Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke)

by Keith Olbermann

  And Rudy, if you have permission to diagnose Secretary Clinton from videos you saw on the internet—maybe you got it from Trump’s physician, Dr. Vinnie Boombatz—may I suggest that having seen you in person several times over the past fifteen years (to say nothing of all those videos), it sure looks to me from my completely and utterly unqualified position as a not-doctor that you’ve been waging a losing battle against ever-increasing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Rudy Giuliani!

  The only reason he kept the job as chief Clinton health rumormongerer was that, while Newt Gingrich was on the air spewing to Sean Hannity about Clinton’s coughing fits, Gingrich had . . . a coughing fit.

  And Tom Brokaw. Dr. Tom Brokaw! Who in 2008, threatened by the Republicans that their candidate wouldn’t show up to the debate he was moderating unless he got me and Chris Matthews thrown off MSNBC coverage of the debates, not only carried that barrel of GOP water but then boasted about it in the papers . . . Tom Brokaw saying, an hour after the pneumonia overcame Secretary Clinton inside the 9/11 ceremony:

  “Just this morning I had a rather detailed message from a Republican who was inside, and he was raising questions as well, saying, ‘I didn’t know if this is true, but here are the incidents that we are all watching.’ . . . I think that she should go to a hospital, see a neurologist, and get a clean report if it is available to her.”

  Hey, Tom. I worked with you for nine years. Brought you back from the professional dead to work with us on the cable coverage. I think you should go to a mirror and see if you have any journalistic credibility left.

  It was pneumonia.

  Bad! Guess! Tom!

  *

  For crying out loud, Hillary Clinton has been campaigning with pneumonia since at least last Friday, and making more sense per minute than Trump has in his entire campaign.

  “How’s her health?”!

  She’s frickin’ Wonder Woman!

  THE DEPLORABLES REDEPLOY

  Post date • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

  Not to applaud tricks from the poli-sci-fi movie The Manchurian Candidate too loudly, but anybody notice that—five days later—we aren’t debating whether or not Trump supporters are “deplorable”—we’re debating how many of them are?

  And by the way, Hillary Clinton was dead wrong about this.

  “Half”?

  *

  The Trump Gang is trying to pull off the neat trick of making “deplorable” into a red badge of courage while simultaneously scoring martyr points by insisting it was an inappropriate attack.

  It’s not going well.

  Somebody asks Mike “I, Robot” Pence if he would agree merely that David Duke is deplorable, and Pence seems offended by the question and says he’s not in the name-calling business, whereupon his buddy Mike Lee, Republican senator from Utah, tells Pence that he at least must call Duke’s racism deplorable and that the Trump campaign must repudiate the alt-right.

  Then campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tries to pivot away to Hillary’s health by claiming that Secretary Clinton “lied” about her pneumonia. Unfortunately, when pressed about whether Trump should release his full medical records, she seems offended and says that everybody—even Trump—has a “right to privacy”—apparently completely unaware that less than three weeks ago, Trump offered to release his full medical records.

  And while that gaffe is still echoing, the Deplorables again steal the stage. Video spreads of a protester getting grabbed by the neck and punched by a Trump supporter during his speech in Asheville—whereupon they ejected . . . not the choker . . . but the choked.

  And then a sixty-nine-year-old woman, after the same speech, tells a Trump supporter that if Trump gets elected, the guy had better learn Russian, and the first words he should learn should be “ha-ha-ha”—so he decks the woman, who is injured when the punch sends her crashing into her portable oxygen tank.

  And this kinder, gentler Trump campaign—well, it is kinder, gentler: the Trump supporters aren’t all wearing the same-colored shirts yet—this comes the same week the hapless campaign manager number three (perhaps out of four), Conway, had convinced her boss to do fewer big events with dangerous crowds, and thus tamp down all the noise about “deplorable.”

  *

  What was that Hillary Clinton said about them again?

  “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

  Annnnnnd . . . your point?

  *

  But forget the supporters for a moment . . .

  What about the advocates?

  Racist?

  A co-chair of Trump’s campaign in New York, Carl Paladino, former Republican nominee for governor, on Twitter: “Lynch Loretta Lynch.” It was a typo by a staffer, they explained. Ah, but six years ago he sent out a video of an African tribal dance. The email was titled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal.”

  Sexist?

  Trump himself talking about Megyn Kelly? Or Mika Brzezinski? Or Heidi Cruz? Or Carly Fiorina?

  Homophobic?

  Robert Jeffress, the Texas megachurch pastor who led the prayer at a Trump rally in June, a year after he said gay rights “will pave the way for that future world dictator, the Antichrist, to persecute and martyr Christians without any repercussions whatsoever”?

  Islamophobic?

