Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday highlighted how Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed — who is set to become the first Muslim U.S. senator — offered the “simplest way” to describe the “most important thing” about the big blue wave on election night.
The MS NOW host, who weighed in on clips from an array of Democrats’ speeches as the results poured in, noted that the progressive faced vicious, false attacks like “no other” Senate candidate in U.S. history before rolling a clip of his message to parents and children who paid attention to the race.
“To all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost,” said El-Sayed, referring to Donald Trump calling to him by his middle name, Mohamed.
O’Donnell reacted to the Democrat’s three-word midterm verdict, likening it to “the movie ending we all grew up with.”
He pointed to times that Americans didn’t know “how long the movie turned out to be,” like when Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 election ended two years later due to the Watergate scandal as dozens of his allies went to prison.
“And then we knew once again that the bad guys lost in the end,” he said.
“That wasn’t supposed to just be in the movies; that was supposed to be the American way.”
O’Donnell pointed to Trump’s 2016 win, 2020 loss and eventual 2024 comeback “in a version of a movie we’ve never seen.”
“And so, for a 15-year-old boy in America listening to Sen.-elect El-Sayed last night, the idea that the bad guys lost is not that 15-year-old boy’s lived experience except in the movies — especially if that little boy is in one of the communities in this country that Donald Trump viciously attacks on a daily basis,” he said.
“And so for those of us who became unmoored from that safe American belief, that the bad guys lose in the end, it could be hard to believe that it was really happening last night. That could be part of why people are struggling to, as they say, wrap their heads around it. And then we heard a new senator say it: ‘The bad guys lost.’”
He added, “And then we could feel it, the bad guys lost, and then we could know where we really are in this drama.”