transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of IHeartRadio. Quote, Donald Trump is losing his mind, unquote. The Washington Examiner. 773 words in one of the most prominent MAGA magazines in this country. Headlines elsewhere in the same issue. Quote, Chris Murphy, Democrat of Tehran, and New York City crime, part of promises broken by Mamdani, and why Trump should not rush back to talks with Iran. Quote, Donald Trump is losing his mind. That's not me writing that. It's not Jimmy Kimmel. It's The Washington God damned Examiner, where the same columnist who wrote Donald Trump is losing his mind, once authored Monarchical Obama, real monarchs are humbler and a whole lot cheaper. This conservative MAGA bastion published this, Donald Trump is losing his mind, before Trump threatened yesterday to go all General Sherman on Tehran. They published it before he overshadowed his own claim that the Virginia redistricting vote was fixed, by also insisting in the same post, as everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person. Insisting that, as an asshole does. This was published before Trump compared his war in Iran to Vietnam, a war he avoided serving in, and said he could have quote, won Vietnam very quickly, you know Vietnam which he dodged. And before Trump exhausted this, that's not the flex you think it is, and found a second one like that, quote, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time. The Washington Examiner column claiming Trump is losing his mind, preceded all that, it even preceded Trump's proclamation that nobody should be allowed to criticize him about Iran anymore. He didn't threaten his critics, but he came right up to that point. Never allow the traitor Democrats like low IQ person Akeem Jeffries, low IQ person is of course Trump's euphemism for black, or crying Chuck Schumer, or the totally corrupt fake news media such as the phony and decaying Wall Street Journal, the failing New York Times, subscriptions way down, or dying 60 Minutes to demean or criticize Operation Midnight Hammer, which totally obliterated the nuclear dust locations. Editor's note, there's no such thing as nuclear dust moron. Nuclear dust locations to the point where bloodthirsty Iran has been unable to get to it or dig it out. You're not allowed to criticize what I've done, he wrote. I'm the best, I bombed Iran, I would have won in Iraq, in Vietnam, I would have won Antietam, I would have won at Waterloo, never, never allow, never allow. Who are we kidding? Trump doesn't know what Waterloo was? Quote, Donald Trump is losing his mind.

Speaker 2:
[03:24] I would have won Vietnam very quickly, I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won because essentially we've won here.

Speaker 1:
[03:36] And if you disagree, you can't disagree. You're not allowed, you're not allowed. By whom are you not allowed? Well, he hasn't said. Yet, as an aside, note please, that most of Trump's TV interviews tend to be not just with fascist stooges like Joe Kerman there, but with fascist stooges like Joe Kerman there, whose hair is actually worse than his own. Think Hannity, think Maria Bartiromo. What is perhaps the most amazing of all the details buried in this reality, we now accept as part of our daily lives, that the president is a functioning insane person, was the Wall Street Journal report that when the two American airmen went down in Iran and a rescue operation was being forged, aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute by minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn't be helpful, a senior administration official said. They wouldn't let Trump in the situation room for the planning meeting. They updated him when there were meaningful developments, and in between, they just left him to, I don't know, play with his own toes. Back to The Washington Examiner, author Dan Hannon's other columns, before Donald Trump is losing his mind, included such Pulitzer Prize winners as Better Trump Than Starmor, and Reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination reveal a nation on the brink, and the epic The Kids Are Alt-Right, which I understand has been optioned as a major motion picture, presumably by Jeff Bezos. I'll spare you the whole column. I wrote this better and sooner in 2016. George Conway wrote it in 2019. But Hannon underscores that the breaking point, to the degree that MAGA has broken with Trump, and that is still only showing up marginally in polling, but it is showing up. We'll get to that in a moment. The breaking point for MAGA has been the attack on the Pope. Fascism? Okay. Heresy? We draw the line at heresy. Quote, imagine it was someone other than President Donald Trump. Suppose a different leader were posting deranged rants in the small hours, insulting the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, threatening the entire civilizations with annihilation and comparing himself to God. What would be the reaction? We all know the answer. Both parties would be rushing to bundle him out of office before he did irreversible harm to the Republic. Yet, as we all know, different rules apply to Trump. Democrats, having had their fingers burned by two failed impeachment attempts, you think, are reluctant to try again, you think, for they know that there is no sure way to boost his support. Republicans, who privately despair at the electoral damage he is doing, let alone the constitutional damage, are paralyzed by fear of upsetting their primary voters. The