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

by Keith Olbermann

  Who else but a jackass would, as your second reaction, do nothing—just stick to the policy that most benefits Russia?

  Who else but a jackass would, as your third reaction, put the international balance of power at risk in case our troops happened to kill a Russian in Syria because your daughter—the schlockmeister one who tries to turn everything she can touch into a marketing opportunity—she ran to Daddy and said she was heartbroken and you should go kill some people?

  Who else but a jackass would, as your fourth reaction, warn Russia that our planes were coming, knowing that Russia would warn Syria, and then put the lives of American service personnel at risk so they could run a farcical stunt attack on an air base, with instructions that they should not try to destroy the runways from which the Syrian jets carrying the sarin gas that killed those kids took off?

  Who else but a jackass would, as your fifth reaction, when America finally woke up to the nauseating reality that you put our people’s lives at risk to run a phony photo-op bombing raid that didn’t bomb anything, tweet that everybody knows when you bomb an air base you never bomb the runways because they’re so easy to fix.

  You are a jackass! You are President Jackass!

  Who else but a jackass would rely on his nitwit son-in-law to do anything on behalf of the American government, when he just happened to fill out the forms for the top-secret security clearance he doesn’t deserve in a million years and he came to question 20B.6, which asks about substantial meetings with foreign governments, and he forgot to mention his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States?

  Who else but a jackass would trot out this Kushner, this triumph of double nepotism, after this? To borrow names from Louise Mensch’s Twitter feed: Oliver Northface somehow acting in the name of our democracy, wearing Flaks Fifth Avenue and a pair of Jamokely Sunglasses?

  Who else but a jackass would say how many weeks he’d been in office—and get it wrong by a margin of 15 percent?

  Who else but a jackass would accuse Susan Rice and Barack Obama and the intelligence community of crimes, without one shred of evidence among them, but continually defend Vladimir Goddamned Putin?

  Who else but a jackass would claim that an eleven-term Democratic congressman from Baltimore had told you, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country,” and leave off the part where he said that to perhaps become great, first you’d have to stop dividing and harming the country and start truly representing everybody?

  You are a jackass!

  Who else but a jackass would demote a man like Steve Bannon not because he has no business being involved in running anything more important than a popsicle stand, but because you reportedly were embarrassed that Saturday Night Live made him look like your boss, and you weren’t—quoting, of all places, Fox News—“happy with the way Bannon had been grabbing the limelight”?

  Who else but a jackass would let Homeland Security try to trample the First Amendment to unmask one of his critics on Twitter?

  Who else but a jackass would have escaped disaster during the campaign after the Access Hollywood sexual assault tape, yet still publicly defend a serial sexual harasser like your pal Bill O’Reilly and claim he had done nothing wrong?

  Who else but a jackass could accuse a New York Times reporter of being the PR person for Hillary Clinton, and when she replies, “Mostly by you, though,” you say, “No, no, no, mostly by a lot of people,” like you’re twelve freaking years old?

  Who else but a jackass could have a collection of pet television hosts, propagandists so stupid that they would try to delete four-year-old tweets that prophesied your nitwitted policy? “Glad our arrogant Pres. is enjoying his taxpayer funded golf outing after announcing the US should take military action against Syria.”

  You are a jackass!

  President Jackass!

  And worst of all, worst of all, maybe worse than everything else combined: who but a jackass would approve his first military mission, and see a Navy SEAL named Ryan Owens lose his life while fulfilling that mission, and exploit his widow during a speech to both houses of Congress, and then say, “This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something that was, you know, just, they wanted to do. . . . My generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”

  Jackass.

  You worthless jackass.

  You President Jackass.

  THE TALE OF THE TAPE

  Post date • MONDAY, APRIL 17

  The British may have already nailed Trump on Russia.

  On tape.

  No—not that tape.

  It was the thirty-fourth and final paragraph in a long and pretty staid review of the role British spies have played in connecting the dots between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians. And then, as if it were merely the best available way for Britain’s newspaper The Guardian to end its useful but modest story, came paragraph thirty-four: “One source suggested the official investigation was making progress. ‘They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,’ the source said. ‘This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.’”

  Oh.

  Shouldn’t that have been presented, I don’t know, a little more prominently? “Specific and corroborative evidence of collusion . . . between people in the Trump campaign and agents of Russian influence . . . relating to the use of hacked material.”

  Not only did the Republic not grind to a halt, but nobody, not even The Guardian itself, followed up with the appropriate screaming headlines. No screaming headlines, even in light of what Eric Trump told another British newspaper, The Telegraph, in the wake of his father’s impotent missile attack against that Syrian air base. “If there was anything that Syria did,” the Trump spawn protested, too much, “it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie.”

  No screaming headlines as a British magazine—Prospect—quoted that nation’s former chief spy Richard Dearlove as speculating, “What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the west apparently would not lend to him.”

