Politico has revealed President Joe Biden’s favorite television talk show host is MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, host of the network’s 10 p.m. show “The Last Word” — adding that the anchor won the president’s favor, because he is less likely to ask probing or exacting questions than other hosts on the network.
Biden has kept a lower media profile than any president in recent memory, continuing his successful strategy of avoiding press scrutiny that proved pivotal to winning the 2020 presidential election. This has included the left-leaning MSNBC, which features staples like “Morning Joe” and Rachel Maddow, and which cultivated a famously friendly relationship with the Obama administration.
“One former campaign official said [President Biden’s] absence from those programs was due to the fear that they could get hammered from the left,” reported Politico, which noted the president believed that other anchors at the network would furnish him with “friendlier treatment.” When Joe Biden “wanted to appear on MSNBC’s more highly-rated prime-time programming, he opted for O’Donnell, whom multiple former Biden campaign staffers said he favored because of their personal relationship and belief that their mutually-shared time in Congress made for a less potentially contentious interview.”
That is, O’Donnell will test the president’s resolve less than anyone else in cable news. That comes as a relief to the frequently tongue-tied and gaffe-prone commander-in-chief.
Sources told Politico that Biden had developed a nearly teacher-student relationship with O’Donnell while the journalist served as a legislative aide to the late liberal lion Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). “Lawrence is a student of the Senate and Biden is a professor,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told Politico.
O’Donnell’s program has defended the Biden administration more sycophantically than virtually any program on the heavily pro-Biden network. While other programs compared Biden’s evacuation of Kabul to the fall of Saigon or described his policy as “incompetence, and failure, and disorganization, and lies,” O’Donnell gave a full-throated defense to the president’s actions. As this author reported at The Daily Wire:
The Harvard-educated O’Donnell, who never served in the military, asserted that he knew more about geostrategic issues than military brass …
“An unnamed American military source in Afghanistan was quoted as saying what we are seeing now in the American evacuation of Afghanistan is worse, much worse, than what we saw in 1975 in the American evacuation from Vietnam after we lost the war there,” he complained. “The problem with that kind of quote is that any unnamed military source in Afghanistan tonight is too young to remember the Vietnam War and was probably not born yet when we evacuated Vietnam in 1975, and so that source literally does not know what he or she is talking about.”
O’Donnell also defended Biden on the domestic front. Even as inflation mounted and stores limited their hours due to a lack of labor, O’Donnell gushed: “The Biden economic recovery is so positive that economists are reaching for new words to describe it. Like ‘wonderful.’”
The Biden economic recovery is so positive that economists are reaching for new words to describe it. Like “wonderful.” https://t.co/LbLlpBRcSa
— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) August 20, 2021
Biden has rewarded O’Donnell in kind: The only interview Biden has granted MSNBC during his presidency went to O’Donnell, on May 13. Biden also appeared on O’Donnell’s first show; Vice President Kamala Harris granted an interview for his 10th anniversary program.
O’Donnell’s close relationship with the White House has done little to improve his ratings. O’Donnell had the luck of the Irish in competing against CNN’s Don Lemon, whom he had beaten 78 straight months as of November. Yet both finish well behind “The Ingraham Angle,” hosted by Laura Ingraham, on Fox News, an outspoken critic of the president.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.