I have to praise Lawrence O’Donnell once again. I listen to his 10 p.m. program on MS NOW quite often. I do so in part because he is usually entertaining. And in part because I usually agree with what he is saying.

I don’t look at O’Donnell’s program as a news program. It is more like listening to an editorial page, or listening to a series of op-eds. I say this because O’Donnell does not portray himself as a neutral, as someone being fully objective and putting out both (or all) sides of a story. He is giving you his point of view. And he has very definite opinions on a variety of subjects.

One of those subjects that O’Donnell is passionate, and very opinionated, about is Donald Trump. O’Donnell (this is my interpretation) views Donald Trump as a powerful and dangerous clown, who just happens to be the president of the United States. Clowns, in general, often have two aspects: the comic, and the frightening. Donald Trump, as discussed by Lawrence O’Donnell clearly is comprised of both.

I am not saying this to, in any way, be critical of O’Donnell. Just the opposite. Because I find that Lawrence O’Donnell, in his descriptions of Donald Trump, tends to be quite accurate. He is accurate in reporting of instances from Trump’s history, in reporting the events of the day, and, most importantly perhaps, in reporting what is going to happen in the future.

Believe it or not, there is a Wikipedia entry called “Trump Always Chickens Out”. This first time I heard this phrase, I think, was on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, and I guessed that he probably coined the phrase. Apparently, not. Apparently, it was coined by Robert Armstrong, who writes for the Financial Times, on May 2, 2025, exactly one month after Trump’s self-declared Liberation Day, the day that Trump issued an executive order describing a large number of tariffs that the country would soon be imposing world-wide in order to counterbalance barriers to American exports. Within two days, the DOW index lost about 4,000 points, and Trump announced that the tariffs declared on April 2 would not be implemented. Trump’s abrupt about face led to the phrase “TACO Trump”, or “Trump Always Chickens Out”.

In late May, on one of his programs, Lawrence O’Donnell used the phrase after saying “Trump, the stupidest and most cowardly president in American history, backed down again”. Yes, O’Donnell does not hide his feelings, but he kept saying that, night after night and week after week, that the world should ignore various Trump threats, and various Trump promises, because he was never going to follow through with them. And, to my knowledge, each time that O’Donnell would make such a statement, he proved to be correct.

Most recently, O’Donnell used the TACO description to explain what was going to happen about Greenland. He told European leaders that they shouldn’t panic; they shouldn’t even be worried. When people talked about a possible military invasion, O’Donnell scoffed: “It is never going to happen”. When the question arose as to how Trump was going to work it that the United States wound up with the possession of Greenland, O’Donnell said not to concern yourself with it: “It is never going to happen”. When journalists from around the world began to alight in Greenland, he thought news outlets were wasting their resources: “It is never going to happen.” When Donald Trump issued his threats to Denmark and the EU and NATO about how determined the U.S. was to take Greenland, and how he would not take no for an answer, and how Greenland, as an island in the western hemisphere, should be off limits to Europeans, O’Donnell said: “It is never going to happen”.

Yesterday, Trump, speaking at Davos, gave his usual bombastic and threatening speech, warning the Europeans that he was going to acquire Greenland, and that in fact Greenland had already been taken by the United States during the second World War, and had been “foolishly” given back to Denmark by this country after the war ended. In this speech, Trump (perhaps surprisingly to most) took military invasion off his agenda (although, with Trump, things can change on a dime), but said that there were other ways to insure that Greenland became American, including of course (since Trump no longer does anything for the first time) a two stage imposition of tariffs, first on February 1 and then in June.

It was only about two or three hours later that Trump on Truth Social (no, I do not look at Truth Social) announced that he and Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of NATO, had come up with (something like) the framework of a concept of an outline of a possible, potential arrangement for Greenland, and that not only was a possible military intervention off the table, so were the proposed European tariffs.

It was a good, straight-man setup for Lawrence O’Donnell. Not only was he proven right that Trump was not going to launch a military attack on Greenland (and he ruthlessly criticized the rest of the media for paying any attention to the threat in the first place), but Trump was not going to impose the tariffs he declared were on their way (Trump Always Chickens Out), and he was doing this only with the framework of a concept of an outline of a possible, potential arrangement for Greenland, which – to O’Donnell – will never amount to anything significant.

Of course, it is easy (if you have the right staffs or search engines) to come up with instance after instance where Trump has said something like “and you will see what exactly we are proposing within two weeks” and nothing happens. The most obvious example would be in years of talking about a health care plan to succeed Obamacare. Last night, O’Donnell went back ten years, showing Trump on a dais talking about people who had suggested that Melania had come into the country illegally. Trump poo-pooed that suggestion and said, to counter it and put it to bed once and for all, Melania will within the next few days hold a news conference to explain exactly how she entered the country. O’Donnell says that it has been ten years since Trump promised that, and that he is still waiting.

Perhaps we will hear more about Greenland today. Whatever might be said about it, my guess is that tonight Lawrence O’Donnell’s reaction will be, “I told you so”.