Lawrence O'Donnell

Last Standing Truth Man

I’m not one for hero worship. I’ve seen too many fall out of the sky like shot birds—wings clipped by scandal, hubris, or just the collapse of a once-vital news cycle. But in the evening’s cold final stretch, when the headlines are spent and the howling pundits have retreated into their algorithmic dens, one voice still rolls in steady and sharp: Lawrence O’Donnell.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still clock in for Nicole Wallace—her deft weave of insider clarity and pointed calm reminds me politics wasn’t always about carnival barkers and bloodsport. And when 7 p.m. hits without Joy Reid, it’s like a jazz quartet missing its lead horn. Jim Acosta? He’s CNN’s cautionary tale. Toasted and buttered and now gone. Jake Tapper? Roadkill on the highway of journalistic purpose. You can toss Joe Scarborough in that same ditch—smiling and mumbling about bipartisanship like it’s 1997.

The media landscape has fractured into a thousand shards—Substack sages, podcast prophets, YouTube crusaders, and TikTok truth-slingers. MeidasTouch. George Conway. IHIP News. Tennessee Brando howling from a cabin in the Appalachian fog. Carville’s still out here spinning like a Cajun cyclone, bless him with James Hunt. And the Bulwark boys sip bean sauce and tell tales of GOP ghosts. It’s a new kingdom, my friend, and the court jesters are now the kings.

Yet Lawrence stands apart.

Here’s the thing—O’Donnell is not a newsreader. He’s a playwright. A former Senate staffer who can lace together legislation and lie with equal fluency. He’s cut from that rare cloth—part Edward R. Murrow, part Shakespearean monologist. Each night, he enters like a man with purpose, not posture. There’s no faux outrage, no commercial jingle smile. Just the scalpel. And the truth.

COVID made us all stop and stare into the abyss of the screen. We recalibrated—ditched the cable box for a Roku and a reckoning. But some habits survived. For me, it’s Lawrence. He’s the one who reminds you: a lie isn’t a slip of the tongue. A lie is an arrow to democracy’s chest. A sexual abuser in the White House isn’t your “eccentric uncle”—he’s the predator at the gate. And O’Donnell? He names it.

He strips away the pomp. Scrapes the gilded paint from the Senate floor and shows you the rotting timber underneath. And somehow, he does this while still soothing the pain. He speaks not just about the privileged but to the people they trample. He reminds us we are not insane. That reality hasn’t folded in on itself.

Born in Boston, the son of an attorney and an office manager, Lawrence O'Donnell was shaped by Irish Catholic discipline and the intellect of Harvard. He cut his teeth on Capitol Hill, working as an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and then drew on that experience as a writer and producer on The West Wing—an insider who never forgot the importance of clean lines and clear intent. You hear it in every sentence he delivers on MSNBC: law, order, justice, poetry.

And yet, I still ask—how does he survive? How does he keep his spot in a world that has exiled Terry Moran to network purgatory, that dangled Joy Reid over the gallows, that turned Jim Acosta into yesterday’s caricature? Is it MSNBC’s mercy? Or just that O’Donnell’s the last adult left in the room?

Whatever it is, I’ll take it. I’ll keep him in that final slot before Kimmel swings in with the absurd, before Colbert tilts the world just enough to laugh, before Jon Stewart locks us in a bear hug of righteous rage. Lawrence is the closer. The steady hand. The political coroner.

He’s not here to comfort power. He’s here to whisper in its ear—remember, you’re mortal.

And that, my friend, is the last word.