  No screaming headlines, even as The Washington Post reported that the FBI did indeed get a judge to issue a FISA warrant (permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to track the actions of and communications with Russians by Carter Page, who was the second name Donald Trump ever gave when asked who his foreign policy advisers were.

  No screaming headlines, even though the story that the FBI had sought, and gotten—a FISA warrant of some kind against somebody directly linked to Trump and/or his campaign—had been widely reported in nontraditional media ever since the former British member of Parliament Louise Mensch published a sourced story before the election.

  No screaming headlines, even though the essence of Mensch’s November 7 story was that, while looking at suspicious Russian banking activity, foreign intelligence services had tripped over contacts between the Russians and the Trump team, and the FBI needed that FISA warrant because without it they couldn’t even read what, say, the British had come up with. “It is thought in the intelligence community,” Mensch wrote in November, “that the warrant covers any ‘US person’ connected to this investigation, and thus covers Donald Trump and at least three further men who have either formed part of his campaign or acted as his media surrogates.”

  Mensch’s report was not so much dismissed as ignored.

  Now Ms. Mensch is back. On her own blog, Sunday night: “Sources with links to the intelligence community say it is believed that Carter Page went to Moscow in early July carrying with him a prerecorded tape of Donald Trump offering to change American policy if he were to be elected, to make it more favorable to Putin. In exchange, Page was authorized
directly by Trump to request the help of the Russian government in hacking the election.”

  Well, you have to admit, a tape of Donald Trump personally saying he would trade American policy decisions in exchange for nefarious Russian intervention in the election would probably fit The Guardian’s thirty-fourth paragraph about “specific and corroborative evidence of collusion . . . between people in the Trump campaign and agents of Russian influence . . . relating to the use of hacked material.”

  Mensch also identifies three Trump associates named in the FBI FISA warrant application—Russian-born reportedly ex–Trump TV spokesman Boris Epshteyn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. “A recording exists of all three men discussing the possibility of Page taking the tape of Trump to Moscow as an earnest of good faith. There is a minor dispute over whether Trump himself is also on that tape . . .”

  So, if Mensch is correct, there may be two tapes of Trump personally making a promise to a foreign government, to help it out if that foreign government broke American laws in order to get him elected.

  In the abstract—in the theoretical—that would be treason.

  On tape.

  Where Ms. Mensch has been again dismissed, three criticisms have been raised. First, that she was not exactly right when she was the first to report that the FBI had gone to the extreme lengths of seeking FISA warrants against the Trump team, before the entirety of the world’s mainstream media was even close to the story The Washington Post just got last week.

  Second, there is the disbelief that anybody would be stupid enough to not just leave “specific and corroborative evidence of collusion,” of Trump saying, “Let’s make a deal,” but to actually, deliberately create that evidence.

  If you have seen Carter Page interviewed, you should have no doubt that he is stupid enough to have done something exactly like this. In one interview on the question of whether or not he had ever met the infamous Russian ambassador Kislyak, he managed to contradict himself about five times in about five minutes before confessing with the immortal words “I may have met him—possibly. It might have been in Cleveland.”

  And of course, if you have ever heard Donald Trump talk, and forget which country he attacked the day before but remember what kind of cake he was eating while he was telling the premier of China about the attack, you should have no doubt that he, too, is stupid enough—and, more relevant, so convinced of his own invulnerability—to have done something exactly like this. And indeed this underscores my repeated contention here that democracy has survived less because of the hard work and dedication of people like you and me who are committed to its preservation, and more because of the unfailing and eternal stupidity of those who would destroy it.

  But last, and most important, Louise Mensch’s story has been criticized because no matter how unfailing and how eternal that stupidity may be, who could ever rise to the position of president of the United States, no matter how insane, or paranoid, or certain that the ordinary odds that they might get caught did not apply to them?

  No president would be stupid enough to put it on tape.

  Richard Nixon?

  THE PRESIDENT IS GETTING CRAZIER

  Post date • TUESDAY, APRIL 18

  Lost in the cacophony of launched missiles in Syria and dropped bombs in Afghanistan and rattled sabers in Korea; drowned out by the clamoring dissonance of conflicting policies about China and Assad and NATO; shouted over by the crises of Sean Spicer and Paul Manafort and Eric Trump; and always—forever—distracted from by the little whir and click sounds of a recorder switching on and off, supported by the remorseless background drumbeat of the Russian election scandal, there is a terrifying new fact: The president is getting crazier.

  This statement is somewhat akin to rhetorically asking if today here in hell it is hotter than it was yesterday. But in the last week—just in the last week—the featherlight grip on reality of Trump’s tiny hands has seemingly gotten much looser—and much looser, much faster.

  The most obvious, though hardly the most disturbing, evidence of some kind of deepening illness or damage or madness or what-does-the-cause-matter-any-longer was the latest barrage of tweets, like the “Fake Media (not Real Media)” tweet Monday morning, but especially the string of them on Easter.

