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

by Keith Olbermann

  Trump, of course, cannot—literally cannot—hear any of this.

  He must be loved, worshiped, obeyed. That’s why there is a cocoon.

  That’s why there is a cocoon where there were lines “six blocks long” to get into his speech at CPAC, when the public wasn’t even admitted to CPAC, so there couldn’t have been any lines. That’s why he had to cancel on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner before the correspondents could refuse to invite him, or he’d be faced with venturing outside the cocoon and getting mauled by a comic. That’s why his staff reportedly feeds him only stories he’ll like from propagandist sites like Fox and Breitbart.

  That’s why the Baltimore Orioles denied us a test of the density of the cocoon when the team president said he wouldn’t invite Trump to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on baseball’s Opening Day. What a choice! Forty-six thousand screaming fans who could cheer him: To be cheered—perchance to be booed; ay, there’s the rub!

  And then there are the leaks.

  Trump is insane enough that he could repeatedly scream about “the illegal leaks” when he spent the campaign—literally every one of the last thirty days (164 times in one month)—quoting the “illegal leaks” provided by Russia and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

  He loves WikiLeaks.

  He could rail about catching the leakers and investigating them and punishing them—while Reince Priebus was begging the FBI to leak about Trump and Russia, and while the White House got Congressman Nunes and Senator Burr to leak about Trump and Russia.

  He could attack the FBI and the CIA—self-destructively and specifically—about leakers inside their organizations, while his own house is such a sieve that his faithful toady Sean Spicer collects all his staffers’ phones to check whether they’ve been leaking. And not only does that story itself leak out within days, but when it does, it contradicts Trump’s mindless assertion that the news media just makes up stories about him—if they’re making them up, why are you checking who’s leaking them? And when Trump wants specific outlets banned from news briefings, Spicer does it, even though just two months ago Spicer said they only do that in dictatorships.

  This makes no sense—not even for a crazy man in a cocoon. Confirming what you ardently deny; retroactively declaring your presidency a “dictatorship”—it makes no sense unless we postulate that what Trump calls leaks and what the rest of the world calls leaks are different things.

  He’s not obsessed with leaks from inside the cocoon . . . getting out . . .

  He’s obsessed with leaks . . . from outside the cocoon . . . getting in.

  The Russian scandal is not a problem because it could send him to an impeachment trial or the penitentiary or both. It’s a problem because stories about it leak into the cocoon and damage his perfect world, in which he was elected because everybody loves him.

  The same with the loss of the popular vote. To him, that’s not about presidential legitimacy or a mandate. He cannot permit it to be true because it means he finished second in something.

  What he calls leaks—are in fact reality permeating the wall of the cocoon.

  As historians and medical researchers gain new information and new insight, the evidence mounts that the primary intellectual damage done to President Woodrow Wilson during his stroke in October 1919 was that it short-circuited the part of the brain that would normally have allowed Wilson to understand the reality and gravity of the damage to his brain. It’s called anosognosia, and it is, in essence, a physical form of denial.

  As the psychologist David Dunning once told The New York Times: “An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m tired,’ or ‘I don’t need a pencil.’”

  Maybe Trump has that.

  If not, he has manufactured a cocoon for himself—in which he might as well have it.

  It can be tragic for the nation—many historians believe that Wilson’s anosognosia made it impossible for him to compromise about the League of Nations. His stroke may have in part led . . . to the Second World War.

  Our tragedy with a president who will not—or cannot—allow reality to leak into his cocoon?

  Who knows which nightmare we will get.

  But it is axiomatic that authoritarians in power—even the ones who don’t have anosognosia or regular old denial—begin by shutting out dissenting voices, and invariably end up . . . by shutting down dissenting voices.

  RUSSIA, CONTINUED

  Post date • MONDAY, MARCH 6

  Not only is the putative president of the United States being investigated for illicit contact directly or through intermediaries with representatives of an enemy nation, but the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly asked the Department of Justice to essentially let him call the president a lying gossipmonger.

  Trump’s madness and his weekend of channeling his persecution complex and disseminating it as a deflection from his own perfidy is the obvious headline.

  However—the true story is the moving parts of his regime’s treachery with Russia—especially those moving parts that have become the wheels now flying off the vehicle!

  *

  To dodge those wheels and review the headlines as they land—

  Foremost: Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, reportedly spent the weekend combing the U.S. intelligence services trying to gain access to any FISA Court–ordered surveillance related to Trump or his associates.

  That would be twice in a little over a week that the White House directly tried to interfere with the investigation of the Trump Gang and Russia. The first was when Chief of Staff Priebus got the chairmen of the House and Senate intel committees to spin the media on Trump’s behalf, and tried to get intelligence officials to do the same.

  Stuff like this is what Nixon’s White House tried to do with the FBI and the CIA throughout Watergate.

