Until now, I have resisted putting Trump's lie he told about abortion into a post. After all, what's the point of amplifying an outright lie about abortion, intended to inflame and incite?
But Lawrence O'Donnell put the lie into a perspective that makes sense.
O'Donnell introduced the clip as "one of the ugliest lies of his presidency, possibly his ugliest lie, possibly his worst lie," which it is. After warning that he was playing the clip rather than reading the words, he played a brief clip of the "poisonous" lie that doctors and mothers conspire to kill babies.
"This is vile, despicable, deplorable lying by a man who clearly now is willing to say absolutely anything to hold onto the presidency," O'Donnell said.
The Big Lie is this: "They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby."
He then spent some time discussing all of Trump's 61 lies at that rally alone before turning to the question of whether Trump's rhetoric inspires violence. (Of course it does)
"He was defending people who chant 'Jews will not replace us'," O'Donnell explained. "He specifically meant and intends and continues to intend to defend them by saying that some of them who said Jews will not replace us are good people, some of them."
"And the very next day, the very next day after the president defended those people once again, a person who proudly calls himself a white supremacist took his ARr-15 assault weapon into a synagogue north of San Diego and started killing and wounding the Jewish men women and children in that synagogue," he continued.
Yes, his rhetoric inspires hate crimes. On synagogues, mosques, and churches. But the targets of unrelenting white supremacist hate are Jews.
That's no coincidence, as Lawrence explained. "But..my enemies are killing babies, my enemies are taking the babies and wrapping them up and deciding to execute them," repeating Trump's words. "That is what Hitler said about the Jews."
"Hitler said that they were killing babies," he reiterated. "That is one of the Nazis' leading lies about the Jews."
"That was a Hitlerian lie by Donald Trump on Saturday night," he declared.
Yes, it was. And the next time you hear that lie echoed in the right wing echo chamber, call it out. It was a page ripped right out of Mein Kampf.
