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

by Keith Olbermann

  In short, to revise a great question from history: What did Donald Trump know—and when did he stop knowing it?

  MESSAGE TO A TRUMP SUPPORTER

  Post date • THURSDAY, JANUARY 5

  So you support Donald Trump.

  I’m not going to yell.

  I’m not going to say you’re wrong.

  I’m not going to talk about his policies.

  I’m not going to talk about his promises.

  *

  I’m not going to talk about whether he’s going to cut your taxes or raise them.

  I’m not going to talk about whether he’s going to make America great again or crash it and burn it.

  *

  And unlike what you probably think, I’m not trying to get the election overturned.

  I’m not trying to get Hillary Clinton into the White House.

  I’m not claiming the Republican Party won’t be there for at least the next four years.

  *

  No. This is about . . . him.

  And you.

  And the respect for you I start with, because you’re following this.

  You are thoughtful enough to have gotten this far . . .

  So let’s go in on the assumption that you’re smarter than I am . . .

  In which case you already know what my point is.

  *

  I don’t know who the political figure would be if our places were reversed.

  I guess the time I got the closest to the position you’re in was with John Edwards, who had a problem, and I didn’t see it, and while he wasn’t my first choice, I would’ve supported him for president.

  He had what I thought was a great, humane set of policies, and a wife who was so smart and had been through so much in life that she probably should have been the candidate instead of him. And then it turned out John Edwards was a con man who not only had fooled me—he had fooled her, too.

  If Edwards wasn’t my version of this, it would have to be Anthony Weiner. I used to have him on my show a lot. He gave straightforward, damn-the-torpedoes kinds of answers you never get from politicians; he disliked the same Republicans I disliked, and he hated the same Democrats I hated.

  And even after he crashed and burned the first time, and then tried to run for mayor of New York, I thought, Well, he has to have gotten his problem fixed, and he might be a really good mayor, and then it happened again. In fact, it had barely stopped.

  And the next time I saw him, a year ago, I literally was afraid to shake his hand, in case (a) somebody took a picture of it or (b) whatever he had, it was catching.

  *

  So I haven’t been where you are right now—but . . . close.

  And you are in a terrible position.

  A man whose opinions you agree with has been elected president and is about to be sworn in.

  And yet—I’m pretty sure you know the problem.

  You’re smart, and generally speaking, the only person who can fool you is you.

  You’re smart enough to recognize something I saw when I first met this man, thirty-three years ago.

  And that is this: there’s something really, really wrong with him.

  *

  Who does this on Christmas Eve?

  His tweet was a plug for a documentary.

  A documentary about him.

  Not even a new one.

  A repeat!

  Who does this on Christmas Eve?

  His Christmas greeting on Twitter was just a photo of himself.

  Not the family.

  Not the wife.

  Not even the vice president.

  Not Santa.

  Not Jesus.

  Just him.

  Who does this?

  Two days later—meaning sixty days after the election—the election is still all he’s tweeting about.

  “President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states and lost.”

  What kind of man does this?

  You win, you act like you’ve won before; you don’t waste your energy on the guy who’s gone in a month anyway.

  Maybe, maybe, if you’re a good guy, you’re gracious in victory, you’re a good winner—at least during the holidays.

  “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

  Would you . . . write that?

  Would you write that—when you got votes from fewer people than the other candidate?

  Would you call everybody else . . . your enemy?

  *

  Okay. Maybe just because when I interviewed him when I was twenty-five and he owned a football team and I came away muttering to my producer, “What’s wrong with that guy?”—maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s nothing really dangerous about a man who has to tell you how much he won by. Again and again. And again. When he actually didn’t win by very much.

  Maybe that doesn’t matter.

  Maybe from where you sit, it’s only about “Make America Great Again” and “America First” and always defending this country because we are right and we need to be loyal to our great nation.

  “Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary and Dems: ‘In my opinion, it is humiliating. One must be able to lose with dignity.’ So true!”

  “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”

  Who defends a Russian dictator, ahead of an American president, or an American politician, or half of the people in America?

  I mean, when he was president, as much as I hated George W. Bush, I never took Vladimir Putin’s side against him!

  Would you do that?

