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

by Keith Olbermann

  The CIA said the Russians hacked Americans.

  You don’t know that, he says. Could be a fat guy.

  The CIA now says the Russians hacked to get him elected.

  I don’t believe that, and so what? I won in a landslide.

  What happens when the CIA next says the Russians are absorbing Ukraine?

  What happens when the CIA then says Putin is so strong he’s planning to take back Alaska?

  What happens when the CIA then says there’s an imminent terrorist attack, and it tracks back to Putin?

  What happens when the CIA finally says Putin has lost his mind and he’s launching missiles?

  You don’t know that, Trump says. I don’t believe it.

  *

  The people should know the truth . . .

  They should know that we have sustained a defeat, without a war . . .

  The consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.

  They should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of representative government has been deranged, and that the terrible words have, for the time being, been pronounced against our democracy:

  “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

  And do not suppose that this is the end.

  This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

  This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us, year by year, unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom . . .

  *

  Winston Churchill said that, more or less, in the British House of Commons, October 5, 1938, days after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, at Munich, gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for . . . a piece of paper.

  Chamberlain and much of the world thus thought he had guaranteed that there would be no Second World War—just as supporters of Trump think they have guaranteed some kind of new freedom and more money for themselves.

  Churchill, and only a few others, knew that, in fact, Chamberlain had guaranteed there would be a Second World War—just as those of us who recognize Trump for what he is know that the voters have guaranteed themselves slavery, defeat, economic disaster, and the need to—sooner or later—save this nation and restore freedom by extricating ourselves from a Trump regime by whatever process provides itself.

  *

  Churchill was most prescient when he noted that Munich was only the beginning, just as we must recognize that the administering of the oath of office to Trump—an event to be resisted by any legal means—is only the first and smallest of a series of apocalypses.

  Because, just as in Churchill’s time, we have a Hitler.

  No. It’s not Trump. Not yet—certainly not in this context, anyway.

  The part of Hitler in our sad reenactment of the months before the Second World War . . . is played by Vladimir Putin.

  Trump?

  In this remake . . . he is Neville Chamberlain.

  He knows better.

  He can see the strength in the foreign leader.

  He knows how to make a deal.

  He can handle him.

  He can negotiate with him.

  He can hand him our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

  He has already helped hand Putin our sacred right to vote.

  He will happily hand Putin a cleared path to the world domination he seeks for Russia.

  He will—just so long as Putin tells him he’s making a great deal and he’s, like . . . a smart person—he will hand Putin . . . this country.

  *

  “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?” wrote the British courtier and author John Harington four hundred years ago.

  “Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

  It’s treason.

  THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND THE COMPROMISE OF 2016

  Post date • WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14

  “The most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter—but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.

  “How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

  *

  Not my words.

  They are those of . . . Alexander Hamilton.

  Writing in the newspaper The New-York Packet and the American Advertiser in its issue of Friday, March 14, 1788. The Federalist Papers. No. 68. The one explaining how the president of the United States would be elected.

  Alexander Hamilton, 83,549 days ago, predicting the Russian attempt to decide our 2016 election for us and install their own stooge, Donald Trump, to the chief magistracy of the Union. “How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own . . .”

  A creature of their own . . . indeed.

  As if Hamilton was peering through time and seeing Trump’s preening face and evil soul. A creature of their own.

  In The Federalist No. 68, Hamilton was explaining how in the new Constitution, the much-debated concept of the Electoral College would preclude another country from putting its man in the presidency, how it would make bribing the electors nearly impossible, how it would also serve as protection against scoundrels and traitors.

  “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

  “Talents for low intrigue.”

  “The little arts of popularity.”

  Alexander Hamilton saw everything phony about Donald Trump—except his hair.

  *

  Hamilton, of course, describes a different Electoral College from that which meets next Monday.

  The one Hamilton wrote about in 1788 existed before there was any popular voting.

  There were no political parties, no pledged delegates, no rubber stamp.

  It’s a different Electoral College from the one that is our last defense against the end of America—different except in spirit.

  For if the Electoral College is not still what Hamilton described, it is still what Hamilton intended.

  It is there to weed out the unqualified, the unprincipled, the merely famous—and especially to weed out a creature “of foreign powers.” Or, in Donald Trump’s case, all of the above.

