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

by Keith Olbermann

  I ALONE CAN BREAK IT

  Post date • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22

  “I alone can fix it.”

  July 21, 2016, at the Republican convention in Cleveland, the five Trump words that officially proclaimed his bid to overthrow the traditional government of the United States of America and replace it with him. As I have argued here this week, you can look at the first sixty-plus days of his presidency as a succession of losses and incompetence and humiliations that would have sent almost any other human being who found himself in Trump’s shoes fleeing for the Cayman Islands.

  But one comment by one woman with the improbable name of Charla McComic has me wondering if this—this chaos-monger, this embarrassment, this petulant little boy refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand, this doer of this latest stuff he did today, this imbecile in imbecile’s clothing—has me wondering if all this is actually the plan.

  “I alone can fix it.”

  Charla McComic is the woman from Lexington, Tennessee, whom Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post found. Ms. McComic is fifty-two years old, her son lost his job and the health insurance that came with it, and yet his health insurance premium dropped from $567 a month to $88 a month. “A blessing from God,” said Ms. McComic—a blessing from God via Donald Trump. Quoting her again: “I think it was just because of the tax credit.”

  That’s the Trump-Ryan-Republican plan to in part replace the Affordable Care Act with a series of tax credits.

  She thinks her son’s insurance premium plummeted because of the Trump plan that hasn’t even been passed by the House and Senate, let alone become law.

  She thinks Trump did this for her.

  In fact—Obama did this for her. Her son’s insurance premium dropped $479 a month due to Obamacare.

  But not in her mind. Nope. Trump brought her God’s blessing.

  “I alone can fix it.”

  Do you remember that a majority of Iraqis—this is in the twenty-first century, mind you—believed that Saddam Hussein wore a magical stone around his neck, or had one implanted in his arm, that made him invulnerable to attack? And that if somehow he was killed, chaos would consume Iraq?

  “I alone can fix it.”

  Have you watched Turkey in the past year? A country riven with terrorism and sectarianism, coming apart at the seams. And then this lunatic bully Erdoğan either fomented a coup against his own government, which included insurgents who just happened to not shoot down the plane he was in while they were next to it—or, if it wasn’t a false flag, he just happened to be in position to almost immediately exploit it, to detain, arrest, or dismiss as many as 150,000 of his own citizens and blame everything on a dissident living in Pennsylvania, and put to a national vote his bid to eliminate the remnants of democracy and place all power in his own hands.

  “I alone can fix it.”

  “I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told a reporter from The Daily Beast in a 2013 conversation he now claims he does not remember. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

  Thus “I alone can fix it” would actually just be shorthand for a longer quote: “I alone can fix it . . . after so many of you never notice that I alone broke it.”

  Mind you, I’m not convinced of this.

  Most of the fascists who have popped up to seize power in this country’s history have been pretty easy to analyze. The question “Why in the hell are they doing this this way?” does not usually come with a series of multiple-choice answers. I’m still not convinced that Trump and his cronies are not just morons who have tried to apply the simple rules that always worked for them in corporate ownership to the mega-complexity of geopolitics. I’m still not convinced they’re not all crazy. I’m still not convinced they’re not all stoned.

  They sure act stoned.

  But what if this is the plan?

  Claim the British tapped his phones, threaten North Korea and China, insult the German chancellor, try to drag her into his paranoid wiretapping hoax, quote a bozo from Fox for it, turn around and throw the bozo from Fox under the bus, blame the rest of the news media for painting the Merkel meeting as bad, and himself paint Merkel as some kind of deadbeat—all in a span of twenty-four hours. What would all that mean to Ms. Charla “God’s Blessing” McComic in Lexington, Tennessee?

  Why—it would mean her president is under attack.

  By the British. By the Germans. By the North Koreans. By the Chinese. By Obama. By fake news. By Fox News. By the judges. By the Democrats. By the paid protesters. By the Muslims. By the Hispanics. By the non-Christians.

  “I alone can fix it.”

  And when it’s broken? Will it matter who is really at fault to Charla McComic? When some atrocity from this medieval budget gets through? When, say, the Delta Regional Authority and two similar agencies that Trump wants to cut get cut—the agencies that fix the roads and the sewers and fund the health clinics and support the local small businesses in 698 rural counties, including in Charla McComic’s Tennessee, 698 rural counties that Trump won by 16 percent—what happens when the Delta Regional Authority goes away?

  Trump blames somebody else.

  And Charla McComic blames somebody else. The Democrats did it. The Republicans did it. The career politicians did it when they altered his budget.

