LAWRENCE O'DONNELL (HOST): The next day the headlines were not unhinged candidate vows war over gestures, with a subhead of candidate's mental health question. Donald Trump had earned those headlines, but he didn't get them. He earned non-stop talk about the sheer madness of going to war over a gesture.
He deserved a word for word comparison to the sayings of North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un because there are only two people in the world who talk like that. There are only two people in the world who believe that a country's dignity can only be maintained with weapons. North Korea said its nuclear test last week was necessary, quote, to protect our dignity, end quote. That is a pure Trumpian definition of dignity.
Donald Trump's candidacy long before Friday night had become a deplorable insult to the intelligence of the American voter. Yes, deplorable. But on Friday night, when he proudly announced that he was willing to start World War III over an issue of his perceived dignity, when he proudly took his place beside Kim Jong Un as one of the two most dangerous and dysfunctional minds in the world, he reached a new level of deplorable, and it was over the single most important decision a president can make, when and where and how and why to use the weapons of war of the mightiest army in the world. The political media had the biggest policy story that has ever been handed to them by a presidential candidate, the policy of going to war over a gesture. And the news media quickly ignored it. Because the other candidate for president said something that the political media decided was much, much more important. It wasn't a policy announcement. It was a description of Donald Trump's supporters, in which she used the word “deplorable” to describe many of their hateful ideas. She was careful enough to limit it to half of Trump's supporters.
But that wasn't careful enough for the news media, because the news media was clearly in the middle of a nervous breakdown on its way to a complete collapse which happened the very next day when Hillary Clinton felt a little sick and decided to go home. You've seen the video a few thousand times by now of Hillary Clinton being helped into a car as she was clearly feeling faint. Hours later, we got the word from her doctor that she's been diagnosed with pneumonia, and she's going to slow down for a few days. And today the news media lost its mind, lost all perspective on what matters in this presidential campaign. Lost all perspective on how voters should make their choice and Hillary Clinton's health became the most important thing this the world.