  But still, a rubber stamp. A quaint vestige of the fact that you have to win states, not just votes, to become president.

  Oh?

  If it is a rubber stamp—why does it convene?

  If the Electoral College is merely a formality in which the electors vote as the vote totals in their states tell them to—why are the electors there? Certainly, the certified results from each state are sufficient to declare, “Trump 306, Clinton 232.”

  If the Electoral College is merely a vestige of state demographics in which the electors vote as the vote totals in their states tell them to—why is it legal in literally half the states, twenty-five, for the members to vote for . . . whoever they want?

  The answer would seem obvious, albeit hard to believe.

  Never in our history have any of our leaders changed the Electoral College. We have changed the Constitution to permit women to vote and slavery to be ended, and for alcohol to be banned, and then we changed it back so alcohol would be unbanned. We have changed the Constitution to include something the Founding Fathers quickly discovered they had left out: the entire Bill of Rights.

 
; But never in our history have we changed the fact of the vote by the Electoral College.

  Thus, there is only one conclusion.

  It is there because the Founding Fathers . . . were right.

  Someday—we would need it.

  Someday, perhaps centuries later, we would need to follow Alexander Hamilton’s version of IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Someday, perhaps centuries later, “talents for low intrigue” and “the little arts of popularity” would combine with “the desire in foreign powers” to elect their own president, and only the quaint, irrelevant rubber stamp of the Electoral College—the appendix of the body politic—would stand between us and Armageddon.

  Turned out “someday” was December 19, 2016.

  *

  It is correct that thirty-eight Trump electors voting instead for Hillary Clinton would make her president.

  It is also correct that it is likelier that the Electoral College will be hit by an asteroid during its convention next Monday than that thirty-eight Republican electors will vote instead for a Democrat.

  The country has long since become the land of “me first,” and to find thirty-eight political men and women of true, self-sacrificing patriotism and conscience would at least quadruple the number of them I could name right now.

  The Russians could have literally, instead of merely remotely, swung the election for Trump—they could be standing in Cossack uniforms along Pennsylvania Avenue—and Republican politicians would still think, “But what’s in it for me?” before they switched from Trump to Clinton.

  *

  But there is another way.

  There are compromises.

  This nation exists—probably to die on January 20, when a foreign-backed usurper seizes power, but for now, this nation exists—because of the second civil war we didn’t have, the one that threatened to explode in the winter of 1876–77 over the disputed election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden.

  The election was to be decided by Florida. The state sent two entirely separate delegations to the Electoral College: one Republican, one Democratic. And the lame duck president increased the presence of troops in Washington because it was assumed that whoever lost was going to start shooting.

  But he didn’t.

  We compromised.

  It was an awful compromise, the impact of which was still felt ninety years later. The Republicans got the White House; the Democrats got the end of Reconstruction in the South and tacit permission to disenfranchise blacks, and there descended upon us ninety years and more of segregation and Jim Crow.

  Yet the threat of civil war vanished and has stayed vanished. Until now, at least.

  *

  Compromise.

  A resident scholar from the Cato Institute named Michael F. Cannon wrote in The Washington Post on the fifth of this month suggesting that, instead of holding out hope of thirty-eight Trump electors miraculously risking their status in their party for the sake of democracy, the hero this time should be . . . Hillary Clinton.

  Her electors—not Trump’s—should vote differently.

  She should instruct those pledged to her . . . to vote instead for a moderate Republican, while patriots in that party find thirty-eight—or more—Trump supporters to switch to that same moderate Republican.

  Cannon suggested Mitt Romney. One could make a list—a small list: Romney and John McCain and Evan McMullin, and, for that matter, if he were a little healthier, President George H. W. Bush.

  Romney, McCain, McMullin, whoever—presumably with a moderate Democrat as vice president.

  Would it be right?

  Would it be fair?

  Before you answer, answer this:

  Would it be a victory over the Russians, who committed an act of war against us by interfering with our elections? Would it be defense against Trump and this Banana Republican government of his, which will turn the rest of the world over to Vladimir Putin and end our democracy?

  And before you answer that, answer this:

  You can’t have Clinton . . .

  Alexander Hamilton is dead . . .

  The alternative is an unelected dictator . . .

  Would you, right now, trade Donald Trump for a President Mitt Romney—or a President John McCain—or a President Evan McMullin?