  The New York co-chair Paladino again, on Khizr Khan: “I mean, if he’s a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or supporting the ISIS type of attitude against America, there’s no reason for Donald Trump to have to honor this man.”

  And xenophobic?

  Ubiquitous campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, four years ago: “Perfect Obama’s dad born in Africa, Mitt Romney’s dad born in Mexico. Any pure breeds left?”

  If you say “pure breeds” and you’re not in a Harry Potter film or at a dog show, you have a screw loose.

  These are campaign leaders, surrogates, friends of Mr. Trump—if they’re not talking to a basket of deplorables, who are they talking to?

  Why would you have them there? You say stuff like that at work, you get fired. You say it at school, you get suspended.

  But happily, Trump is there to say, “No, it’s okay to hate. Better than that, you can hate out loud! We’ll just call it ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘Make America Great Again’!”

  *

  Secretary Clinton originally postulated that half of Trump supporters were not deplorable.

  And that’s where she screwed up.

  Because if you support Trump . . .

  If you think he should be president regardless of how much he and his advocates hate . . . and mock . . . and punch old women with portable oxygen canisters . . .

  If you’re not condemning this madness and repudiating these deplorable people and you are not racist, or sexist or homophobic or xenophobic or Islamophobic . . .

  If you’re supporting him not for those things but in spite of them . . .

  You are even more deplorable.

  The correct number, Secretary Clinton, is not 50 percent . . .

  But a hundred!

  KING LEAR

  Post date • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20

  Beware the demagogue who knows everything.

  Because nearly every demagogue, ever, has actually known . . . nothing.

  Donald Trump is a demagogue.

  You tweet him that I just called him this.

  Then tweet him again, explaining to him what a demagogue is.

  This is a demagogue.

  Late last Saturday, a dumpster blew up on Twenty-third Street in New York.

  The perfect 2016 campaign analogy, of course.

  Also the perfect opportunity for Donald J. Trump, Demagogue, to, per the definition, be “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational a
rgument.”

  So he got off his plane in Colorado Springs and told the crowd there that “a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on. But boy, we are living in a time—we better get very tough, folks. We better get very, very tough. . . . It’s a terrible thing that’s going on in our world, in our country, and we are going to get tough and smart and vigilant.”

  Trump said that before any official had confirmed it was a bomb.

  Before any expert, literally, could have any idea what was going on.

  He couldn’t wait.

  He couldn’t wait literally because he is a compulsive talker, a gossiping child.

  He couldn’t wait metaphorically because he clearly knows that terrorist attacks benefit him. He needs them. Alone in this country, to him they are preferable to—you know—no more terrorism. They fit his product: this vast, free-floating sense of panic and the need for vigilance—or is the right word “vigilantism”?—that he is so successfully selling.

  It had to be a bomb.

  It had to be evidence of the vast plot against his voters that—to use his words—only he can fix.

  “Nobody knows what’s going on,” Donald Trump said.

  *

  True.

  Least of all . . . Donald Trump.

  “We’re going to have to do something extremely tough,” he said Monday morning.

  “Like what?” he was asked by the other guy accused by Gretchen Carlson.

  “Over there. Like, knock the hell out of them. And we have to get everybody together and we have to lead for a change, because we’re not knocking them . . .”

  Trump has no idea what to do except “knock them.”

  There’s no plan, secret or otherwise.

  There is nothing he is concealing.

  There is no deal for him to make.

  Trump! Confused?

  Actually, Trump is just Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  “I will have such revenges on you both

  that all the world shall—I will do such things!,—

  What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

  The terrors of the earth.”

  No plan, no clue.

  Just a lot of “knocking them.”

  *

  Donald Trump has had no plan against terrorism, ISIS or otherwise, for a long time.

  He has been doing his “terrors of the earth” King Lear bit for at least sixteen months, when in reality, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, he wouldn’t know the difference between a first lieutenant and a Mark 48 torpedo.

  May 27, 2015. To Fox News: “I do know what to do, and I would know how to bring ISIS to the table or, beyond that, defeat ISIS very quickly. And I’m not gonna tell you what it is tonight.”

  Even the Fox host was appalled: “Why won’t you tell? We need all the help we can get!”

  “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to tell at some point, but there is a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory.”

  Hate him or love him, there is a small germ of logic in that.

  Or there would have been, had Trump not been lying.

  He wasn’t keeping the plan from ISIS—he was keeping it from Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

  The next month, to The Des Moines Register:

  “The problem with politics is if I tell you right now, everyone else is going to say, ‘Wow, what a great idea.’ You’re going to have ten candidates go and use it, and they’re going to forget where it came from, which is me. But no, I have an absolute way of defeating ISIS.”

