It's true. Donald Trump tweeted a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing - literally - against him in a White House meeting on Wednesday before she and the other Democrats left the room in the face of incredible disrespect. That photo is now Speaker Pelosi's background image on her Twitter account, because it is an amazing depiction of her standing up for us. All of us.
Wednesday night, Lawrence O'Donnell paid tribute to her stand while utterly trashing Trump for his lack of self-awareness in releasing the photo with a lame effort to gaslight his followers into thinking she was the one who had the meltdown.
The transcript:
We would not have that photograph if Donald Trump had not made the profoundly stupid mistake of tweeting it. And that photograph, thanks to Donald Trump, will now become the single-most important and indelible photographic image of the Trump presidency. It tells the story of the Trump presidency better than any other photograph.
Nancy Pelosi immediately placed that photograph on her Twitter page and she will never replace it with a better photograph. It is the perfect portrait of the child president, the Trump face is full of the confusion and fear of a 4-year-old boy being rebuked by an adult in the room full of adults who know he shouldn't be there.
50 years from now, schoolchildren studying American history will come upon this photograph and they will instantly know who was in charge in that room. The adult standing and pointing at the pained face across the table. Historians will recognize that when Nancy Pelosi stood up to that president today, she wasn't just standing up for herself and for Congress.
She was standing up for the millions of Americans and millions of people around the world who immediately stood up to Donald Trump after he was inaugurated in what turned out to be the largest inauguration protest in history. A protest that went worldwide.
She was standing up for American voters whose democracy has been attacked by foreign agents while Donald Trump welcomes those attacks.
She was standing up for children held in custody at the southern border by Donald Trump and mothers and fathers separated from those children by Donald Trump.
She was standing up for Kurds in Syria being killed tonight by forces unleashed by Donald Trump.
She was standing up to the lies and racist poison that Donald Trump has been spewing since he first opened his mouth about President Obama's birth certificate.
She was standing up for all of us against all of that. And so, of course, it was impossible for Donald Trump to understand the moment, impossible for him to understand what that photograph represents to the world. That's why he tweeted it into history today.
What Nancy Pelosi was saying to Donald Trump then was: "All roads with you lead to Putin."
And they do. Now it's time to impeach the MFer.
