President Donald Trump, master of schadenfreude? That was what MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow suggested on Monday’s episode of The Last Word. O’Donnell, under the influence of a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, claimed that the indictments of his political opponents were all that Trump cared about. “It comes down to - for Donald Trump, it comes down to, just get them indicted. That is the minimum that is good enough for him. He just wants to see them go through that pain,” O’Donnell proclaimed to Maddow during their hand off. In their coverage, the two so-called journalists missed one crucial fact present in these cases - the DOJ can only indict someone if they have some evidence that the person committed a federal crime. Trump did not sit on any of the federal grand juries that passed the indictments, and he was not the one facing his political rivals in court. That was the job of federal prosecutors. But that wasn’t the sense you’d get if you listened to Maddow’s assertion that these indictments were “a window into the wizened soul of Donald Trump and what he's trying to do as he attempts an authoritarian takeover of our country and the destruction of our Constitution.”      Article III, Section Two of the United States Constitution states that “the judicial Power shall extend to all Cases. . . affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers, and Consuls.” James, as New York Attorney General, counted as a “public Minister,” so she was indeed under the Constitutional authority of “the judicial Power.” Being a leftist and/or a woman of color didn’t make her immune to accountability, no matter what the Democrat Party may wish. Any administration that didn’t investigate or prosecute people like James merely because of political loyalties would be closer to destroying the Constitution than an administration that did.  Maddow, in a delightful example of myopic hypocrisy, also accused the Trump DOJ of bringing “vindictive prosecution[s].” Call her Dory, because she seemed to have already forgotten the vindictive prosecutions brought against Trump during the interim Biden period, when Democrats brought a myriad of charges against the then-former President solely in an attempt to smear him and prevent him from running for office again. The entire liberal media adored figures like Letitia James solely for her anti-Trump prosecutions, then they made her a martyr when the DOJ indicted her in 2025 for bank fraud. Her sainthood status has remained with her even after the charges were dropped. The leftist media will fall over themselves to lavish praise over anyone who positions themselves as anti-Trump. The list was endless -- Letitia James, James Comey, Fani Willis, John Bolton, and so on. Democrats would even defend real Nazis like Graham Platner and crackheads like Hunter Biden, as long as they subscribe to their radical leftist ideology.  Whatever “pain” these indictments may cause those who hounded Trump, they were the ones who unsheathed the sword with their own ruthless prosecutions for political purposes. The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read: MS NOW's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell 6/22/26 10:01:00 (...) LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: So, Rachel, you were talking about the strain, the difficulty of being indicted in the Trump universe that - by the Trump Justice Department.  In the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which I'm going to discuss with the authors, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, they talk about exactly this. Inside the Trump White House when they're talking about getting the indictments on Letitia James. And people are saying 'It's impossible. You can't do it. You can't prove the case.' It comes down to - for Donald Trump, it comes down to, just get them indicted. That is the minimum that is good enough for him. He just wants to see them go through that pain. RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah, and if they're talking about it explicitly like that, it's potentially something that's admissible in a court motion for having a - having an indictment dismissed as a vindictive prosecution.  So it's not only a window into the wizened soul of Donald Trump and what he's trying to do as he attempts an authoritarian takeover of our country and the destruction of our constitution. It's also potentially legally actionable reporting in terms of Trump's enemies being able to turn that around and use it against them - use it against him to defend themselves. (...)