ALSO BY KEITH OLBERMANN
Pitchforks and Torches
Truth and Consequences
The Worst Person in the World
The Big Show
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Copyright © 2017 by Keith Olbermann
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Olbermann, Keith, author.
Title: Trump is f*cking crazy : (this is not a joke) / Keith Olbermann.
Other titles: Trump is fucking crazy
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017028965 | ISBN 9780525533863 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533887 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– . | United States—Politics and government—2016– . | Presidents—United States—Election—2016.
Classification: LCC E913 .O43 2017 | DDC 973.933092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028965
p. cm.
Version_1
In memory of Ted and Marie Olbermann, who would be way more pissed off than their son is
Contents
Also by Keith Olbermann
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
PART I
Before: THE CLOSER
CHAPTER 1 • SEPTEMBER 2016
176 Reasons Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be President
The Rumormongering About Hillary’s Health Is . . . Deplorable
The Deplorables Redeploy
King Lear
Assassination
Is Trump Loyal to the United States?
The Atlantic Wall
CHAPTER 2 • October 2016
Trump and Dogs
The Election Is Inviolable, Trump
Donald Trump’s Top Fifty Excuses
“Because You’d Be in Jail”
Trump’s Thirty Craziest Debate Events
Camps, with Concentration
Meltdown
From Russia with Love
To Trump’s Supporters: You Know This Man
Give Us Your Answer!
Imagine
To Johnson and Stein Supporters
To Hillary Clinton Voters
To Women Voting for Trump
Trump Praises Another Dictator
Worse Than Watergate
CHAPTER 3 • November 2016, pre–Election Day
The Trumpchurian Candidate
Descending from the Clouds
Trump TV—You Think It’s for When He Loses?
Goddamned Fascist Morons
Another Fucking Trump Lie
National Suicide
The Terrorists Have Won
PART II
After: THE RESISTANCE
CHAPTER 4 • November 2016, post–Election Day
Post-Election, The Closer Becomes The Resistance
Pretend
Alien and Sedition
Twenty-five, Section 4
Madness
A Reply to Trump’s Video
CHAPTER 5 • December 2016
We Have Elected an Idiot
We Have Elected a Shitty Businessman
Batman Villains
Russia
“I’m, Like, a Smart Person”
The Electoral College and the Compromise of 2016
The President-Elect and Treason
Social Security
CHAPTER 6 • January 2017
What Did Trump Know and When Did He Stop Knowing It?
Message to a Trump Supporter
He Cannot Leave It Alone
Guns and Trump
Answer the Question, Trump
Packing the Court of Public Opinion
Boycott the Inauguration
Keynote Speech to Meeting of Democracy Matters
Another Message to His Supporters—It’s Time for Trump to Resign
The Media Is Going to Have to Rethink Its Relationship with Trump Here
The Apology
CHAPTER 7 • February 2017
Trump Has Now Aided ISIS
The Top Fifty Crazy and/or Impeachable Things Done by Trump Since the Inauguration
For Trump Supporters: Meet Fatemah
The Arrest of Michael Thomas Flynn
Guadalupe García de Rayos
Are These People High or What?
The Suicide of a Presidency
Intel
He Must Go
Tell It to the Grand Jury
Call Them What They Are: A Muslim Ban and a Purge of Hispanics
CHAPTER 8 • March 2017
The Cocoon and Anosognosia
Russia, Continued
The Conspiracy Peddler in Chief
That Speech Aged Well
Seven Years
Russia, Russia, Russia
Russia/Wiretap/Comey Testimony
Donald Trump, Loser
I Alone Can Break It
First to Flip Gets Less Jail Time
Could Trump Pass a Sanity Test?
CHAPTER 9 • April 2017
Trump Is Panicking over Russia
Flynn and the Dog That Did Nothing in the Nighttime
So—New Election?
The Syria Stunt
A Message to President Jackass
The Tale of the Tape
The President Is Getting Crazier
A Gilded Coach, You Say?
The White House Russia Cover-Up
What Are We Doing?
The One Hundred Days Are Really Just Sixty
CHAPTER 10 • May 2017
Trump’s Plan: Sue Dissenters
Trump Is Panicking Again About Russia
A Plea to the Free World: For God’s Sake, Ask Trump!
The Health Care Repeal
Yates Proves Trump’s Treason
Follow the Money
You Cannot Fire the Man Who Is Investigating You
An Appeal to the World’s Intelligence Services
The Trump-Russia Cover-up Case
“Some Kind of Paranoid Delusion”
The Tape
When Will Russia “Break”?