  *

  Maybe you would. I said I wouldn’t yell, and I’m not going to. To my mind, it is possible for you to agree with Donald Trump and still be a good person. I just disagree with you. I don’t think you’re my enemy.

  But let me run one last pair of tweets past you and ask you if you think they were written by a normal guy.

  “Various media outlets and pundits say that I thought I was going to lose the election. Wrong, it all came together in the last week and . . . I thought and felt I would win big, easily over the fabled 270 (306). When they cancelled fireworks, they knew, and so did I.”

  So those tweets are from last Monday.

  That means it was only three weeks since he got up at one of those victory tour stops—this was in West Allis, Wisconsin, on December 13—and he said . . . he thought he was going to lose the election . . . and he thought so on the night of the election.

  “I went to see my wife. I say, ‘Baby, I tell you what. We’re not going to win tonight.’ The polls are coming out—I always used to believe in those things. I don’t believe them anymore. I said if we’re going to lose I don’t want a big ballroom.”

  There aren’t a lot of choices here, are there?

  He either lied—in the tweets, or at the tour stop in Wisconsin, or to his wife that night—or he forgot that he said it, or . . .

  There’s something wrong with him.

  *

  To pretend that there isn’t . . . you have to pretend really hard.

  I know you can’t say it, I know you don’t want to believe it, and I know you won’t believe this, either, but I wish it weren’t true . . .

  But we’ve elected a man . . . who is not all there.

  And that cannot end happily.

  His illness—it’s an illness—is putting you at risk. And your family. And your kids. And my family. And everybody we know, the ones we like—and the ones we don’t.

  Don’t say anything, don’t do anything—I don’t even want you to admit anything to anybody except yourself.

  But you know that someday, probably soon, something bad
will happen, and whatever he does will make it worse, and it’ll all be clear that he’s not healthy enough to be president, and they’ll have to remove him.

  And, by the way, it’ll be the Republicans who will have to remove him—either the vice president and the Speaker of the House using the Twenty-fifth Amendment, or the Republican congressmen and the Republican senators impeaching him.

  Because this isn’t about what he believes in.

  This is about the fact that he’s . . . not . . . well.

  So all I’m asking—all that this has been about—is for you to just think about it, for when the time comes. Because when the Republicans really need to remove him as president, they’ll need to do it in a hurry, and as a Republican or a conservative or a Democrat or as an American, or whichever way you describe yourself, it’ll be a lot easier—and a lot safer for all of us—if you’ve prepared yourself, and you help them remove him.

  Because he’s not well.

  HE CANNOT LEAVE IT ALONE

  Post date • TUESDAY, JANUARY 10

  Any essential distinction between Donald Trump being merely an idiot marionette belonging to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump being an active Russian agent has been fully erased in the course of just over a week.

  And it has been erased by . . . Donald Trump.

  *

  When the damning stain of illegitimacy grows on this presidency, week by week—hour by hour—when every moment of the political discourse of this nation becomes consumed by a debate over not whether he has been placed in office by the efforts of a foreign power, but over how much of that subversion he knew in advance—he will have no one to blame but himself.

  Because he cannot . . . leave it . . . alone.

  Because every move Donald Trump has made this year has been politically tone-deaf. He could not make it look more like he is covering up something—something horrifying—if he hung a sign around his neck reading COVER-UP. He reeks of cover-up.

  And in his neurosis, unsatisfied with having fooled some of the people some of the time, he has not merely ignored the option a real president would take—invite a full investigation—he has also waited weeks before trying the option a skilled traitor would take: to shut up and change the subject to, say, Meryl Streep.

  And still, like a desperate child, he has to keep bringing the subject up, keep shouting those key words that he should never speak again—Russia, hacking, Assange, Putin—until he can presumably convince himself that he has convinced everyone everywhere that none of it is true, and until he can convince himself that everyone now agrees with him about how strong and powerful he is—and how he has now . . . won.

  *

  It is madness. And it will destroy him.

  December 29: “I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.”

  But saying that “nobody knows exactly what’s going on” means . . . even he doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.

  And he can’t let anybody believe that:

  December 31: “I know a lot about hacking, and hacking is a very hard thing to prove, so it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so, they cannot be sure of this situation.”

  Pool reporter: “What do you know that other people don’t know?”

