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

  ALSO BY KEITH OLBERMANN

  Pitchforks and Torches

  Truth and Consequences

  The Worst Person in the World

  The Big Show

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Keith Olbermann

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Olbermann, Keith, author.

  Title: Trump is f*cking crazy : (this is not a joke) / Keith Olbermann.

  Other titles: Trump is fucking crazy

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017028965 | ISBN 9780525533863 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533887 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– . | United States—Politics and government—2016– . | Presidents—United States—Election—2016.

  Classification: LCC E913 .O43 2017 | DDC 973.933092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028965

  p. cm.

  Version_1

  In memory of Ted and Marie Olbermann, who would be way more pissed off than their son is

  Contents

  Also by Keith Olbermann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I

  Before: THE CLOSER

  CHAPTER 1 • SEPTEMBER 2016

  176 Reasons Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be President

  The Rumormongering About Hillary’s Health Is . . . Deplorable

  The Deplorables Redeploy

  King Lear

  Assassination

  Is Trump Loyal to the United States?

  The Atlantic Wall

  CHAPTER 2 • October 2016

  Trump and Dogs

  The Election Is Inviolable, Trump

  Donald Trump’s Top Fifty Excuses

  “Because You’d Be in Jail”

  Trump’s Thirty Craziest Debate Events

  Camps, with Concentration

  Meltdown

  From Russia with Love

  To Trump’s Supporters: You Know This Man

  Give Us Your Answer!

  Imagine

  To Johnson and Stein Supporters

  To Hillary Clinton Voters

  To Women Voting for Trump

  Trump Praises Another Dictator

  Worse Than Watergate

  CHAPTER 3 • November 2016, pre–Election Day

  The Trumpchurian Candidate

  Descending from the Clouds

  Trump TV—You Think It’s for When He Loses?

  Goddamned Fascist Morons

  Another Fucking Trump Lie

  National Suicide

  The Terrorists Have Won

  PART II

  After: THE RESISTANCE

  CHAPTER 4 • November 2016, post–Election Day

  Post-Election, The Closer Becomes The Resistance

  Pretend

  Alien and Sedition

  Twenty-five, Section 4

  Madness

  A Reply to Trump’s Video

  CHAPTER 5 • December 2016

  We Have Elected an Idiot

  We Have Elected a Shitty Businessman

  Batman Villains

  Russia

  “I’m, Like, a Smart Person”

  The Electoral College and the Compromise of 2016

  The President-Elect and Treason

  Social Security

  CHAPTER 6 • January 2017

  What Did Trump Know and When Did He Stop Knowing It?

  Message to a Trump Supporter

  He Cannot Leave It Alone

  Guns and Trump

  Answer the Question, Trump

  Packing the Court of Public Opinion

  Boycott the Inauguration

  Keynote Speech to Meeting of Democracy Matters

  Another Message to His Supporters—It’s Time for Trump to Resign

  The Media Is Going to Have to Rethink Its Relationship with Trump Here

  The Apology

  CHAPTER 7 • February 2017

  Trump Has Now Aided ISIS

  The Top Fifty Crazy and/or Impeachable Things Done by Trump Since the Inauguration

  For Trump Supporters: Meet Fatemah

  The Arrest of Michael Thomas Flynn

  Guadalupe García de Rayos

  Are These People High or What?

  The Suicide of a Presidency

  Intel

  He Must Go

  Tell It to the Grand Jury

  Call Them What They Are: A Muslim Ban and a Purge of Hispanics

  CHAPTER 8 • March 2017

  The Cocoon and Anosognosia

  Russia, Continued

  The Conspiracy Peddler in Chief

  That Speech Aged Well

  Seven Years

  Russia, Russia, Russia

  Russia/Wiretap/Comey Testimony

  Donald Trump, Loser

  I Alone Can Break It

  First to Flip Gets Less Jail Time

  Could Trump Pass a Sanity Test?

  CHAPTER 9 • April 2017

  Trump Is Panicking over Russia

  Flynn and the Dog That Did Nothing in the Nighttime

  So—New Election?

  The Syria Stunt

  A Message to President Jackass

  The Tale of the Tape

  The President Is Getting Crazier

  A Gilded Coach, You Say?

  The White House Russia Cover-Up

  What Are We Doing?

  The One Hundred Days Are Really Just Sixty

  CHAPTER 10 • May 2017

  Trump’s Plan: Sue Dissenters

  Trump Is Panicking Again About Russia

  A Plea to the Free World: For God’s Sake, Ask Trump!