president, he went on, whom critics accuse of having a god complex, no, those are his followers who accuse him of having a god complex, then followed up with an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. The image was offensive not only to Catholics, but to almost every practicing Christian, and come to that, to almost every Muslim. The Iranian Ayatollahs used one of the Lego videos with which they have been trolling the president to condemn what they sincerely saw as blasphemy. They were not alone. catholicvote.org, which turned out millions of voters for Trump in three successive elections, condemned the post as impious. At the same time, according to its president, Kelsey Reinhart, quote, President Trump's post insulting Pope Leo crossed again a line of decorum. Mr. Hannon, in his column, you know what it's called, then asks if there is some strategy, some chess move, he writes, that requires picking a quarrel with the pope and lists a few options, and then he dismisses them and dismisses Trump's sanity and quoting his column again. These things are possible, I suppose. The likelier explanation, though, is that this is exactly what it looks like. A 79-year-old man who has long dealt in chaos is now being consumed by that chaos. His episodes are becoming more frequent, his good days further apart. What he has lost is not a sense of decency or decorum. He never had those, but any remaining self-sense of control. Everyone around him can see it, yet whether from ambition, cowardice or weary acceptance, they keep looking for ways to rationalize his behavior. The tragedy is no longer Trump's, it is now America's. Column kind of fizzles out at the end there, but the point remains, this is written about Trump in as Trump sucking a magazine as still publishes in this country. And the details may be instructive, but the takeaway remains the headline. Donald Trump is losing his mind. By the way, this point, the essence of the emperor has no close argument. Some of us have been making about Trump since 1983, let alone 2015. This is finally beginning to catch on. People are afraid of this issue, of Trump's acuity and sanity, even though he constantly brings it up. I suppose that is because once you ask if one particular public figure is insane, where do you stop? But finally, somebody is actually asking, a little publicized Ipsos poll for Reuters this week has Trump's mental sharpness, that's the phrase they use, mental sharpness, gotten worse over the last year? Gently phrased, mental sharpness, a lot of wiggle room, mental sharpness. But a majority say, yeah, it has, 51 percent, his mental sharpness has gotten worse, and the interior numbers are even more telling. 85 percent of Democrats, okay, I'd like to see the 15 percent of you who think he has not gotten worse in the last year, raise your hands, which may be difficult since you must be in comas. 54 percent of independents say yes, his mental sharpness is worse than last year. 14 percent of Republicans think Trump's mental sharpness has gotten worse in the last year. The rest of the world was ahead of us on this, of course, and now they are ahead in using Trump's dementia or stupidity or insanity against him. The New York Times reports that some leaders in Ukraine think they might be able yet to sway Trump into fully supporting their nation, especially in the continuing demands by Russia for Ukraine to cede the Donbass region to Russia by simply renaming the Donbass, quote, Donny Land. Well, that of course is ridiculous. Trump would never go against Putin and repudiate a decade of enmity towards Ukraine and Zelensky simply because they would rename part of their country Donny Land. Now, rename it Trump-ylvania and he's in. Donald Trump is losing his mind, writes The Washington Examiner, which I guess makes it unanimous. Trump is also approaching unanimity in non-is-he-crazy polling. A new Associated Press NORC poll, 33% approval. He's now 19 points underwater on immigration, and that's his best poll number. He's 35 points underwater on Iran, 40 on the economy, 53 on inflation. Even Politico, stenographer to the Western world, reports that White House staffers have accepted they will not only lose the House significantly, but probably will lose the Senate as well. There is an outside chance that the Democrats could come up with enough of a swing in the upper chamber to get enough votes to not merely impeach Trump in the House, but convict him and remove him in the Senate. Which is dandy, because there is a separate poll, strength in numbers, verisite. 55% of Americans support impeaching Trump. 55. 45% strongly support impeaching him. Only 30% are strongly opposed. And if you say, blah blah blah, there has been an impeachment bill somewhere in the House, every day Trump has been president, and yeah, that point from before, there has been two impeachments, what good did they do? Ponder this number. Impeachment in this poll is supported by 21% of Republicans, by 21% of Trump's 2024 voters. A fifth of them want their money back. Now, how will Trump's crack team redeem him? And by crack team, I am not just referring to RFK Jr. They have bellowed the clarion call, save me Joe Rogan. Politico reported yesterday that when you saw little Joe Rogan and his cue ball noggin up on his tippy toes trying to peer over the top of Trump's head as Trump sat at the Oval Office Saturday, it was part of a meeting with him to try to get him back on their side after Rogan trashed Trump about Iran. Rogan