  Because Trump’s plan to defeat ISIS was an “absolute way,” but he would keep it a secret for a year and a half, rather than tell America’s generals right then, in June 2015.

  So instead, we had the June beheading in France, the November Paris attacks at the Bataclan and the stadium and the restaurants, the German attacks, the San Bernardino attack last December . . .

  Those all would not have happened if Donald Trump, Super Genius, had said, “This will work, General.”

  Even if he demanded public credit for it afterwards.

  Which he would have gotten.

  April 2016. Trump’s clownish foreign policy speech:

  For Isis: “I have a simple message for them: their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how . . .

  “But they’re going to be gone. ISIS will be gone if I’m elected president. And they’ll be gone quickly.”

  So if he’d gone to the generals then with his plan, no ISIS.

  No attack on the Pulse club in Orlando in June.

  No suicide attack at Ansbach, Germany, in July.

  No priest killed in Rouen, France.

  No ISIS lunatic driving a truck down the boardwalk in Nice during holiday fireworks, killing 86 and injuring 434.

  No whatever-this-was in New York and New Jersey last weekend.

  All because Donald Trump wanted to keep his foolproof plan a secret, from the generals, from the public, from the families of those who would yet suffer.

  And finally, this month, we get an inkling of the plan.

  Trump, at Greenville, North Carolina:

  “We are going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have thirty days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS. We have no choice.”

  Trump could’ve also added: “. . . and we have no plan.”

  The secret plan, the foolproof plan, “the absolute way of defeating ISIS,” the one he wouldn’t tell and thus hundreds of people who could’ve been saved by it were instead murdered—the one he alone could devise, because, as he said, he knows more about ISIS than the generals . . . The big plan is to tell the generals they have to think up a plan.

  *

  Trump had no plan. He has no plan. He will have no plan.

  He is not a leader. He is not tough. He is not concerned about ISIS except as a sales tool to get your vote.

  He knows nothing.

  He has nothing.

  Except a tweet: “Once again someone we were told is ok turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country & its people- how did he get thru system?”

  Well, my understanding is, his grandfather emigrated from Bremen in 1885, and then changed the family name from Drumpf, and the guy you’re referring to is that man’s grandson.

  Donald Trump is our national shame.

  ASSASSINATION

  Post date • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

  Donald Trump has repeated the worst thing he has done in this campaign—worse than the smearing of African Americans or the self-congratulations over the Orlando nightclub shooting or even the display of madness as he petulantly backed away from the lifeblood of his campaign, birtherism.

  Worse than all that.

  Worse than anything any other candidate for president has done in our history.

  And it is the second time he has done it.

  And after he did it, he reminded everybody he did it on Twitter.

  And because you may have already forgotten it.

  Because within twenty-four hours, with the atrocity of his message already in the ears of those to whom it was music, Donald Trump did what he always does. To prevent getting called in by the grown-ups, he changed the subject. He did something else. He shot off his big bazoo about another topic—in this case, about the terrorism here in New York—and suddenly he got us yelling at him, as he always does, over something not . . . quite . . . as bad . . . as what he had said the day before.

  Trump, you again dog-whistled for somebody to assassinate your opponent.

  You did it in a speech in Miami. Then you went back to a hotel and obsessed over what they were saying about you online
like you were a fourteen-year-old, like you do every night and every morning, and there wasn’t enough praise for the omniscient, omnipotent Trumpness of your being—so you dog-whistled again, on Twitter.

  What kind of sick bastard are you, Trump?

  Again, predicating this on another one of your lies—that Hillary Clinton wants to eliminate the Second Amendment . . . I wish! As if somebody could!—you said:

  “I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm. I think they should disarm immediately; what do you think, yes? Take their guns away, she doesn’t want guns. Take them, let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay? It will be very dangerous.”

  Trump, what do you think those idiots out there think you meant?

  It’ll be dangerous, Trump, because . . . the Secret Service dropping its weapons will . . . damage the floor?

  It’ll be dangerous because without guns the Secret Service wouldn’t be able to protect crowds from escaped circus animals?

  The people who heard you say, “Take their guns away, let’s see what happens” will think you meant: “Somebody should shoot her. See what she thinks of gun control then.”

  And they will think that, Trump, because that’s what you meant.

  Because that’s also what you meant when you said it in North Carolina in August. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

  You meant . . . shoot her.

  You meant kill her.

  You meant assassinate her.

  And even when the former director of the CIA said that anybody else who said what you said would “be in the back of a police wagon now with the Secret Service questioning him,” you went back and did it again, two months later.

  Trump, you don’t know this, because it’s not on Twitter at the moment, but the theme of this country’s political history is not greatness, nor growth, nor compromise—it is assassination.

  President Reagan: shot—survived.

  President Ford: shot at twice in seventeen days—not injured.