  The Health Care Repeal

  Yates Proves Trump’s Treason

  Follow the Money

  You Cannot Fire the Man Who Is Investigating You

  An Appeal to the World’s Intelligence Services

  The Trump-Russia Cover-up Case

  “Some Kind of Paranoid Delusion”

  The Tape

  When Will Russia “Break”?

  The Arrest of Jared Kushner

  CHAPTER 11 • June 2017

  There Are But Two Parties Now

  Anybody Else Would’ve Been Fired by Now

  When Donnie Met Sergey

  Trump Is Now Under Investigation for Collusion and Obstruction of Justice
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  What Was That Again About Russian Hookers?

  Self-Destruction

  Does Trump Have Tapes? Does Anybody?

  Firing the Special Counsel

  The Appeasement of Trump

  Epilogue

  Photography Credits

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Before my flabby, almost flatulent words about Donald Trump were out of my mouth, I knew Bill Maher was going to beat the crap out of me for saying them.

  This was November 6, 2015. To alter a soon-to-be cliché, I had been taking Trump literally but not seriously and figured the Republicans would do what they always did: poll crazy but nominate boring. But now I found myself on Maher’s HBO show, hopelessly lost in a Trump story. I had mentioned that I’d first met him in 1984 and had since run into him in the hallways of NBC as well as the lobby of the apartment building that bore his name where I owned a condo. I had observed that—contrary to this hybrid of Huey Long, Mussolini, and Buzz Windrip that seemed to inhabit Trump’s body during the campaign—the conversations were low-key, rational, pleasant each time I had talked to him. Even accounting for the likelihood that he was sucking up to me because you don’t want an unhappy condo owner with a public profile, these conversations were, stunningly, about me and not him. He had even written me a fan letter at ESPN.

  I was confessing to Maher of having been conned.

  I could not stop the self-incrimination. Even though I managed to express the point that the two personalities—Benito Trumpolini and Eddie Trump-Haskell—were both incredibly convincing and the longer he used them both, the less it mattered which was the “real” Trump, I knew Bill; after all, we’d originally run into each other in college in 1978—and within seconds we were arguing, with him calling me a “corporate sellout” at a juncture in my life when all the corporations in the history of the world had paid me about $100 in total. Now, thirty-seven years later, Maher was going to call me a lot worse than a corporate sellout.

  Only, he didn’t.

  He completely agreed with me.

  He couldn’t have agreed more with me and my assessment of Trump’s in-person non-Mussolinism had he said, “Golly gumption, Keith, you’re right, he was super neato pleasant!”

  That was my Trumpian tipping point.

  I was born with a pretty solid bullshit detector, honed by twenty years covering sports for a living and nearly twenty more after that covering politics and news and sports, often all at the same time. But Bill’s bullshit detector was so much better than mine that it was weaponized—and somehow even he had been taken in by Trump. If you see the video of my appearance that night on Bill’s show you’ll notice a little tic in my left eye as it registers in my head: Trump was able to fool Maher?

  When I walked off his stage that night, the thoughts came as fast and as loud as any I had ever had. It wasn’t implausible that Trump had conned me. But Trump had conned Maher? Those aren’t two integrated personalities Trump wears interchangeably like different penis-draping ties. These are manifestations of acute mental illness. Trump isn’t just a scam artist and he isn’t merely a reincarnated P. T. Barnum. This is a psychopath. This is a clear and present danger. Soylent Green is people. They’re after you, they’re after all of us, our wives, our children, everyone! They’re here already! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell! You’re gonna need a bigger boat!

  I’ll spare you the full details of the process that ten months later led to my election-year commentary series that was supposed to keep the car alarm bleating and help my old nemesis Hillary Clinton seal her victory. Besides me, there was one other guy who was asking the question “Why isn’t Olbermann doing commentaries about this?” and he was Geoff Gagnon, the articles editor at GQ magazine. At our first meeting about doing a series we called it The Closer because we were still beholden to pre-11/8 thinking that all Hillary needed was somebody to close the deal for her.

  *

  When the perfect Russian storm hit and the nightmare came to life on Election Day, Geoff and I, and GQ’s video executive producer, Dorenna Newton, and photographer-editor Peter Calvin and Noel Howard and Luke Leifeste and the rest of the crew talked for literally a couple of minutes about shutting the thing down. And then we all said: To hell with that, so what if this will be used against us in court, after two months of this guy we aren’t going to get a trial—and we renamed the series The Resistance and persisted.

  The commentary scripts were not designed as a narrative of the closing stages of the campaign and the opening months of this Ray Bradbury Funhouse Mirror of a presidency. But when I read them in order, it was shocking to me how they formed themselves into one. It’s like digesting a diary rescued from the Titanic and actually finding yourself hoping against your better judgment that this time the damn boat won’t hit the damn iceberg.