The Arrest of Jared Kushner
CHAPTER 11 • June 2017
There Are But Two Parties Now
Anybody Else Would’ve Been Fired by Now
When Donnie Met Sergey
Trump Is Now Under Investigation for Collusion and Obstruction of Justice
>
What Was That Again About Russian Hookers?
Self-Destruction
Does Trump Have Tapes? Does Anybody?
Firing the Special Counsel
The Appeasement of Trump
Epilogue
Photography Credits
About the Author
Introduction
Before my flabby, almost flatulent words about Donald Trump were out of my mouth, I knew Bill Maher was going to beat the crap out of me for saying them.
This was November 6, 2015. To alter a soon-to-be cliché, I had been taking Trump literally but not seriously and figured the Republicans would do what they always did: poll crazy but nominate boring. But now I found myself on Maher’s HBO show, hopelessly lost in a Trump story. I had mentioned that I’d first met him in 1984 and had since run into him in the hallways of NBC as well as the lobby of the apartment building that bore his name where I owned a condo. I had observed that—contrary to this hybrid of Huey Long, Mussolini, and Buzz Windrip that seemed to inhabit Trump’s body during the campaign—the conversations were low-key, rational, pleasant each time I had talked to him. Even accounting for the likelihood that he was sucking up to me because you don’t want an unhappy condo owner with a public profile, these conversations were, stunningly, about me and not him. He had even written me a fan letter at ESPN.
I was confessing to Maher of having been conned.
I could not stop the self-incrimination. Even though I managed to express the point that the two personalities—Benito Trumpolini and Eddie Trump-Haskell—were both incredibly convincing and the longer he used them both, the less it mattered which was the “real” Trump, I knew Bill; after all, we’d originally run into each other in college in 1978—and within seconds we were arguing, with him calling me a “corporate sellout” at a juncture in my life when all the corporations in the history of the world had paid me about $100 in total. Now, thirty-seven years later, Maher was going to call me a lot worse than a corporate sellout.
Only, he didn’t.
He completely agreed with me.
He couldn’t have agreed more with me and my assessment of Trump’s in-person non-Mussolinism had he said, “Golly gumption, Keith, you’re right, he was super neato pleasant!”
That was my Trumpian tipping point.
I was born with a pretty solid bullshit detector, honed by twenty years covering sports for a living and nearly twenty more after that covering politics and news and sports, often all at the same time. But Bill’s bullshit detector was so much better than mine that it was weaponized—and somehow even he had been taken in by Trump. If you see the video of my appearance that night on Bill’s show you’ll notice a little tic in my left eye as it registers in my head: Trump was able to fool Maher?
When I walked off his stage that night, the thoughts came as fast and as loud as any I had ever had. It wasn’t implausible that Trump had conned me. But Trump had conned Maher? Those aren’t two integrated personalities Trump wears interchangeably like different penis-draping ties. These are manifestations of acute mental illness. Trump isn’t just a scam artist and he isn’t merely a reincarnated P. T. Barnum. This is a psychopath. This is a clear and present danger. Soylent Green is people. They’re after you, they’re after all of us, our wives, our children, everyone! They’re here already! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell! You’re gonna need a bigger boat!
I’ll spare you the full details of the process that ten months later led to my election-year commentary series that was supposed to keep the car alarm bleating and help my old nemesis Hillary Clinton seal her victory. Besides me, there was one other guy who was asking the question “Why isn’t Olbermann doing commentaries about this?” and he was Geoff Gagnon, the articles editor at GQ magazine. At our first meeting about doing a series we called it The Closer because we were still beholden to pre-11/8 thinking that all Hillary needed was somebody to close the deal for her.
*
When the perfect Russian storm hit and the nightmare came to life on Election Day, Geoff and I, and GQ’s video executive producer, Dorenna Newton, and photographer-editor Peter Calvin and Noel Howard and Luke Leifeste and the rest of the crew talked for literally a couple of minutes about shutting the thing down. And then we all said: To hell with that, so what if this will be used against us in court, after two months of this guy we aren’t going to get a trial—and we renamed the series The Resistance and persisted.
The commentary scripts were not designed as a narrative of the closing stages of the campaign and the opening months of this Ray Bradbury Funhouse Mirror of a presidency. But when I read them in order, it was shocking to me how they formed themselves into one. It’s like digesting a diary rescued from the Titanic and actually finding yourself hoping against your better judgment that this time the damn boat won’t hit the damn iceberg.
