OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Imagine being so rich that you can walk away from your job because President Donald Trump broke you.
That is the reality for MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, who announced that he is stepping away after 50 days of covering the president and his administration after claiming he is “exhausted.”
He made the announcement when he spoke to fellow host Rachel Maddow on her show last week, who herself has committed to working every weekday during the president’s first 100 days after only doing a Monday program for the past year.
Maddow and O’Donnell then created a bizarre scene when they appeared to form a live television support group for each other.
“This is day 52, I thought it was day 92,” O’Donnell complained. “So I’m going to take next week off. And I’m telling you that now because I know you don’t like it when I just drift away. Just taking next week off. Then I’m going to come back and go with you all the way to the hundred days. I can’t. I know.”
Maddow then offered some emotional support to her distraught network colleague.
“We all tell each other you have to take care of yourself, you have to pace yourself, you have to be in this for the long haul,” Maddow said. “So I can’t hold it against you, but I’m very sad.”
“Can you hold this against me? Can you hold this against me? I’m going to get a head start by taking tomorrow off,” O’Donnell said.
Before he admitted how mentally weak and broken he was to Maddow, on his own show O’Donnell railed against the
“So America is at this hour completing the 52nd day of having a president of the United States whose brain does not work. Donald Trump’s brain is broken, badly damaged, as he exhibits every day. And once again, today, Donald Trump said something that would have gotten any other president rushed to the hospital for a neurological examination and an evaluation for dementia, for starters,” he said. “That’s where they would have begun.”
O’Donnell’s announcement came on the heels of a number of high profile firings at the struggling network.
Maddow got some bad news after criticizing her network late last month following the firing of race-baiting host Joy Reid and the demotion of fill-in host Alex Wagner.
Her criticism comes on the heels of the network revealing earlier in the week that Reid’s and Wagner’s shows would be canceled as part of a broader effort to revamp its programming, with weekend shows hosted by Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart, and Ayman Mohyeldin also being scrapped.
“She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old,” Maddow said during a show segment in February. “I have been gainfully employed since I was 12 and I have had so many different kinds of jobs, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
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“But in all of the jobs I have had in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid,” Maddow said of her far-left friend.
“I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her,” Maddow continued. “I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that. But that’s what I think.”
“I will tell you. It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two — count them — two non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend,” Maddow said. “And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible and I do not defend it.”