  That’d never work, though. Of course not. He could never get away with being “President I Didn’t Do It.” And he could never pitch—for nearly three weeks—a hoax that Obama tapped his phones. Or insist it was reported in The New York Times. Or that he used quote marks on his tweets about it when half his tweets had no quote marks. Or claim that he disproved birtherism. Or insist that the generals lost the Navy SEAL in Yemen. Or contend that the judiciary had no right to interfere with his idea of legal and illegal travel bans, or what is safe and what is terroristic. And he could never get people thinking the way they thought in Iraq, or the way they think in Turkey. He could never get Charla McComic to convince herself, by herself, that her son’s insurance dropped $479 a month due not to Obamacare but to Trump tax credits that don’t exist yet. And even if she did start thinking that way, so what? She’s obviously on the fringes of society, not very bright, not very . . .

  She’s a retired schoolteacher.

  *

  Charla McComic and her friends, by the way, campaigned for him, started a motorcade, shouting his name at passersby. “We said: ‘Who else would we do this for, besides Trump?’ We agreed on the Lord. We would stand here for the Lord, but that’s about it.” So what happens if McComic’s son now actually loses his insurance because of Trump? Presumably all Trump would have to do is . . . blame somebody. Anybody. She believes him. He could probably convince her he has a magic stone under his skin.

  But—if this is the plan—maybe the stone is for later.

  Maybe that’s for when there is a real crisis that Trump fostered, and he ignores the courts and the Congress and the Constitution and blames somebody else for it.

  Right now, the only thing he has to do is just say it again to her:

  I alone can fix it . . .

  After so many of you never notice that I alone . . . broke it.

  FIRST TO FLIP GETS LESS JAIL TIME

  Post date • MONDAY, MARCH 27

  Trump couldn’t make a deal on health care, but Michael Flynn might have made a deal with the FBI?

  The Russia story continues to grow grimmer and bigger and deadlier, like a funnel cloud, moving like a living thing out at the horizon.

  The word “treason” has been invoked by the unlikeliest of sources;

  By process of elimination, it seems as if Flynn—or somebody from the Trump Gang—may be ready to testify against the rest of them;

  The White House seems to be setting up Flynn and maybe a second guy as its scapegoats;


  And . . . the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has been engulfed in a full, weeklong spasm of panic.

  Part by part.

  “FBI UNCOVERING EVIDENCE OF TREASON. THERE IS NO OTHER WORD FOR IT”

  That’s a helluva statement.

  I couldn’t just make that statement, even just as commentary.

  But that was one man’s comment when he retweeted the McClatchy news report that FBI investigators probing Russian sabotage of the presidential election were now looking to see whether Breitbart, Infowars, and maybe other American right-wing sites were knowingly involved in Russian cyber operations. “FBI uncovering evidence of treason. There is no other word for it.”

  Who wrote that? Professor Richard W. Painter, of the University of Minnesota Law School, who from February 2005 to July 2007 was President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer. He uses the word “treason.” Seven times. Like after the CNN report that the FBI is culling through evidence that Trump associates communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the leaks damaging to the Clinton campaign. Painter, Friday: “Despite mounting evidence of collusion and treason, President Trump is still spouting the Kremlin line.”

  So, to cite the full quote from sixteenth-century British courtier and author John Harington:

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

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

  None dare call it treason.

  Except the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.

  So you are probably okay using the term.

  LET’S MAKE A DEAL

  So, there’s a good chance you may have committed some light treason. What should you do now?

  To again paraphrase the former NSA and Naval War College figure John Schindler: First ones to make a deal usually get the lightest prison sentences.

  Friday: security expert, Harvard lecturer, and somebody I was proud to help bring to MSNBC, Juliette Kayyem, put together three mildly interesting facts and realized that one other name was missing, and that name and why it was missing was way more interesting.

  Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort volunteered for a limited interview with the House Intelligence Committee.

  Longtime Trump henchman Roger Stone demanded to make an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee.

  The second man ever named by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, also said he would talk to the House Intelligence Committee.

  Monday morning, The New York Times revealed that Jared Kushner—whose only known skill is that he has survived being Trump’s son-in-law—has been asked to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

  But, as Juliette Kayyem realized, the other key actor in whatever the Trump-Russia Dance of Deceit really is—he hasn’t said boo about testifying anywhere.

  General Michael Flynn.

  Thus, says Juliette, the question in the intelligence and security circles in which she travels is: Could Flynn be cutting a deal with the FBI?

  Flynn, of course, was briefly national security adviser until it turned out not only that every wild report about him and Russia was true, but that some of them were sanitized versions of true . . .

  Then it turned out that he was also on the Trump campaign team and the Turkish payroll simultaneously . . .

  Now, former CIA director James Woolsey says he was at a meeting last summer at which Flynn, on the Trump campaign team, talked to Turkish officials about “removing” the Muslim cleric on whom Turkish dictator Erdoğan has blamed all of his country’s problems.

  You can translate “removing” as “kidnap a legal resident of the United States from his home in Pennsylvania and take him to imprisonment and/or death in Turkey.”

