“Taken for Granted”: Lawrence O’Donnell Blasts CNN’s Trump Coverage—and the Media’s Sliding Bar for Outrage

An analysis of a viral monologue, the “Biden clone” post, and the newsroom incentives that keep moving the goalposts.

When Lawrence O’Donnell looked into the MSNBC camera this week, he wasn’t training his fire on a political opponent so much as on a professional neighbor. His target was CNN—and, by extension, a media ecosystem that he says has learned to treat the extraordinary as ordinary when it comes to Donald Trump.

The cue for O’Donnell’s broadside was the latest Trump online spectacle: a repost on Truth Social boosting a baseless claim that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by robotic clones or body doubles. The post—framed by some Republican defenders as “a joke” or mere trolling—fit a familiar pattern of conspiratorial amplification. What pushed O’Donnell over the edge, he argued, wasn’t simply that the claim circulated again. It was how quickly major outlets, in his view, shrugged and moved on.

“Donald Trump is the only president in history,” O’Donnell said, “who can publicly embrace and accept and believe such insanity without immediately provoking a rush of questions…about the sanity of the American president.” In his telling, the strangest part of this story isn’t Trump’s behavior; it’s the way the press treats it as atmospheric noise. “Which means,” he added, “that the insanity of the current American president is now officially taken for granted in the news media.”

The “just a joke” defense—and its limits

Within right-leaning media, the initial defense of Trump’s repost came quickly. Hosts and commentators suggested he was “trolling,” that he didn’t literally believe the claim, and that context matters: a repost isn’t the same as a personal statement. One network anchor framed it this way: yes, it was outlandish, but also obviously tongue-in-cheek—hardly the stuff of a constitutional crisis.

O’Donnell and other critics pushed back on two fronts. First, intent is unknowable and ultimately beside the point; amplification from a former and possibly future president confers visibility and legitimacy on even the most fringe narratives. Second, context is the whole point: a decade-long pattern of elevating conspiracy theories—from birtherism to false accusations about election fraud—changes how “jokes” are heard. If a politician spends years nurturing a conspiratorial audience, the line between satire and signal becomes indistinct.

This is why the “just kidding” framing rings hollow to media critics: it expects audiences to parse irony from a feed that has long trafficked in the opposite. If your brand is gasoline, you don’t get to insist you were only flicking a decorative lighter.

The false equivalence trap: “Both sides do conspiracies”

Another familiar defense surfaced on CNN in an exchange with former New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu: both parties entertain conspiracy theories, he argued, so none of this is a big deal. The anchor allowed that Democrats have their own fringes too—citing online chatter about Melania Trump body doubles as an example—before acknowledging the comparison isn’t perfect.

To O’Donnell’s camp, this is exactly the problem: the temptation to launder asymmetry into symmetry. A rumor trafficked by anonymous accounts is not the same as a claim amplified by a party leader. False equivalence doesn’t require equal content, only equal framing. When “a president reposts a clone hoax” becomes “politics gets silly on both sides,” the public loses the ability to weigh stakes and sources.

Media ethicists have a simple diagnostic here: Who is making the claim? What is their power? What is the evidence? And how is the platform responding? In that light, “a random meme about a First Lady’s body double” and “a presidential candidate boosting a false execution/clone narrative” don’t occupy the same rung of responsibility.

CNN in the crosshairs

O’Donnell’s sharper complaint targeted CNN’s programming priorities. He argued that the network devoted weeks to parsing Biden’s mental acuity—panel after panel, special segments, banner headlines—but offered nothing comparable when Trump amplified the clone hoax. Whether or not that description is entirely fair, the critique lands because it maps onto broader industry incentives: coverage follows novelty and perceived vulnerability. Biden’s age produces fresh footage, new stumbles to dissect; Trump’s rhetorical outrages, by contrast, are chronic—less “new” than “more of the same.”

The result is a paradox. The more frequently Trump detonates norms, the less each detonation feels newsworthy. What would have been an unprecedented presidential scandal in 2012 is an afternoon shrug in 2025. Editors don’t ignore the stories; they simply slot them into a hardened template—one more bullet point in a familiar list. That habituation—call it the outrage treadmill—has two effects: it lowers the bar for what counts as “breaking,” and it frees newsrooms to prioritize what’s fresh over what’s important.

Normalization by repetition

There’s a term for this: normalization by repetition. When extreme behavior recurs often enough, the burden of proof shifts from “why is no one reacting?” to “what would justify reacting again?” In practice, this means the same claim can be news on Monday and non-news by Thursday—not because it matters less, but because it seems less novel.

O’Donnell’s monologue attempted to reverse that drift, insisting that “insanity taken for granted” is a news story in its own right. He wasn’t just admonishing CNN. He was warning colleagues everywhere that newsroom sense organs can dull under constant exposure. When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the audience slowly learns to accept it too.

The historical ledger of conspiracies

The MSNBC host also placed the clone post into a longer ledger of Trump-aligned conspiracies, many of which Trump has advanced or flirted with over the years: birtherism about Barack Obama, doubts about the 2020 election, insinuations about Paul Pelosi’s assault, musings about South Africa, Epstein-Clinton conspiracies, and more. Whether Trump “truly believes” each item is less important than the consistent tactic: platforming fringe narratives as entertainment or grievance fuel, then retreating behind irony or ambiguity when challenged.

