Countdown with Keith Olbermann - TRUMP GOES NUTS, COMPARES HIMSELF TO JESUS - 3.26.24

TRUMP GOES NUTS, COMPARES HIMSELF TO JESUS - 3.26.24

03/26/24 • 80 min

3 Listeners

SERIES 2 EPISODE 146: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Sure, the split legal decisions in New York courtrooms matter. Trump got a brief reprieve in the business fraud case ($500 million bond reduced to $175 bond, he gets an extra 10 days grace; but his son said even a $15 million bond was almost impossible) but the Stormy Daniels election hush money case starts as scheduled April 15.

But in the span five hours, Trump posted a psalm he claimed to have "received" from somebody in which he was compared to Christ, and said that he would have to sell his "babies" due to Judge Engoron, and he announced to an uncomfortable crowd of reporters "You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season."

He's NUTS. Besides which, I always thought he'd decide he was not Jesus but Napoleon.

RFK JR'S NEVADA OOPSIE: He celebrated getting enough signatures to be a Trump stalking horse on the ballot there. Then somebody noticed that your petitions have to mention just not the presidential candidate but the VICE presidential candidate. And he's not announcing who that is until today. He has to refile all the signatures. Hopefully the likely Veep, the ex-wife of the founder of Google who wanted a divorce settlement of a billion, can front RFK Jr the cash.

THE CONTINUING RONNA McDANIEL DISASTER: No, Maddow didn't stop it last night. She could've stopped it last week, or last month if she'd stood up and threatened to quit when her bosses overruled her - live on the air - and reversed her dictum that MSNBC would not carry Trump speeches live.

And no, MSNBC's president did NOT say McDaniel won't appear on the network. And no, Chuck Todd didn't put himself at risk by speaking out. And no, don't even get me started about Joe Scarborough.

In the old days we used to have a more direct way of stopping such subversions of journalism. I threatened to quit, on the spot, at least twice. Rachel did it at least once. Scarborough used threats on a regular basis. Brokaw did it.

Ultimately the problem is: people paid big salaries to make essential decisions about the coverage of an election that will decide whether or not we still have a democracy next January, thought she was a GREAT HIRE. And nice as the protests from Todd and Welker and “Golly I hope they reconsider” Scarborough were, bluntly, the moment the hiring of Ronna Romney McDaniel was announced, MSNBC anchors and producers and writers, and NBC NEWS anchors and producers and writers, should have literally walked off the job. Gone on strike.

Because it comes down to this: the hiring of Ronna McDaniel didn’t represent some kind of political balance. It conceded – STIPULATED – that there can be some kind of balance, some kind of yes-but, some kind of bothsidesism, between the reality of the 2020 election, and election deniers and the Trumpist cult. She IS the flat earther, the climate change denier. She might as well be Q from Q-Anon. She is reality, trying to appease hallucination and mental illness in hopes of making... more... money. Her presence as an NBC News employee LEGITIMIZES the election deniers and the conspiracy theorists... and Trump. It is an act of journalistic self-defenestration and – for the future democracy in this country – an act of self-immolation.

B-Block (30:50) IN SPORTS: Shohei Ohtani makes it worse: nobody has explained the money transfer to the bookie. Now the NBA has a burgeoning scandal: the fringe player who everybody placed "prop bets" on (33:40) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: The sad post-mortem for Flaco the Central Park Owl, and farewell to Bill Jorgensen. (50:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Rece Davis isn't actually one of them but his dry sense of humor created another mini-sports wagering mess at my alma mater. Now we know what Jeff Yass bought Trump with. And Charlie Kirk wants to use machine guns and whips at the border.

C-Block (57:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since I've asserted that the NBC News/MSNBC protest over Ronna McDaniel is tepid compared to the Him-Or-Me ones we had in the 2003-11 era, I'll tell you everything I know about them. It stars Tom Brokaw, John McCain, Scarborough, Michael Savage, Chris Hayes, Maddow, me, and a cast of thousands. Pull up a chair: it takes 27 minutes.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He's NUTS. Besides which, I always thought he'd decide he was not Jesus but Napoleon.

And no, MSNBC's president did NOT say McDaniel won't appear on the network. And no, Chuck Todd didn't put himself at risk by speaking out. And no, don't even get me started about Joe Scarborough.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

VALET'S J6 TESTIMONY: TRUMP IGNORED ASHLI BABBITT SHOOTING - 3.22.24

SEASON 2 EPISODE 145: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: His Republican minions in the House thought releasing the previously unreported January 6 Committee transcript of an interview with a White House valet would help the desperate need to "prove" Trump tried to stop January 6th.

Instead it shows that he was told that Ashli Babbitt had been shot in the chest and he did and said nothing and now he uses her at his fascist rallies and his inhumanity and selfishness is more apparent than ever. The testimony also shows Trump thought to call General Mark Milley and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the National Guard (the GOP will play that part up) and then... didn't (the GOP will ignore that part). And it details how he threatened Mike Pence that morning and even as the coup failed his only concern was himself, and how Pence "let me down."