was there because it is assumed that Rogan prioritizes the new White House initiative to make some psychedelic drugs available to treat severe depression. Once again, it seems like they got the wrong guy there, Joe Rogan. This is RFK Jr.'s area of expertise. There are also strong indications that one of the other solutions to the Trump slump, the firings will continue until Trump's ratings improve. Tulsi Gabbard and her minion Harmeet Dhillon on the block because, well, they're women and Trump is a flaming misogynist. But also, Kash Patel. Kash Patel may be on the way because Kash Patel not only sued the Atlantic over its drunken unreliability story, but A, Streisand affected that story and that suit by relisting every detail of the story in his lawyer letter, B, left a series of embarrassing typos in the lawyer letter, and C, at a news conference, he did not know that the lawyer letter confirmed the framework of a story in the story, the one about him getting locked out of a device on the FBI computer system, while he stood there and contradicted his own lawyer letter insisting no, he never got locked out of anything. Computer, iPad, his government funded private jet, the bedroom of his quote girlfriend, the locker room of some hockey team somewhere. Patel also did not sound the sharpest at his news conference, but if we still took that as an indicator in what has been dubbed the Trump Liquor Cabinet, RFK Jr. would have been long gone, and Hegseth, and Patel, and of course Trump himself. But the unfortunate and perhaps unfair reality for Patel in particular is, whatever that is with his eyes, it makes him look like he is worse for wear. They call it cockeyed drunk for a reason. The Democrats once again showing the wisdom to kick a man when he's down, are now demanding that Patel take an alcoholism screening test. His choices amount to A, are you an alcoholic? B, are you so full of alcohol that you're at risk of bursting into flames? Or C, are you J. Edgar Boozer? Some highlights of the actual test, alcohol use disorders identification test, audit, questionnaire. Please circle the answer that is correct for you. It doesn't say if you can. One, how often do you have a drink containing alcohol? A, never, B, monthly or less, C, two, four times a month. E is four or more times a week. How many standard drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when drinking? A, one or two, B, three or four, C, five or six, D, seven to nine, E, ten or more? Three, how often do you have six or more drinks on one occasion? You can see where this is going. Number six, question number six, during the past year, how often have you needed a drink in the morning to get yourself going after a heavy drinking session? A, never, B, less than monthly, C, monthly, D, weekly, E, daily or almost daily, F should be, I can't tell the difference between night and morning anymore. Seven is during the past year, how often have you had a feeling of guilt or remorse after drinking? Eight is during the past year, have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you have been drinking? Nine, have you or someone else been injured as a result of your drinking? Ten, has a relative or friend, doctor or other health worker been concerned about your drinking or suggested you cut down? A, no. B, yes, but not in the past year. C, yes, during the past year. Once again, I will suggest D, only the president. As to the typos in the lawsuit, Patel's lawyers misspelled policies and the word disgust, as in we disgust this and most tellingly the word feeble. Pressed for a response to these typos in the lawsuit, his lawyers said if the worst that critics could come up with about the lawsuit, just some misspelled words, he felt good about their chances. Even though the point of the lawsuit is to deny that Patel is failing at his job and letting other fail at their job because he is impaired, or if you prefer, because he's no longer able to successfully. Dicuss administration politizes because he's too feeble. That's F-E-A-B-L-E, feeble. Lastly, in the news, White House Correspondents dinner is Saturday. Still, only Huffington Post has officially and entirely pulled out. Trump will be there. Hegseth and Stephen Miller have been invited, some by multiple news organizations, possibly by CBS. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, the gobbles of our time, says he will be there. He's not saying who invited him. He's saying it is not CBS. Some media analysts think he'll be there at the Paramount table, and only Brendan Carr would deny he's going to be there with CBS when he's going to be there with Paramount, which owns CBS now. Not a bright guy. People will go to this because the Chuck Todd, Chris Soliza construction still fits. There is nothing reporters yearn more for than what they would want to see still happening in their own profession rather than what is happening. The past, the world in which there were only about six different kinds of news, political stories, and they all fit neatly to a series of maybe three different cubby holes. The way it used to be when news and the news media were not imploding and not being bombed from above by the president. When, no, the few fair news organizations were not being bought, subverted and sabotaged by the fascists, and no, all the jobs weren't disappearing, and no, you wouldn't have impossible trouble finding a new job, and no, you aren't going to have trouble making the rent or paying the mortgage, and no, it's