For the press, that tactic poses a persistent calibration problem. Treat the claims seriously, and you risk laundering nonsense into mainstream debate. Ignore them, and you cede the field to virality. Mock them, and you may harden the defenses of those who feel sneered at rather than persuaded. There is no perfect solution—only better and worse versions of context, clarity, and proportion.

When the stakes aren’t theoretical: O’Donnell’s turn to policy and lives

Midway through the segment, O’Donnell pivoted from the meta—how TV talks about Trump—to the material: how policy choices reverberate in lives. He told a story about a boy he called Evan, a child whose life depended on anti-retroviral medication that global health programs have long delivered for pennies a day. He connected cuts and freezes in humanitarian aid to cascades of suffering far from Washington, citing commentary that estimated large death tolls attributable to funding shortfalls.

Whatever viewers make of the specific attributions and numbers—some of which remain contested—the rhetorical move was unmistakable. O’Donnell wanted to contrast the media’s fixation on the performative (clone posts, trolling, the never-ending sport of cable wars) with the quiet arithmetic of budgets and supply chains. “The richest country in the world,” he said, “decided it couldn’t afford 12 cents to save a child’s life.” He grew visibly emotional. The studio, for a beat, felt less like a set than a pulpit.

Critics will argue that cable monologues shouldn’t double as moral indictments. Supporters will counter that moral clarity is exactly what’s missing in the churn—especially when policy debates are abstracted into line-items and horse-race odds. Either way, O’Donnell’s close took aim at the same core problem his open did: desensitization. If the press can normalize the absurd, politics can normalize the cruel.

What, exactly, does the press owe the public here?

Strip away the partisan labels and O’Donnell’s claims boil down to two questions newsrooms must answer every day:

How do you cover repeated norm-breaking without numbing your audience—or yourself?
Possible responses include rotation (different angles each time), explanation (re-contextualizing patterns, not just incidents), and proportionality (resisting the siren call of false balance).
How do you weigh spectacle against stakes?
Viral posts generate clicks. Budget footnotes move lives. The craft challenge is to tell the second story with the urgency of the first, without letting the first crowd out the second.

To that end, there are practical steps editors can take when leaders traffic in conspiracies: foreground provenance (who made the claim), supply epistemic context (is there evidence?), separate the fact check from the megaphone (don’t blast the claim in a headline), and explain the pattern (how this fits a history of similar tactics). When discussing “both sides,” anchor the comparison in power, not just content. A mayor’s rumor and a president’s repost are not equals.

CNN’s bind—and everyone else’s

Even if you grant O’Donnell’s critique, CNN’s conundrum is real. Over-cover every Trump post and you risk becoming a reaction engine for a candidate who thrives on attention. Under-cover them and you risk complicity in normalization. Focus on Biden’s age and you’re charged with asymmetry; focus on Trump’s feed and you’re charged with obsession. There is no path that won’t anger half the audience. There are only paths that honor the mission of informing them.

That mission is not “equal time for all outrages.” It is truth, context, accountability, and scale. If a story matters more, it gets more space. If a claim is baseless, it is labeled as such—without euphemism. If a leader repeats conspiracies, that repetition is the story, not the excuse to stop telling it.

The cost of shrugging

The risk O’Donnell highlights isn’t that people will believe a clone hoax en masse. It’s that they’ll stop expecting the office of the presidency to behave like an office governed by norms. Every unremarked violation inches the bar lower. Every unchallenged absurdity adjusts the calibration of seriousness. Over time, citizens forget what normal looked like; journalists forget, too.

In that environment, the outrageous becomes background radiation and the consequential becomes a footnote. The spectacle fills the frame; the stakes squeeze out of it. It’s a media problem, but not only a media problem. It’s a civic one.

What happens next

Will CNN—or any major outlet—change course because of a monologue? Probably not, at least not overnight. But newsroom cultures shift the way climates do: imperceptibly, then all at once. A memo here, an editorial meeting there, a new headline style, a different rundown order. O’Donnell’s critique adds pressure to that slow tectonic drift, reminding peers that audience fatigue is not a defense for editorial timidity.

As another campaign season accelerates, the press will face the same temptations it failed or bested in cycles past: false balance, outrage addiction, and the surrender of judgment to traffic. The stakes will be the same, too: whether the public sees politics as a series of unserious memes or as decisions that decide who thrives and who suffers.

In the end, O’Donnell’s monologue offered two lenses for the same reality. One is the feed—posts designed to entertain, to provoke, to bait the gatekeepers. The other is the ledger—lines in budgets, doses in clinics, children who live or don’t because of what the richest country funds or doesn’t. Which lens dominates in news coverage is not a neutral choice. It’s the choice that tells the country what to care about.

“Sometimes the last word,” he has said on quieter nights, “doesn’t belong to the loudest voice in the room.” If the press remembers that, then maybe the next time a leader boosts a lie for clicks, the headline won’t be the lie—it will be the choice to sell it. And the story right beneath it will be about the child whose life is worth more than 12 cents and more than any politician’s need to be entertained.