  *

  Second headline: Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone confessed—indeed, publicly boasted—over the weekend of knowing in advance about the coming WikiLeaks attacks on Hillary Clinton last October. “Have never denied that Assange and I had a mutual friend who told me WikiLeaks had the goods on HRC and would begin disclosures in Oct. . . . Assange does NOT work for Russians and no one has proved otherwise. Although I never had direct contact with him, such contact would be neither illegal or improper.”

  Even if Stone is correct about that—this is damning circumstantial evidence. The most generous interpretation is that a key Trump adviser looked the other way before the dissemination of emails stolen in what the American intelligence community asserts to this day was a Russian cyberattack against this nation!

  Third headline: Yes, attorney general and former Trump campaign flunky Sessions did the right thing and recused himself from any investigations of Trump and Russia. But he also gave a series of nonsensical interview answers. Asked if anybody in the Trump campaign thought the Russian government favored Trump over Clinton, Sessions answered, “I have never been told that.”

  The follow-up question: “Do you think they did?”

  The Sessions answer: “I don’t have any idea . . . You’d have to ask them.”

  At his confirmation hearing—the one at which he forgot to mention his meetings with the Russian ambassador—the subject of Russia being guilty of interfering with the election came up twice, and Sessions first said, “At least that’s what’s been reported,” and then, “I have no reason to doubt that and have no evidence that would indicate otherwise.”

  Sessions is coming off as either a bad liar paralyzed with guilt, or a moron.

  Fourth headline: Carter Page—the second man Trump ever mentioned as one of his foreign policy advisers—keeps changing his story.

&
nbsp; Said on February 15, “I had no meetings, no meetings” with Russian officials in 2016. Said on March 2, about meeting Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, “I’m not going to deny that I talked to him.”

  Fifth headline: Campaign national security lackey J. D. Gordon changed his story about how the Republican platform at the convention was 180’d from defending Ukrainian rebels to kissing them off.

  Sixth headline: Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who has already changed his Russian story at least four times, did not change it a fifth.

  However, the businessman Alex Oronov, who organized the controversial “Ukrainian peace plan” that Cohen reportedly hand-carried to General Flynn—he suddenly turned up all dead.

  Seventh headline: Whatever it is, it’s catching: When the popular ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin keeled over at his desk last month, he became the sixth Russian diplomat to die since the day Trump was elected.

  Eighth headline: Trump himself was reportedly so outraged by the recusal of the attorney general from the Russian investigation that he went into a three-day spasm of Whataboutism. He began with a demand for an investigation of a 2003 photo of Senator Chuck Schumer with Vladimir Putin, which turned out to be them literally at the ceremony christening a Russian-owned Lukoil service station in New York City.

  Schumer and Putin were at a gas station opening—as if they were the cohosts of some radio station morning-zoo program.

  The ninth Trump-Russia headline: Trump then tweeted, “The first meeting Jeff Sessions had with the Russian Amb was set up by the Obama Administration,” adding—without realizing he was making his own argument look ridiculous—“under education program for 100 Ambs.” When that didn’t work, Trump moved on to repeating the right-wing radio nutjob patter that Obama had tapped Trump’s phone.

  When that blew up in Trump’s face, there came a tenth headline: The reaction to the conflation of Russia, Obama, and imaginary wiretaps so screwed up the White House that at 8:51 Eastern Time Sunday morning, Press Secretary Spicer declared that, until there was a congressional investigation of Trump’s crazy talk, “Neither the White House nor the President will comment further.”

  Eighteen minutes later, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went on ABC’s This Week to comment further.

  And twenty-five minutes after that, Spicer commented further on Twitter.

  And by late Sunday afternoon, Trump was, according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, “frustrated by the Sunday shows today/felt people didn’t defend him strongly enough on his Obama claim, per ppl close to him.”

  And at 7:06 Eastern Time Monday morning, the White House—still not commenting further—commented on ABC again, via the deputy press secretary.

  Last, the eleventh headline: A question posed in many different quarters. At least seven Trump campaign figures had contact with Russia. Even if every last second of all the interaction was benign, did any of them, at any time, ask their Russian pals if they could lay off the international cybercrime? All of this one-to-one conversation, and did anybody in the Trump Gang say, “You know, you should probably stop hacking our computers and screwing with our election”?

  The wheels haven’t just come off the bus—the tires have now formed a pile and started a fire!

  And of course, Trump, who blamed “the generals” for the loss of the Navy SEAL in Yemen and suggested that threats on Jewish centers had been made by Jewish people . . . None of this panorama of disloyal, amoral interaction with an enemy nation during a presidential election—none of this is his fault.

  And you know what, Republicans—he’s right!

  This is no longer his fault.

  This is your fault!

  Look to our history. Look to the Civil War, when the entirety of one political party, the Democrats, opposed intervention against slavery, and for personal politics and the evils of omission.

  Look to the years before World War II, when the entirety of another political party, the Republicans, opposed intervention against Hitler, and for personal politics and those evils of omission.

  What happened to all those men?

  They took the fall.