still okay to dress up on a clammy Saturday night in April and sit on the oldest, clammiest chairs left in any Washington hotel, and it's okay to sit in the same room as Trump and pretend it's still 1996 or something, and that you can pretend that the president up there wouldn't enjoy watching you get killed. Look, I get it. We were all raised on all the president's men and that image of reporting, or at least the broadcast news version of reporting. It's gone. It's dead. We might be able to get it back, but it doesn't exist right now, and if you're looking for it to protect you, you're dead too. And I get the other part. The high-end people in the business who are slowly sliding into the abyss of obeying in advance, of collaborating with Brendan Carr and the Bollesons and Barry Weiss and the rest of them who would erase the First Amendment or, like Jeff Bezos, sell it to buy extra implants for his wife's breasts. The money they offer can still be much more than any of these people could ever make doing anything else. The trap of that money is you don't just look at a couple of years of a multimillion-dollar salary and say, As I honestly said, how can I make this last the rest of my life if I have to? Or if I decide one day I don't want to go to work anymore? No, you don't do that. Suddenly you reset your floor. That money, I'm making $7 million a year. I will never work for less than $7 million again. That becomes the minimum you need. And you will do anything to keep it coming. At the pinnacle of my income, I like to think of the days when I started and made $16,500 a year as a sports reporter at UPI in New York. And I did stuff like this. Keith Olbermann reports.

Speaker 3:
[22:19] After receiving gifts, Sirius and Comical, and the praise of his teammates, his manager and the fans, Catfish Hunter marked his retirement ceremony by noting the important people who could not attend.

Speaker 4:
[22:28] Three people that I wish could have been here today.

Speaker 1:
[22:35] I used to do stuff like that every day and on my off nights, I would still go back to the ballpark because I had a pass to get into the press box. And dinner was still free in those days in the press box. And then later they would give you a snack. And I could get there on the subway and then usually get a free lift downtown after the game from a friend. And if I did it right, my cost for an evening of food and entertainment and fellowship was the 60 cents, the subway cost, instead of the $3.25 that the dinner at Burger King cost. To this day, in a real sense, the $2.65 I used to save while I beat the 1979 system was the largest amount of money I have ever had in my hands. I beat the system. I made sure I remembered that. Others in media remember something like that only to do a Scarlett O'Hara and insist, as God is their witness, they'll never be hungry again. You think Jake Tapper wants to become a professional cartoonist and take a cut from $7 million a year to $113,000 if he's lucky? Does Maddow want to go back to being a dancing cell phone outside a cell phone store in suburban Boston? Does Sarah Eisen of CNBC want to go back to, I don't know, trying to find work in some other field? I think it was a bit of a trap to ask Kevin Warsh about the election denial to get him to disagree with President Trump she said yesterday on CNBC in a statement that should be framed and delivered to Brendan Carr or Vladimir Putin. You know no Fed chair is going to weigh in on politics like that, Senator Warren. Yes, that was CNBC declaring, you know no Fed chair is going to weigh in on politics like that, that CNBC declaring Trump's attempt to overturn an election and overthrow the government of the United States and end democracy here, that that's, quote, politics. Sarah Eisen should be fired and CNBC should be closed down and the building knocked down and the earth beneath it salted. But no, they'll have a table at the Washington Hilton. And maybe, maybe this Eisen woman will be there applauding the Nazis in person. I still hold out some hope there must be some people somewhere who had thought about leaving the media anyway and had saved their money for the day when the chance might come around, the roulette wheel might spin, and they might at least make a statement about Trump that Trump might actually see. That they might break through the bubble in which he lives. Somebody who would stand up as he enters the room and scream, F you Trump! Or interrupt him if he actually gets up and talks. Because if you can't do that because you would get fired and blacklisted and they take your home within a month, I guess you get a pass. Though maybe, if that's true, maybe you shouldn't go to the damn dinner anyway, which in its best years is boring and sad, with terrible food and too many chairs at each table. That was before the dinner was actually so corrupted that its organizing committee would list Trump as they list Trump for this Saturday night, in this timeline, at this moment. They are listing Trump as an honoree of the White House Correspondents Association. Fuck you, White House Correspondents Association. Can I be any more blunt about that? Because the bottom line is, if you are attending the White House Correspondents Dinner and you are not storming out or otherwise protesting Trump's presence, Trump who wants to destroy you, literally, and your employers and your profession and decide which few of you get to live, which few of you get to continue in some kind of macabre perversion of journalism. If you are not protesting tomorrow at the White House Correspondents Dinner, you are not only a traitor to journalism, you are a traitor to America. Talking about dinner on Saturday in DC, a little lighter note, time to tell you about my dates with Laura Ingraham. Well, one date, and then something that was closer to me being held hostage. And more importantly, remember that Trump crazy idea about the Garden of Heroes? 