  In eighty-three short minutes, Trump started with a simpleton’s rationalization of his complete 180 on Chinese currency manipulation to boasting about his election as if it were the answer to everything, to using that election as an excuse for reneging on one of his campaign promises, to paranoid fantasies about paid protesters, to then insisting that his election should not be the answer to everything, to a random boast about American military strength, which, if it were connected to the previous tweet, could easily and terrifyingly be read as a tacit threat to suppress American protesters with American military force.

  The president is getting crazier.

  It is possible that this string of five “word explosions” could be only that. Merely a sign of a lazy, damaged, unfocused mind wandering off on its own—again. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or adult attention disorder, or not-really-an-adult sanity disorder, taking a stroll on a lazy holiday weekend. But this wasn’t a lazy holiday weekend. Literally twenty-four hours earlier, there was urgent reason to think we might be bombing North Korea. There had been no accord. There had been no stand-down. And had there been no Korean missile self-destructing and dropping impotently into the sea, there would have been no relief from the crisis.

  And the next morning, the quote-president-unquote was obsessed about how many votes he got in the Electoral College five months ago, as if anyone, anywhere, at any time—besides him—thinks that his weak victory there is by itself an explanation for his broken promises about releasing his taxes.

  And North Korea? North Korea went from inspiring a joke on Saturday Night Live—with Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer suggesting we should eat all the chocolate eggs we want, because it was to be our last Easter on earth—to being relegated to almost an afterthought to the real Trump’s rationalizations about his other broken promises about designating China as a currency manipulator. In the disordered mind of the commander in chief, North Korea had been figuratively, if not literally, the end of the world. Overnight, it was reduced to being not nearly as much of a threat as the Trump tax return protesters.

  The president is getting crazier.

  And it’s not as if he had spent the preceding week—or even the preceding seventy-two hours—focused just on North Korea. In our collective national trip inside the kaleidoscopic, roller-coaster mind of this unstable man, does anybody even remember the MOAB? The 21,000-pound Mother of All Bombs dropped in Afghanistan? Or the stunt attack on the Syrian missile base that didn’t even disable the Syrian missile base? That was one week before Syria. The MOAB was Thursday. Thursday has apparently become Blow-Stuff-Up Day.

  And of course, Trump had already forgotten into which country he had those missiles fired. “So what happens is, I said ‘We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading to Iraq, and I wanted you to know this.’ And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.” And Maria Bartiromo, who used to be a journalist, interrupts and says, “To . . . Syria—”

  “Yes. Heading toward Syria. In other words, ‘We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading toward Syria.’”

  No.

  Those aren’t “other words.” Those things—“We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading to Iraq” and “We’ve just launched fifty-nine missiles heading toward Syria”—are not two different descriptions of the same thing. They are two different things with two utterly different, world-changing sets of consequences. And they are two things that a president says in an interview in which he also expresses his amazement about the unmanned missiles, as if there were manned missiles, and the only thing he says with clear conviction or unmuddied memory is “We had the most beautifu
l piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”

  They are two things a president says when he is getting crazier.

  Only a president who is getting crazier would admit going into a meeting with the premier of China with a long-standing assumption that the Chinese could just wave a magic wand and stop North Korea, but figuring out this was not true after only ten minutes of conversation, while not realizing that there are ten-year-old children in this country with a better grasp on North Korea than he has.

  Only a president who is getting crazier would flip-flop on the Export-Import Bank. And flip-flop on NATO. And flip-flop on his own promise on Chinese currency manipulation. And flip-flop on his own promise on his tax returns. And flip-flop on his Syria policy. And flip-flop on his top adviser. And all of that in just barely over a week, while bombing two countries and threatening a third, and correctly remembering only two of their three names!

  *

  We don’t like to admit this, but it has often served our purposes, just as certainly as it has served Kim Jong-un’s, to have leaders, or indeed even commanders in chief, who verged on seeming madness. Kissinger used to tell the Russians that Richard Nixon was a madman. Ronald Reagan let the same country believe he viewed it as the “evil empire” from Star Wars. Barry Goldwater wouldn’t rule out nuking North Vietnam, and George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate was an ex-general who wanted to nuke Vietnam, Russia, and China, and the Russian records from the Cuban Missile Crisis suggest that Khrushchev thought John F. Kennedy might have been literally insane.

  It can be a tactic. But it can work only if there remains the likelihood that the president really is not crazy. And with every passing week and every passing day and every passing hour, there is less and less evidence that this president really is not crazy.

  What is rapidly becoming the paramount fact of the twenty-first century, the event overshadowing everything else from 9/11 to climate change, continues to be largely ignored—ignored even though it is an existential threat to the future of mankind. There are millions of Americans, millions of others around the world—even millions who despise these policies and hate that man—who are standing so close to the bark, they can’t see the trees, let alone the forest.