  Not one prominent figure in either party in either century . . . survived the political apocalypse that followed their amorality!

  They took the fall—as all you gutless Republicans of today will take the fall for enabling this treason involving Russia to remain unrevealed, and this lunatic Trump to remain unimpeached.

  THE CONSPIRACY PEDDLER IN CHIEF

  Post date • TUESDAY, MARCH 7

  We no longer have a president of the United States.

  We have an executive for dismissing the facts he doesn’t like and believing the lies he does.

  We have a head of state-of-paranoia.

  We have a conspiracy peddler in chief.

  There are positives underlying this insanity: few, but potent.

  Such a damaged personality cannot discern that while every new falsehood may bind to him more tightly those who already trust him, they inevitably drive more people away.

  Such a narcissist cannot realize that every time he invokes Russia and close ties and wiretaps and the intelligence services and investigations, he does not decrease—he only increases—the chances that the investigations by the intelligence services of the close ties to Russia will be not about others, but about him.

  Such a messianic individual cannot fathom that his rumormongering is so dangerous—merely to himself—that even the director of the FBI feels compelled to publicly get out his conclusion that Trump is lying.

  But these positives still sit under a pile of excrement, of radioactive waste, of what even a Republican senator correctly describes as a “civilization-warping crisis of public trust.”

  The immediacy of such a danger—the active crisis of fantasy-based reality in a president—is obvious:

  Any man—no matter how immorally or illegally he attained the Oval Office—is still, as Lincoln said, “president of the United States, clothed with immense power.”

  For the unthinking, the uneducated, the unbalanced who sincerely believe him—or who have chosen to, as if they have a menu of realities from which to select—a lie, a calumny, a slander, a preposterous fiction is automatically less a lie, less a calumny, less a slander, less a preposterous fiction just because he said it.

  Thus the flunkies, like House Intelligence Chairman Nunes, and the bottom-feeders of filth, like Fox News and Breitbart and Alex Jones and Mark Levin, line up to endorse and reinforce the lies.

  And thus the mighty engines of investigation with which Congress is clothed, and the free press is clothed, are not turned on the obvious, gigantic, irrefutable, horizon-blocking truth that Trump and Manafort and Stone and Cohen and Kushner and Flynn and Sessions and Gordon and Page and Trump Jr. all interacted with the Russians in some nefarious way, great or small, during the campaign and after it.

  No. Those investigative engines are turned instead on a previous president and something there is no evidence he did, something there was never even a rumor that he did, something that has been propagated nationally—by the paranoiac in chief, without any substance, governmentally or journalistically—a desperate and manufactured slander designed as part of a cover-up of true and traitorous crimes, containing exactly the same probability of truth as something that would have come to Donald Trump in a dream.

  That they will investigate.

  And now not even logic and motive are still necessary. Even on the one-in-a-billion chance that none of it is criminal, Trump’s connection to Russia is plausible if only because the Russians wanted a president who would give them a free hand in Ukraine and elsewhere, and Trump’s desperate ego would let him pay any price—even the freedom of this country he falsely purports to love—to gain ultimate power.

  But Trump�
�s Obama claim? What is the theory here? What is the motive? What is the purpose? As Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted: “Barack Obama’s master plan: 1) Wiretap the opposition 2) Gather damaging info 3) Say nothing 4) Let him win 5) Ride off into the sunset.”

  It is as nonsensical as Trump’s claim of the Democrats enabling three million illegal votes—all for Hillary Clinton—and none of them in the counties where seventy-seven thousand votes would have swung the election to her.

  There are paranoid, insane, unsupported conspiracy theories, but even they divide into the good ones and the bad ones—and the man holding the executive power of the nation can’t even tell the difference between them.

  He who has already sold birtherism conspiracies, and vaccination conspiracies, and inauguration crowd-size conspiracies, and illegal-vote conspiracies, and a carnage of immigrant-violence conspiracies, and 40-percent-unemployment conspiracies . . . has now sold the-last-president-tapping-his-phone-and-stealing-his-secrets-and-doing-nothing-with-them-before-the-election conspiracies.

  This is the immediate danger—the active crisis of fantasy-based reality—into which Donald Trump has pushed this nation with his peddling of the ludicrous.

  But the true danger is—which insane conspiracy and which resultant crisis is next.

  Trump has already sold to the gullible the snake oil that ISIS is pouring across the nation’s borders.

  Trump has already sold the stupid on the falsehood that immigrants commit virtually all violent crime and push virtually all drugs—when an immigrant is less likely to break the law.

  Trump has already sold the racist and the hateful on the idea that a then sitting president of the United States is behind the leaks from his administration, and now that he tapped his phone, apparently just for the hell of it.

  What will Trump try to sell next?

  What would stop him from announcing that there is a terrorist plot, and behind it is a judge he doesn’t like, or a newspaper he doesn’t like, or a senator he doesn’t like, or a religion or race he doesn’t like, or a member of your family he doesn’t like?