  Trump: “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  All we found out Tuesday was . . . his willingness to publicly advertise his own paranoia.

  Tuesday, January 3, 8:14 p.m.: “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!”

  The delay was for a family emergency.

  The delay was of an intelligence briefing, the likes of which he has reportedly been skipping for two months.

  Wednesday, January 4, 7:22 a.m.: “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

  Trump has here cited—and given credibility to—Assange of WikiLeaks, about whose activities Trump said in December 2010, “I think it’s disgraceful, I think there should be like death penalty or something.”

  Wednesday, January 4, 8:27 a.m.: “Somebody hacked the DNC but why did they not have ‘hacking defense’ like the RNC has and why have they not responded to the terrible things they did and said (like giving the questions to the debate to H). A total double standard! Media, as usual, gave them a pass.”

  Trump has now justified international espionage against Americans, provided they are guilty of something—or provided he merely thinks they are guilty of something—especially if the espionage involves Julian Assange.

  Thursday, January 5, 8:25 a.m.: “The dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange—wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”

  He cannot . . . leave it . . . alone!

  He must not only erase what he himself has just done . . . He must also find a new scapegoat.

  Thursday, January 5, 7:24 p.m.: “How did NBC get ‘an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?’ Who gave them this report and why? Politics!”

  He asks about NBC, but does so in his standard way of scapegoating the media: politically, scornfully—not seriously, not officially, not ominously.

  The next morning . . . somebody else does all that for him.

  The tweet from WikiLeaks: “The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET//COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it.”

  That tweet was from 5:48 a.m. on January 6.

  The next tweet is from 11:51 a.m. on January 6:

  Trump: “I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it.”

  He is now desperate enough to try change the subject from his connection to WikiLeaks that he doesn’t even seem to realize he has just . . . connected himself to WikiLeaks!

  Perhaps somebody pointed that out to him, because next, by phone to The New York Times:

  “China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names. How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.”

  Then comes the briefing on the hacking: a briefing he had avoided, on hacking he had dismissed, from an intelligence community he had undermined.

  And after it, a very, very cleverly phrased written statement: “I had a constructive meeting and conversation with the leaders of the Intelligence Community this afternoon. I have tremendous respect for the work and service done by the men and women of this community to our great nation.

  “While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines . . .”

  Do you see what he did there? Merely through juxtaposition?

  The first paragraph describes a meeting with the intelligence community and its work . . .

  The second paragraph describes the conclusion that cyberattacks had no effect on the outcome of the election.

  Composed that way, it seems as if the intelligence community had concluded the hacking had no effect.

  But the conclusion . . . is Trump’s.

  The intelligence community’s report doesn’t merely offer a different conclusion—it makes Trump’s written statement even more deceptive and malicio
us.

  “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.”

  When that real version of what the report did not conclude was officially released, Trump looked like a liar.

  So, that night, back to blaming the victim.

  Friday, January 6, 10:53 p.m.: “Gross negligence by the Democratic National Committee allowed hacking to take place. The Republican National Committee had strong defense!”

  But the intelligence briefing actually concluded the Republicans were also hacked by Russia. Russia just didn’t distribute its RNC data.

  So: change the story again.

  Saturday, January 7, 6:56 a.m.: “Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!”

  He has just erased the subtle deception and misdirection in his Friday statement—and replaced it with a flat-out, transparent, childish lie.

  He. Cannot. Leave It. Alone.

  Saturday, January 7, 7:03 a.m.: “Only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC is discussed is that the loss by the Dems was so big that they are totally embarrassed!”

  And here Trump’s story spirals out of anything resembling his own control.

  It has gone from Russian espionage to him invoking the hacking of voting machines to him disparaging half the country thirteen days before his inauguration . . . to:

  Saturday, January 7, 10:02 a.m.: “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only ‘stupid’ people, or fools, would think that it is bad! We have enough problems around the world without yet another one. When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now and both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!”

  In three hours and twenty-eight minutes, Trump has gone from espionage to hacking voting machines to calling tens of millions of Americans “fools” and “stupid” to a promise of cooperation with Russia that reads as if it were written in response to instructions from a blackmailer saying, “You better fix this, Trump. You better make us look good, Trump.”