250 statues of American immortals like Elvis and Buffalo Bill and Justice Scalia and Patton, and Whittaker effing Chambers? To open on July 4th for the country's 250th anniversary? Small problem with the Garden of Heroes. They forgot to order the statues. Even the statue of Whittaker Chambers, they forgot to get any statues for the Garden of Statues. That's next. You don't know who Whittaker Chambers was? Whittaker Chambers was the guy who ratted out Alger Hiss. That's next. This is Countdown.

Speaker 2:
[27:58] This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Speaker 1:
[28:23] Still ahead on this edition of Countdown, I made reference online early this week to having gone out on two dates with Laura Ingraham during a previous century. Judging by the astonished reaction, this admittedly startling fact has apparently again slipped from the forefront of the collective American consciousness. So let me refresh your memory. The first one was definitely a date. The second one, as I always like to say, was more of a hostage situation, and I was the hostage. Next, in another thing, I promised not to tell. In the interim, we always have new idiots to talk about, the roundup of the miscreants, morons, and dunning grueger effects specimens who constitute today's other Worst Persons In The World. The medalists, the bronze, worse, the National Garden of American Heroes. You remember this crackpot idea among Trump's, Trump's, well, National Garden of Crackpot Ideas, an outdoor collection of giant statues of popular Americans, Kobe Bryant, Rosa Parks, Elvis Presley, thank you very much, up to 250 of them to be sandwiched into the DC landscape outside somewhere in somebody's yard or something, apparently near the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, because, duh, Trump is making sure there's another place where somebody will have to put up a statue of him, or he thinks he's making sure of that. The sell on this one was it was to open around July 4th to be part of the commemorations of America's 250th anniversary, at least of the Declaration of Independence, so we can celebrate it with Elvis. One assumes, by the way, that's singing Elvis, and not a statue of Elvis O.D.ing on the turlet, Elvis. The whole thing is asinine, but what's amazing is Trump and his cronies have somehow screwed it up. It is the end of April, July 4th is in July, and they don't have any of the statues made yet. Hell, they don't even have any of them commissioned yet. And don't think there haven't been applicants. The statue business is not a high-volume industry. You get five statues or sculptures commissioned in a decade, you're having a great year. Not only are there no statues, they haven't even gotten permission to secure the land yet, or start the commission that would have to run the place. Now, I can't help on that, but I do have a suggestion on the lack of statues. 250 cardboard cutouts. 250 cardboard cutouts of Kobe and Rosa Parks and Trump and Kash Patel and Elvis. It'll be great until it rains. Actually, it'll be greater after it rains. Throwing her up worse, sir, Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. Speaking of statues, no, not him. He's not made of metal. Though he's very wooden. And why are the eyebrows jet black, Doug? I mean, bluntly, I'm an eyebrows expert. What the hell, man? Doug Burgum is the president's point man on one of the weirder co-op to previous American hero to grow Trump's reputation ideas. Weirder even than the National Garden of American Cardboard Heroes. Doug Burgum is starting a pressure campaign, a public pressure campaign, in concert with a museum and maybe in concert with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who used to make the sports version of the Worst Persons List once a week when I did it for ESPN. Doug Burgum wants President Theodore Roosevelt to be inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame. Burgum points accurately to TR's efforts in 1905 to get hold of the then out-of-control increase in severe injuries during football games, even fatal injuries. He convened a summit, he got rules changes, they eliminated the flying wedge, they improved helmet quality, all great things. And the other option was to ban football. But the point is all of Roosevelt's interventions pertained to college football. There had been some pro football by 1905, a few teams, a few failed attempts at leagues, mostly in Ohio and Pennsylvania. They had an indoor football game at Madison Square Garden with a bunch of famous baseball players. But professional football would not really be a serious thing until the 1920s. By some measurements, it wasn't serious until the 1930s. Hell, one of the networks that had exclusive TV rights for football in the 1950s went out of business. Dumont Television carried the National Football League in the 50s and it went bankrupt. That's how unpopular professional football was. Teddy Roosevelt saved college football. And Doug Burgum's argument to put him in the pro football hall fame is that because he saved college