  I’d love to say I planned it that way, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s been noted anywhere, but views for each commentary began to rival, then surpass, the high-water-mark ratings of cable news—the total audience for the series eventually exceeded 300 million. I never got a dime out of the videos—I asked GQ only for a few charitable contributions in my name and some (much-needed) fashion help. I hoped all along that the project would be put out of business because the grown-ups would ultimately stop this lunatic from being elected, or from being confirmed by the Electoral College, or from being sworn in, or from not being removed by the fourth clause of the Twenty-fifth Amendment the first time he showed he was crazier than Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, and Ted Cruz put together.

  Tragically, there weren’t any grown-ups, only opportunists who were too busy leveraging Trump’s election to their own advantage for political power or ratings or for paying off mortgages. Crazy old John Brown hastened the coming Civil War and said the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away but with blood. I don’t think we’re nearly at that point—yet—but I’m just as confident as he was, that the crimes of this self-absorbed land will never be purged away but with everything from Lexuses to the repossession of personal freedoms.

  This may seem like an odd point to make here, but bear with me for a moment. By marriage and adoption, I’m Mike Tyson’s distant cousin (he was adopted by his first trainer and manager, Cus D’Amato; D’Amato’s late niece Gerry was my uncle’s wife). Thirty years ago, Trump—who was then involved in the boxing-promotion business because of his casino venues—and the infamous promoter Don King squeezed Cus’s protégé trainer Kevin Rooney and other D’Amato disciples out of Tyson’s coterie. They also told Mike—forgive me, cousin Mike—that he was the champ now and he no longer had to do the things that Cus and Kevin used to insist he do. You know, like taking the cocktail of medications that kept him surprisingly stable and unexpectedly kind and even sweet-hearted but harshed his buzz, or sticking to a diet, or training, or not attacking people, or not giving away $200,000 cars to strangers. King and Trump came into a situation that was seemingly permanently under control, disabled the brakes and busted the headlights and painted over the speed-limit signs, and within a few years, Tyson was in prison, convicted of rape.

  The point of this book is to chronicle how Trump managed to get America to choose him to do to our country what Trump helped do to my cousin Mike. These commentaries are about what Trump’s mixture of illness, hucksterism, amorality, and manipulative cunning has done to the United States, so I won’t belabor you with some long meta-analysis right here. But I will say that I suspect you’ll reach the same kind of conclusion I did after reading all these scripts at once. Trump’s immeasurable ego and his “Wheeee! The Rules Don’t Apply to Meeeeee!” attitude (which mirrors the bravado of the opioid abuser—plus whatever else is wrong with him) found a partner in that less than half of the electorate that ultimately doesn’t give a shit about anybody they don’t know personally (and not a lot of people they do know personally, either).
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br />   Trump gives them permission to ignore whatever principles they might have. Trump gives them permission to believe that laws and invoices and religions apply only to others. Trump gives even the lower-incomed among them confirmation that they can act with vengeance against the less fortunate because he’s going to make his “fans” rich. Trump gives them the right to dispute facts. Trump gives them the right to ignore warnings. Trump gives them the right to hate. Trump gives them the right to stop doing what other people and common sense and common decency tell them to do. Trump gives them the right to say, “We don’t have to have any more black people or women running this country.” Trump gives them the right to do what he does when he’s caught lying, stealing, obstructing, or selling out the country: just make up a cover story, the wilder the better—the rubes will believe it. Trump gives them the right to be stupid and goddamned proud of it.

  Just remember as you read, that this can be fixed whenever we will it. We who have seen him for what he is, and fought him and the driving-morally-drunk America still cheering him, are not some fringe group scuttling in the darkness.

  We are the majority.

  Let’s act like it.

  PART I

  Before:

  I’M KEITH OLBERMANN and this is

  THE

  CLOSER

  Chapter 1

  SEPTEMBER 2016

  176 REASONS DONALD TRUMP SHOULDN’T BE PRESIDENT

  Post date • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

  In brief, the Trump presidential campaign so far:

  The Republican Party has actually nominated for president a man who attacked the Pope.

  Who attacked John McCain for being captured by the North Vietnamese.

  Who attacked Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan and then juxtaposed their names with the phrase “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”

  Who attacked Hillary Clinton as a “bigot.”

  Who attacked her as “brainwashed.” As “unhinged.” As “a monster.” As “the devil.” As “the most corrupt candidate ever”—showing her face on piles of hundred-dollar bills and the Star of David.