnell insinuated that President Trump did not respond because “that’s his wet dream to think what could he possibly do to scare journalists from not printing bad news about him, which is also equivalent to the truth about him.”
The remainder of the love-fest between O’Donnell, Wallace, Schmidt, and Robinson focused on the likely death of Khasoggi and its implications for relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia. At the end of the segment, Schmidt slammed Trump for going to Saudi Arabia on his first foreign visit and called President Trump “complicit” in Khasoggi’s death because he has called journalists “the enemy of the people.”
A transcript of the relevant portion of Thursday’s edition of Deadline: White House is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Deadline: White House
10/18/18
04:45 PM
NEWT GINGRICH: I think two words are going to define the night of the 2018 election in the next three weeks. One is Kavanaugh and the other is caravan.
NICOLLE WALLACE: Whoa. Caravan, Donald Trump woke up this morning, 19 days before the midterms, ready to serve up some red meat for his Republican base by beating the drum on immigration prompted by video of Honduran migrants making their way north, some on their way to the U.S. Trump today tweeted about the group: “Including many criminals,” vowing to cut aid to Honduras if the migrants weren’t stopped. Even suggesting the U.S. Military may close the southern border. And according to The Washington Post, “Trump’s comments come as he’s been urging fellow Republicans to make immigration a central issue in the closing weeks of their midterm election campaigns and blaming Democrats for his inability to pass immigration legislation in the GOP-controlled Congress.” Rosie, Steve and Eugene are back. They control…I mean they’re, you can blame the Democrats for some things. Not passing laws isn’t one of them. Republicans control everything.
STEVE SCHMIDT: Republicans control everything. And the Democrats deserve criticism when they controlled everything for not solving this problem in the first years of the Obama administration. But let’s understand what this is. This is a deliberate strategy of incitement. In American politics, our leaders used to go out and try to persuade the American people that their side was perhaps a little bit more correct than the other side. There’s never been a gentile period of American politics but what we’re seeing here is something new, particularly from our President. He uses lying at mass rallies to scapegoat minority populations. He alleges conspiracies. He creates a sense of mass victimization and then positions himself as the avenger on behalf of the victims, defending them from the invading hoard of migrants coming from the south, approaching the border. This is all BS of the first order. When you see Newt Gingrich up there, one of the most singularly pernicious forces in the history of American politics, a man who more than any other has wrecked the collegiality, the comity, who began and begat this era of partisan warfare. When you see his smug smirk talking about caravan and Kavanaugh. Caravan and Kavanaugh. The caravan. These are vulnerable people fleeing some of the most violence-ravaged places on Earth and why do they walk for 2,000 miles? Because of the power of an idea. That idea is this place.
ROSIE O’DONNELL: This country.
SCHMIDT: America.
WALLACE: Yes.
SCHMIDT: A place where people are free. And they are safe. And the idea that when a mother through suffering, through abuse, through risk and sometimes death all around them, when they reach the border and they see a uniform with an American flag and they are no longer safe. Or that baby is ripped away and put into an internment camp, this is a moral outrage that harkens to the worst excesses in the history of the country, to the separation of families at the slave auction blocks…
O’DONNELL: Yes.
SCHMIDT: …to the separation of native American families, it is a moral outrage…
WALLACE: And as Laura Bush said, the Japanese internment camps.
SCHMIDT: And this is the failure of the Democratic Party to address this as a small issue, not as a profound stain on our national honor, as a profoundly un-American policy. And to frame the question for the country in this vile age of Trumpism, what is it that we are? Who are we as a people?
O’DONNELL: As a country, yes. I want to say, I love you. I really do.
SCHMIDT: Thank you, Rosie.
O’DONNELL: I would like to move next door to you and have coffee and discuss every single day because what he says and who would believe this two years ago that these former GOP head honcho people like you two running campaigns with Presidents that I would be so comforted by your words. So…how does this feel? That’s what I want to show on MSNBC.
SCHMIDT: And we both, we both, we both pronounce coffee the same way.
O’DONNELL: I know, are you from Long Island?
SCHMIDT: New Jersey dialect.
O’DONNELL: There you go. It’s very similar to the Long Island. But you know, it gives me such comfort and hope to hear people who I, before described as, you know, not my people giving me a little bit of hope to think to myself there are people who still feel this way and believe this way. We’re going to right this ship. We are going to right this ship. There’s no way that he’s going to prevail because he’s evil, he’s dark. It’s the opposite of what America stands for. One light in the darkness, one candle is all it takes.
WALLACE: Let me, can I ask you something?
O’DONNELL: Yes.
WALLACE: What was it like for you, because we haven’t talked about this ever on TV or off, what was it like for you when he won?