I’d love to say I planned it that way, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s been noted anywhere, but views for each commentary began to rival, then surpass, the high-water-mark ratings of cable news—the total audience for the series eventually exceeded 300 million. I never got a dime out of the videos—I asked GQ only for a few charitable contributions in my name and some (much-needed) fashion help. I hoped all along that the project would be put out of business because the grown-ups would ultimately stop this lunatic from being elected, or from being confirmed by the Electoral College, or from being sworn in, or from not being removed by the fourth clause of the Twenty-fifth Amendment the first time he showed he was crazier than Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, and Ted Cruz put together.
Tragically, there weren’t any grown-ups, only opportunists who were too busy leveraging Trump’s election to their own advantage for political power or ratings or for paying off mortgages. Crazy old John Brown hastened the coming Civil War and said the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away but with blood. I don’t think we’re nearly at that point—yet—but I’m just as confident as he was, that the crimes of this self-absorbed land will never be purged away but with everything from Lexuses to the repossession of personal freedoms.
This may seem like an odd point to make here, but bear with me for a moment. By marriage and adoption, I’m Mike Tyson’s distant cousin (he was adopted by his first trainer and manager, Cus D’Amato; D’Amato’s late niece Gerry was my uncle’s wife). Thirty years ago, Trump—who was then involved in the boxing-promotion business because of his casino venues—and the infamous promoter Don King squeezed Cus’s protégé trainer Kevin Rooney and other D’Amato disciples out of Tyson’s coterie. They also told Mike—forgive me, cousin Mike—that he was the champ now and he no longer had to do the things that Cus and Kevin used to insist he do. You know, like taking the cocktail of medications that kept him surprisingly stable and unexpectedly kind and even sweet-hearted but harshed his buzz, or sticking to a diet, or training, or not attacking people, or not giving away $200,000 cars to strangers. King and Trump came into a situation that was seemingly permanently under control, disabled the brakes and busted the headlights and painted over the speed-limit signs, and within a few years, Tyson was in prison, convicted of rape.
The point of this book is to chronicle how Trump managed to get America to choose him to do to our country what Trump helped do to my cousin Mike. These commentaries are about what Trump’s mixture of illness, hucksterism, amorality, and manipulative cunning has done to the United States, so I won’t belabor you with some long meta-analysis right here. But I will say that I suspect you’ll reach the same kind of conclusion I did after reading all these scripts at once. Trump’s immeasurable ego and his “Wheeee! The Rules Don’t Apply to Meeeeee!” attitude (which mirrors the bravado of the opioid abuser—plus whatever else is wrong with him) found a partner in that less than half of the electorate that ultimately doesn’t give a shit about anybody they don’t know personally (and not a lot of people they do know personally, either).
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br /> Trump gives them permission to ignore whatever principles they might have. Trump gives them permission to believe that laws and invoices and religions apply only to others. Trump gives even the lower-incomed among them confirmation that they can act with vengeance against the less fortunate because he’s going to make his “fans” rich. Trump gives them the right to dispute facts. Trump gives them the right to ignore warnings. Trump gives them the right to hate. Trump gives them the right to stop doing what other people and common sense and common decency tell them to do. Trump gives them the right to say, “We don’t have to have any more black people or women running this country.” Trump gives them the right to do what he does when he’s caught lying, stealing, obstructing, or selling out the country: just make up a cover story, the wilder the better—the rubes will believe it. Trump gives them the right to be stupid and goddamned proud of it.
Just remember as you read, that this can be fixed whenever we will it. We who have seen him for what he is, and fought him and the driving-morally-drunk America still cheering him, are not some fringe group scuttling in the darkness.
We are the majority.
Let’s act like it.
PART I
Before:
I’M KEITH OLBERMANN and this is
THE
CLOSER
Chapter 1
SEPTEMBER 2016
176 REASONS DONALD TRUMP SHOULDN’T BE PRESIDENT
Post date • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
In brief, the Trump presidential campaign so far:
The Republican Party has actually nominated for president a man who attacked the Pope.
Who attacked John McCain for being captured by the North Vietnamese.
Who attacked Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan and then juxtaposed their names with the phrase “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”
Who attacked Hillary Clinton as a “bigot.”
Who attacked her as “brainwashed.” As “unhinged.” As “a monster.” As “the devil.” As “the most corrupt candidate ever”—showing her face on piles of hundred-dollar bills and the Star of David.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 1