Lawrence O’Donnell called out President Donald Trump for his “tariff theater,” blasting the president during his Monday night monologue over a series of “childish” letters that the administration sent out to more than a dozen countries. The letters only further prove that Trump “absolutely does not know what he’s doing about tariffs,” O’Donnell said.
On Monday, the White House announced it had sent letters to the leaders of 14 countries, informing them that beginning Aug. 1 the president plans to impose new tariffs on their exports to the United States. Each of those letters, as “The Last Word” host noted, is almost identical to one another.
“Each qualifies as the stupidest letter ever received from the president of the United States by the head of state of any other country,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell went on to call Trump’s letters “childish” and said they were full of lies. In the letters, Trump claimed that the receiving country would be “charged” a tariff rate, but as O’Donnell noted, it’s American consumers who would be responsible for picking up that tab: “Every penny of tariffs on Japanese products — every penny — brought into the United States, will be paid inside the United States by the people in America who buy that product and bring that product into the country. This is something the entire world knows.”
“Every country receiving this letter today knew that they were looking at a level of economic illiteracy in that letter that they could never get away with in their own countries,” he continued.
You can watch O’Donnell’s entire takedown of Trump in the clip at the top of the page.