O’DONNELL: It was horrible. I was away by myself in Boston about to shoot a TV show and I said to my therapist, do you think it’s wrong for me to go alone, it’s election night and what if he wins? And she said, you know, “Rosie, you’ve got to stop it, always the negative tapes in your head. No one is saying he’s going to win. You go there, you do your job.” I went there and I started, I actually got physically sick, I got physically sick that night and I thought to myself this cannot be happening because when he got the nomination, I thought, well, we just got to wait until Election Day, that’s all I have to do is hold on till then and then that he won. You know, it took me a good year to compose myself to be in public again. I took a year out of the spotlight.
WALLACE: I mean, and I’m sure you would have wanted to be proven wrong but the first thing he did was pass the Muslim ban.
O’DONNELL: Yes.
WALLACE: The second...I mean, he came into office and did all the things that you probably knew about him.
O’DONNELL: Right, when he was elected, what I wrote on Twitter was we should impose martial law until we make sure that the Russians weren’t involved in the final tallies of the votes.
WALLACE: And Bob Mueller has indicted thirteen Russians for election meddling.
O’DONNELL: And people were like martial law, what’s wrong with you? You’re a lunatic.
WALLACE: Well, he wants to send the military to the border so…
O’DONNELL: I want to send the military to the White House to get him. That’s what I want to do.
(LAUGHTER)
WALLACE: Gene. I’ll throw you a lifeline, my friend.
EUGENE ROBINSON: Well, I don’t thing I can top that but that’s actually a pretty good idea.
ROBINSON: It’s, it is, it is astonishing that we’re living through this era, it really is. And you have to try, I think, to be optimistic that after it ends we can put the pieces back together somehow.
WALLACE: But when I walked into the make-up room and I talked to you, you were down for the first time since I’ve known you. Why?
ROBINSON: You know, the killing of Jamal Khashoggi has been, it’s been very sad for The Washington Post newsroom.
WALLACE: Tell us about him.
ROBINSON: I did not know him. A lot of people at the Post, especially in my corner of the newsroom did, did know him, have known him for years. And just, you know, his editor is a good friend of mine. Just the, just the thought of this horrific torture and murder that it’s now clear happened. And to have the President of the United States trying to find a way to ignore it, trying to find a way to just like pretend it didn’t happen, as opposed to…and you can’t have any faith that really that he’s going to do the right thing.
O’DONNELL: And I think he’s doing that to…Sorry.
ROBINSON: Whatever the right thing is, hhe’s not going to do it.
O’DONNELL: He’s doing that to scare every journalist here, who he calls enemy of the people, as we all know. He’s doing that, right? Here’s a guy who was tortured and killed a journalist who was speaking badly of KSM. And he doesn’t respond. Why? I’m sure that’s his wet dream to think what could he possibly do to scare journalists from not printing bad news about him, which is also equivalent to the truth about him.
WALLACE: I mean, we’ve talked about this, we’ve been talking about this for many, many months. I mean his attacks on, and this is what you and I talked about before, the attacks on journalists have happened largely in a vacuum because nothing has happened.
O’DONNELL: Yet.
WALLACE: But now something has happened. Do we, do they feel, do they hurt more?
ROBINSON: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it hurts more. And so, you know, we’re here in the United States and we’re all sort of…
WALLACE: We’re free and we’re safe.
ROBINSON: Exactly. We’re not, you know, going into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. But I think not only of that but, you know, we’re all in on with Mohammed bin Salman so he’s killing thousands of civilians in Yemen, he kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon, he blockaded Qatar, another U.S. ally. He is not a good, reliable U.S. ally and I worry that we’re going to pay a huge price for that.
SCHMIDT: This country is not, has not and never has been an ally of the United States. It is a leech on the United States. We need them for nothing geopolitically. We are an energy-independent country. And if you look at North America between Mexico and Canada and the United States, we are the most energy-rich place on Earth. This is a despotic regime. They have imported Wahhabism, Islamic extremism to every corner of the world. It was 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. They are engaged in a war crime in Yemen. Hundreds of thousands have been killed with American weaponry. And in the same way that Paul Manafort’s criminality was an absolute utter open secret in Washington, D.C., who this guy is is also an open secret. And there are few things more shameful than, one, an American President, on his first foreign visit, goes to Saudi Arabia, a place where we hail MBS and his progressivism because women can now drive a car alone? We need them for nothing.
ROBINSON: That’s true.
SCHMIDT: And when we look at this relationship and we look at the degree to which the Saudis with their money have corrupted the American system of government and you look at the shamefulness of his coast-to-coast tour with The Rock…I admire The Rock. But it’s time for Dwayne Johnson to repudiate him and stand up.
O’DONNELL: Yes.
SCHMIDT: And it’s time for every P.R. agency in this country that has an office in Riyadh to shut it down and to come home. It’s time for every lobbying firm to fire the Saudis. It’s time for every state pension fund to divest, for every technology company, for every media company that has taken dirty Saudi money, send it back. This is a disgrace. This moment in time, what we’ve seen, is the murder of a U.S. resident with American citizen children, a Washington Post columnist with a complicit President who has called journalists the enemy of the people, the American people should rise up against this. But we should put truth to the lie about who this guy is and what this regime is.