  Making a deal to flip and tell all he knows about Trump or whomever is Flynn’s only way out, since he could be charged with some traitorous offenses involving two different foreign countries.

  His reaction? His spokesman told a reporter that, to this story, Flynn is not “responding.”

  SCAPEGOAT TIME

  As Humphrey Bogart cooed to Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, “Don’t be silly—you’re taking the fall.” Funny that Juliette Kayyem thinks that Mike Flynn may have made a deal with the FBI. Seen the blood-curdling cover of the Trump-friendly tabloid the National Enquirer?

  “Trump Catches Russia’s White House Spy!”

  “How He Tricked the Bungling FBI.”

  “‘23 agents have infiltrated Congress, federal bureaus & the military!’”

  Spoiler alert: They mean General Mike Flynn.

  But there are plenty of buses, under which plenty of the Trump-Putinistas can be successfully thrown. The Associated Press story that Paul Manafort signed a $10 million contract with a Russian oligarch in 2006? The deal Manafort said would “greatly benefit the Putin Government”? The Trump government responded by dismissing Manafort’s role with the campaign as a “volunteer”—as somebody “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time,” as somebody there only to “count delegates.”

  Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s second campaign manager.

  All that’s missing for Manafort is the bus. And remember what Mom always said: Never run for the bus—there will always be another one.

  WALKING IN THE NUNES OF LIFE

  And finally: in American politics, we’ve seen guilty suspects panic and innocent suspects panic and vindicated suspects panic, but not since Ken Starr have we seen somebody who is, in effect, the prosecutor panic.

  Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is acting as if he is about to flee the country. He told the media he had some kind of intelligence information that somehow backstopped Trump’s wiretapping hoax—possibly violating the law just by saying that. He then took that information to Trump—like a prosecutor handing over evidence to a defendant, or at least the associate of a defendant—possibly violating the law again. He explained that he did this amazingly stupid thing because Trump had been “taking a lot of heat in the news media.”

  He did this before sharing any of whatever the intel was with the rest of his own committee. He had to apologize to his own committee. He then was unable or unwilling to deny that this information that supposedly supported Trump had originated with Trump.

  Then The Daily Beast quoted three unnamed committee officials and a former national security official who said that the night before all of this started, Nunes was in an Uber with a staffer, got a call or a text or an email, and immediately bolted out of the car, and for hours nobody knew where he was.

  Then, Monday morning it was reported that Nunes had been at the White House that day to meet his intel source—but his spokesman said that while, yes, he was on the White House grounds, he didn’t go to the White House itself.

  Because this is what happens when you elect Inspector Clouseau to Congress. This is the guy nominally leading the congressional investigation! Who, of course, was also a member of Trump’s presidential transition team and just happened to be at one of General Flynn’s meetings with the Turkish foreign minister. And all of this while my friend Andrea Mitchell reported that there were “a lot of former transition team members in and outside of the White House now purging their private phones.” And all of this while the Russian propaganda website Sputnik may get credentials as part of the foreign press, covering the White House.

  *

  This is not blowing over.

  This has not stopped expanding.

  This is not something for which we can’t use the big words.

  This is about whether the man elected president is loyal to the United States of America, or whether he is loyal to the Russian Federation.

  This is about—to quote George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer—each of the seven times he has used the word:

  Treason, treason, treason, treason, treason, treason—and Treason.

  COULD TRUMP PASS A SAN
ITY TEST?

  Post date • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29

  His daily behavior getting weirder and weirder and weirder—like today, after his candidacy was nearly ended by the pussy-grabber tape, he has now been reported to have become, as president, verbally and grossly fixated on the breasts of the Japanese prime minister’s translator.

  His grasp of history doubted during the campaign when he repeated the tabloid gossip that Senator Cruz’s father was involved in a presidential assassination, he has now given a speech suggesting he believes that nobody knows which political party the first Republican president belonged to.

  His intellectual capacity questioned during the transition, when he reportedly revealed that he thought NATO members paid dues to the United States, he—as president—reportedly directly demanded to the chancellor of Germany that her country pony up $375 billion.

  His campaign manager convinced that microwave ovens—not microwaves, but microwave ovens—can turn into cameras, and his transition team on the record asking about using tanks during the inaugural parade, as if this was May Day 1962 at the Kremlin, and a guy on Fox News who used to be Glenn Beck’s vacation relief insisting that Trump told him he was on the short list for the Supreme Court.

  With all that, I want to ask a question I first asked a year ago:

  Could Donald Trump pass a sanity test?

  *

  With the help of a couple of professionals in the field and using only Trump’s own words and actions, I scored him on an actual twenty-question screening test for psychopaths. The most you could get was 40 points. The threshold for probably being a psychopath was 30 points. Trump’s words and actions got him 32 points. He could still finish life as high as 36, since two of the questions pertain to criminal record and violation of parole, and there’s plenty of time for him on both.