football, that in turn saved pro football for the future. And that's ridiculous. What's the idea here? What's the Trump scam on this one? Teddy Roosevelt has nothing to do with the NFL or pro football. But next year's NFL draft of college players is supposed to be held on the National Mall in Washington. And if you could tie Teddy Roosevelt's election to the pro football hall of fame, to the pro football draft, that would make it... Well, that doesn't really make it anything either, does it? That there's no scam here. There's no... Well, there's no scam we can explain. But it makes no sense because the pro football hall of fame has its own induction ceremony and an exhibition game to go with it each summer in the place where they have a hall of fame, Canton, Ohio. The only thing I can think of is this is this rare one-dimensional stupidity from the Trump administration. This is just a dumb idea from two dumb guys. Why don't we put Alexander Hamilton in the pro football hall of fame or Ben Franklin? I mean, they named the field after Ben Franklin. But our winner, the worst, Congressman Clay Fuller of Georgia, once again, each time you think you know the 10 dumbest members of the House of Representatives, a new one is discovered, just like termites. Fuller is the guy who succeeded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who right now looks like she should be given a statue in the hall of famous cardboard Americans or something, compared certainly to her successor. Fuller posted what he says, what he says now, was a satirical video complaining about air conditioning at a Maryland hotel. This video recorded with the congressman shown wearing a backwards snapback ball cap. This is a grown man, 40 years old, trying to dress like he's 17. This video has some very interesting claims about the state of Georgia that he represents.

Speaker 5:
[35:53] He said, well, don't worry, there's this VIP setting that we can override it and the AC will turn on. I was offended and I said, hey, I don't understand, I should already be in VIP mode because I'm from Georgia. He says, I don't understand.

Speaker 1:
[36:06] I said, well, Georgia is named after George Washington, who quite literally invented freedom as the birthplace of Ronald Acuna Jr. Nobody is stupid enough to think that Ronald Acuna Jr. of Atlanta Braves is from Georgia, was born in Georgia. But given that MAGA tried to get Senator Murphy like arrested when he responded this week to news of Iranian ships getting through the blockade with a clearly satirical awesome. I'm going to say this didn't start out as entirely satirical and that Clay Fuller really believes Georgia is named after George Washington. The data is actually fascinating about this. Georgia was founded in April 1732. George Washington had been born in February 1732. So according to this theory, the King of England King George named the new colony of Georgia after a different George who was a two-month-old infant. Congressman Clay, you know, that's all MAGA is missing. A congressman who is himself a two-month-old infant, Fuller of Georgia, with his hat on backwards, today's other Worst Person. It is important to know that though Laura Ingraham was the first star of MSNBC, literally shown on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in a leopard print skirt in 1995, a year before MSNBC even went on the air, it's why they hired her, the skirt, she did not get her own primetime show in cable news for another 22 years. And she did not get that show until she fully embraced Trump. And as we've seen yet again, as Trump has circled the drain, she sure has embraced him. In things I promised not to tell a little personal experience about embracing her, my primetime cable news show debuted on October 1, 1997, it would be 20 years before hers. But she was a guest on my show, the first time the next month, November 1997, and she asked me out in December, I think. It was long after that, that Laura revealed to me that her mother's dying words to her had been, Laura, why are you so bossy? I mean, who tells anybody else something like that? Anybody else in the world? Why would you say that? Wouldn't you make up something nicer sounding? Laura, you've been such a great daughter. I mean, how in the hell could I check? Even more recently than that, she had invoked her mother again in public, I think, as an excuse for raising the Social Security age or eliminating Social Security altogether or having 90-year-olds screw little screws into American iPhones or something. I can't remember what it was. It's true, though, even as Laura flourished in television, she never said, here, mom, here's enough so you can retire. Laura boasted in public that her mother, Anne, worked until she was 73 as a waitress full-time. Anne boasted that her mother continued to pay off Laura's college loans. Anyway, the Ingraham dates. And something she told me on the first of these dates has resonated with me literally every month since and is relevant to politics today. I know, I know, I did not so much date her as survive her. Even then, before 9-11 helped to slide her cheese off her cracker, I find a diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was March 15th, 1998. Beware the Ides of March, Julius Caesar. I didn't. Honestly, and God help me, nearly 48 years of dating, I have not been a kiss-and-tell her. I have dated, I don't know, dozens, a couple of hundred, actually. Thirteen, seriously. With maybe three exceptions, you don't know any