MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell fought again tears on air as he attacked “soulless, mindless” President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for slashing funding that has led to youngsters dying.
On Monday’s “The Last Word,” O’Donnell cited a New York Times column that explores the affect of the Trump administration’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a corporation that in 2023 disbursed greater than $43 billion for humanitarian help, financial growth and well being packages all over the world.
The piece, by columnist Nicholas Kristof, referenced Evan Anzoo, a 5-year-old boy from South Sudan born with HIV. He was “a child as precious as yours or mine,” Kristof wrote.
The orphan was being saved alive by medicines that price lower than 12 cents per day, Kristof reported, funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR has been credited with saving greater than 25 million lives since being launched by President George W. Bush.
But PEPFAR has been a sufferer of Trump’s deep cuts to abroad help. By early March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the purge of the six-decade-old company, wrote on social media that 83% of USAID packages had been reduce.
O’Donnell famous that Rubio had advised Congress that “no children are dying on my watch” because of the cuts.
But Kristof prompt in any other case, reporting that Evan’s situation weakened and he died from an opportunistic an infection after his medicines had been reduce.
“Evan died on [Rubio’s] watch,” mentioned O’Donnell, who quickly began to choke up. “Evans of all ages are dying on Marco Rubio’s watch, and no one is counting. And so we don’t know as of tonight whether it’s tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Evans, but we know it will be.”
O’Donnell moved on to a New York Times column headlined “Elon Musk’s Legacy is Disease, Starvation and Death,” which cites Boston University analysis detailing how Musk’s cuts to USAID’s price range have led to an estimated 300,000 deaths, most of whom are youngsters.
O’Donnell quoted a line from columnist Michelle Goldberg that argues, “If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered.”
The anchor then went on to check Musk’s butchering of the federal authorities with the humanitarian efforts of fellow billionaire Bill Gates, who has “has devoted his life and his billions” to saving youngsters in Africa.
O’Donnell mentioned this implies Gates’ verdict on the present richest particular person on this planet is “so important and powerful.”
“Bill Gates, the former richest person in the world, said, ‘the picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,’” continued O’Donnell.
He added, “And the picture of the richest person in the world carrying around his drug box of ecstasy, Adderall, psychedelic mushrooms and then taking life-saving drugs away from the poorest people in the world is a picture only Donald Trump could have created.”
O’Donnell ended with a brutal evaluation of Musk and Trump as “soulless, mindless entities.”
Watch the assault on the Trump administration under.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lawrence-odonnell-trump-musk-rubio-foreign-aid_n_683f0a26e4b0c670965500f7