  Me?

  In a heartbeat.

  And I’d drop to my knees in thanks for . . . the Electoral College.

  THE PRESIDENT-ELECT AND TREASON

  Post date • MONDAY, DECEMBER 19

  Our long national nightmare . . . is starting.

  With the Electoral College failing to do its duty as conceived under the Constitution, Russia’s whore is now president-elect.

  No longer is Donald Trump merely certifiable; now he is certified.

  So this changes everything.

  No.

  It changes . . . nothing.

  He is still president by a minority vote.

  He is still wholly unfit for the job—the man you would expect to find if you were searching for the person who could most quickly and efficiently destroy a democracy and maybe a planet.

  He is still a moving, breathing conflict of interest who will likely be guilty of impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors within hours, if not minutes, of his own inauguration . . .

  He is still a textbook case of corrupt self-dealing come to life . . .

  He is still the leader of the most remarkable group of public “serve-yourself servants” ever assembled.

  And, most important: Trump is still—at best—an unwitting pawn of, personal local representative of, and employment recruiter for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

  “If you want to shut this down, and you actually love the country enough to have this peaceful transition in our great democracy between the Obama administration and the Trump administration, there are a couple people in pretty prominent positions—one’s named Obama, one’s named Hillary Clinton, since his people are trying to fight over her election still—they could shut this down.”

  Kellyanne Conway, equating bending to Russian interference with patriotism.

  Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager when he repeatedly refused to confirm that he would “shut this down” and participate in a “peaceful transition” if he lost.

  Kellyanne Conway, who might as well be a Russian citizen.

  “I don’t think anyone should complain that the truth did come out. And let’s stipulate that Russia did cyberhacking. Again, all countries are doing it. We don’t like it, we can never condone it . . .”

  Republican congressman Chris Collins of New York State, condoning Russia’s cyberhacking while saying, “We can never condone it.”

  “Whether they’re Russian hackers or any other hackers, the only information that we were getting from hackers was accurate information, was truthful. And that’s not gonna turn the tide. If the American people have been given more truthful information, that’s terrific.”

  Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California, saying the results of a Russia attack on the sanctity of our free elections was “terrific.”

  “I guess Putin is going to have to do it. RT ‘State Dept Won’t Release Clinton Fdn Emails for 27 Months.’”

  Monica Crowley, whom Trump wants in the communications office of the National Security Council.

  No, our—not Russia’s—National Security Council.

  And of course, “If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”

  Trump, on the fifteenth, implying that he’d never heard anything about Russia hacking and then, less than twenty-one hours later, completely contradicting himself:

  “Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gav
e Hillary the questions to the debate?”

  And now Trump and his gang—caviar virtually leaking out of their pockets—are untouchable.

  No longer are there evident legal means to prevent his inauguration, other than indictment and arrest for some kind of crime where bail isn’t granted.

  Hmmm.

  For what kind of crime do they not grant bail?

  “A specter of treason hovers over Donald Trump,” Ambassador John Shattuck wrote in The Boston Globe, in a piece not posted until late last Friday afternoon. “He has brought it on himself by dismissing a bipartisan call for an investigation of Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee as a ‘ridiculous’ political attack on the legitimacy of his election as president.”

  John Shattuck was this country’s ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998 through 2000, and before that he was our assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor.

  “Seventeen US national intelligence agencies have unanimously concluded that Russia engaged in cyberwarfare against the US presidential campaign. The lead agency, the CIA, has reached the further conclusion that Russia’s hacking was intended to influence the election in favor of Trump.”

  Ambassador Shattuck graduated from Yale, got first-class honors in international law at Cambridge, graduated from Yale Law, lectured at Harvard Law.

  “Why does Trump publicly reject these intelligence agency conclusions and the bipartisan proposal for a congressional investigation? As president-elect, he should have a strong interest in presenting a united front against Russia’s interference with the electoral process at the core of American democracy.”

  The ambassador outlines four answers to his own question: that Trump was trying to “shore up” his political standing before the Electoral College voted; that he was looking for leverage to use against the intelligence agencies once in office; that he was testing his ability to convince the public that he—and not the professionals—knows the truth about national security threats; and/or that he is engaged in a cover-up of prior knowledge—his or his campaign’s—of the Russian cyberattack.