of their names. One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why am I telling this story, violating that? Because not three months after that first date, when we were still going out, Laura Ingraham asked me if she could look at a speech I was going to give at Cornell's graduation weekend and offer suggestions. This is so long ago, I literally faxed it to her. Sure enough, a couple of days later, I'm watching Imus in the Morning, which was televised by my network, MSNBC, and there on his desk in front of him is the faxed copy of my speech, and he is reading from my fax. I could recognize the exact sequence of the vertical stripes my cheap fax machine used to streak all of my outgoing pages with. Laura used to go on his show a lot, so to curry favor with Imus, she sent him the speech without asking me. As I told her that day, all bets are now off. So I've told parts of this story before, like she had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas, and our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's tour of the court and having me sit in his chair. In tribute to him, I did not say or do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo cowboy riding on it. And we watched a woman, later discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go on 60 Minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory. But the important Laura Ingraham story, sitting there in the middle of all the debris, I don't think I've ever told this. The first date was only about six weeks after the then first lady, Hillary Clinton, got on the Today Show and blamed the at best exaggerated scandal about her husband Ed Monica Lewinsky on the, quote, vast right wing conspiracy. That is so stupid, Laura said that night as she showed me her small office upstairs. I expected that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans would exploit television, talk radio and the brand new internet to try to bring down a president from the other party and I said so. Naive little boy that I was. No, not that. Of course we're doing that. She was kind of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the end of the day, she said, end of the day constantly. At the end of the day, it's the vast part. It's not vast, vast right-wing conspiracy. Why I bet there's not even 30 of us. Laura Ingraham then explained that she was essentially the central desk for what she called the miniature right-wing conspiracy. She showed me a printed page that had the facts numbers of about two dozen people. There at the top are the sources, she said. There was Ted Olson, the attorney, founder of the so-called Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a constant presence as a talking head on cable news. She later died on 9-11. Everybody liked her. There were several numbers in the office of independent counsel Ken Starr. One of them read B. Kavanaugh. I said, who's that? She said, nobody important. The only other name I remember was Spencer Abraham, who then was a senator from Michigan. She said they, including the people in Ken Starr's office, sent her all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton, stuff they made up, and she distributed them to the other parts of the list. That's these numbers. One number was marked Hannity Radio. Another, Hannity TV, O'Reilly Radio, O'Reilly TV. There was one for Limbaugh. There was one marked Justice Thomas, and I pointed to it. He likes to stay informed. Now maybe the most important names not on that list, that's Matt Drudge. She said Matt Drudge used all her stuff, but he didn't want any of it to be traceable, very big on not traceable. So I never fax it to him, she said. I just give it to my brother. This is when she still liked her brother. He sees Drudge all the time. He gives the stuff to Drudge. Now over here is my baseball collection. See there were reasons to go out with her. At the time, I could think only of an old cartoon I had once seen. It was an octopus working in the post office, using all eight of its limbs to sort the mail. But every couple of weeks it dawns on me afresh that I was actually a witness to one of the earliest configurations of the machinery. And there is no doubt today whether it is vast or miniature, it's vast. The machinery that links the right-wing politicians and those who are supposed to be above the fray, like Supreme Court justices and special prosecutors and people like that there, with the right-wing publicity outlets that pretend to be news organizations like Fox and Drudge and OAN and Newsmax, and the ones that don't even pretend, like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This machine is in fact everything that your typical paranoid, conservative, Republican, fascist, Trumpist thinks is being run by George Soros, or Bill Gates, or Dr. Fauci, or me. You want to be able to say there are reports or accusations about some Democrat or liberal figure or celebrity? Well, somebody puts a rumor in at one end of the machinery, or somebody makes up a rumor at one end of the machinery. It is then sent to dozens of other people. They repeat it. Voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports then get fed back to Fox News or Breitbart or the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court, or they're just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to push this ancient, racist, anti-Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement, but you want it to come out washed clean enough that soulless opportunists like Elise Stefanik and JD. Vance can say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies. This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when it was just a list of 20 and 30 people. And at that moment I barely recognized the importance of what I saw. Then again, I was still on that night recovering from not just the giant steak, but something far more visceral. Earlier that day, as we were leaving the Supreme Court, Laura Ingraham had boasted about getting even with an ex-boyfriend by going back into what had been their house and putting up exact copies of all the photos of the two of them together that he had taken down from his walls. And when he got smart and changed the locks, she went back again to finish the job, found her key didn't work. So naturally, as you would, she stuffed his garden hose through the mail slot of his front door and turned on the outdoor spigot. $10,000 worth of hardwood floors ruined, she said proudly, and part of me screamed, flee, flee now. I didn't flee. Later, as I tried to sleep, two noises kept me awake, snoring, not my own, and Laura's dog, Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep, I mean, almost in syllables. Like that. It was something like 25 degrees out, and I was on the second floor, and yet I resolved that if her dog really did make that last leap to formulate actual syllables, and it turned out her dog was the one telling her what to do, I was simply going to leave by the window without bothering to open it first. The next morning, Laura and I walked her dog. We got to an empty field, she threw a tennis ball, he went and got it. She cocked her arm back again, he took off. Loving life as he did. She did not throw it. He went 40, 50, 60 feet, then stopped and looked back at her with such disappointment and even a sense of betrayal. She said loudly without a trace of affection for him or anything else, wait for it, which is when I realized I was being courted to be the next dog. A few weeks later, back home in New York, I got home from working an early morning shift filling in for the commentator Paul Harvey at ABC Radio. I was just waking up from a tortured nap when the phone rang. Aunt's Laura, I'm downstairs. We're going to my old law firm's party at the museum. I said I was exhausted. We're going or I'll just stay here at this payphone outside your place calling you all night. We went. The next opportunity probably was going to be me on the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned out she was not invited to her party. We're crashing it. I'm going to drink heavily. Frankly, it was a great party. I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother and her brother. And if you think the fascists are completely sincere about everything, even their neuroses and their paranoia, no, Laura Ingraham hugged Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seem to be friends. Later we went up meeting friends of her in the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel where she kept drinking. I was astonished. After about her sixth cosmopolitan, on top of everything she had at the party, she began to droop, her head nodding like a bobblehead doll. Her friends said, Okay, that's it. We'll take care of the check. You take care of her. She had not gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know what that means until you have to pour them into a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages. She basically could not stand up. So I took her to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I went and slept on the couch at the far end of the apartment, which is where I was hours later in the morning when she woke me up because she came parading through using my phone to call my assistant to get a car sent to my address to take her to the airport and to make sure that everybody in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment. And all I kept thinking was, why didn't I follow my instincts? My instincts said flee. I fleed not. Of course, if I had fled, I would have missed seeing the telephone tree of the miniature right-wing conspiracy, wouldn't I? I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. It really happened. And then I let it happen again. I'm a lot less judgmental now than I was before that second date. Oh, yeah, you should have heard me then. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chenille on keyboards and handling the orchestration, Brian Ray on guitars, bass and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. The sports music is from the old Olbermann show on ESPN 2. Music was written by Mitch Warren Davis and appears courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music in this program arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed and my announcer today was my friend Larry David who arranged and performed himself. This program was produced by Ted, Stevie, Rose and Kit and everything else was as always my fault. Let's count down for today day 449 of America Held Hostage Again but just 1004 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brained term unless he is removed sooner by trying to start the war in Vietnam again. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Bulletin says the news warrants. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night and good luck. He's made some deal with the deep state to throw the election to the Democrats. That's the only thing this can be. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.