It is an amazing self-own by Trump's congresswhores.

ALSO the NY Attorney General has begun the paperwork to seize at least one Trump property, the NYC DA says that 100,000 page document dump is virtually irrelevant to the case and trial should begin April 15. And Merrick Garland makes a jackass out of himself yet again.

(16:46) THE SHOHEI ME THE MONEY SCANDAL: Yesterday, I said they had to answer – as quickly as possible – the old Watergate cliché: What did Shohei Ohtani Know And When Did He Know It? Since then, the actions of Ohtani and his representatives and the Dodgers and Baseball (keeping Ohtani away from the press; insisting there's no MLB investigation) have QUINTUPLED the number of questions that must be satisfied as quickly and thoroughly as possible:

WHY have you issued two or maybe three different official versions of this story; HOW could Ohtani have acknowledged he sent the bookie four and a half million dollars then insist the money had been stolen from him AND then insist he knew nothing about any of this; HOW long did the TEAM know about this disaster; IS the interpreter just trying to take the fall for Ohtani; WHY did a Dodgers source remind ESPN that whatever happened, it happened when Ohtani was playing for the Angels (the answer is: the Dodgers are covering their asses if Ohtani goes down); and maybe most saliently: the fired translator Mizuhara told ESPN his annual salary was between 300-thousand and 500-thousand dollars. What kind of self-respecting bookie would let a guy with THAT level of income, run up four and a half million dollars in unpaid gambling losses?

B-Block (28:19) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Tampa Bay Rays spoil it. The pitcher for whom they just traded will NOT become Joe Rock of The Rockies. A Republican congressman retweets the GOP's favorite news source: Russian State TV. And Liz Harrington thinks Peter Navarro can appeal the Supreme Court's verdict to...Jesus. (Jesus!)

C-Block (36:00) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: It's the start of another baseball season (and maybe another baseball scandal of biblical proportions!) so let's celebrate with Thurber's epic mixture of Brooklyn Dodgers Play-by-Play and the jujitsu of the little man: The Catbird Seat.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Next Episode

TRUMP IS SO SICK HE'S NOW MAKING UP WORDS; RONNA, GONE-A - 3.27.24

SEASON 2 EPISODE 147: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Those were Trump's marbles he just lost.

At 2:49 PM, Eastern Dementia Time: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe BUDEN... DIS-INFORMATES and MIS-INFORMATES all the time, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER..."

There is no such word as “Disinformate.”

There is also no such word as “MIS-informate.”

Also, unless I've been getting it wrong since 1973, "BUDEN" is not how the president spells his name. Trump's cheese has slid off his cracker.

It is impossible to say that he cannot possibly last like this, what with the forces of aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever else there is, pulling him apart... but of course he’s lasted in approximately this same space for months now – and in spaces not really that much BETTER than this one for years and decades and if the early anecdotes are correct, a lifetime. Still: inventing your own words, is a sign of a dozen different PHYSICAL problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity and environmental ones like huffing D-Con Roach Room Fogger.

HELP ME RONNA, HELP HELP ME RONNA: And now she belongs to the ages. Five days, one show. Not the shortest tenure in television history nor the fastest-cancelled program (still held by an ABC comedy show from 1969, cancelled just before the first commercial). But NBC's decision to ax Ronna McDaniel - no matter how tortured, self-serving, and late the protests from its stars might have been, does offer some small hope.

The point of all this – and perhaps the value of this internal rebellion – is that perhaps the somnambulant American political media, especially the American TELEVISION political media – has awakened from its naïve stupor. I have been saying here for eighteen months that EVERY news organization in this country has had the same meeting: what do we do if Trump regains power. Not “what do we do journalistically” but what do we do to protect our profits – and what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters and TV executives, he’ll leave us alone. Or, more realistically, he’ll let us become one of his propaganda channels.

Remember, in the minds of its executives, television news isn’t a kind of NEWS, it’s a kind of TELEVISION. It is designed to fill the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind of public purpose, hey, great, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to go TOO many hours cancelling all those advertisements just because some POPE died or something.

Putting Trump on and taking Mehdi Hasan off and hiring Ronna McDaniel was INOCULATION, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving to Trump and the MAGAs that while no, we aren’t shuttering MSNBC and we’re not in favor of this whole “end the peaceful transfer of power” and “fascism is the new democracy” stuff – hey, go on... we’re listening.

American TV news isn’t going to save us from creeping fascism. But maybe – MAYBE – the scattered, largely selfish, righteous-ehhh-kinda righteous indignation at NBC means American TV news will stop HELPING fascism creep faster. Guard rail? No. Scattering spike strips across democracy’s highways? Uhh, ok, maybe we’ll stop.

Also, I sing. I mean: "Help Me Ronna"? I was supposed to RESTRAIN myself from THAT?

B-Block (30:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Congressman Tim Burchett sued by the Kansas City man he claimed was a) a Super Bowl parade shooter and b) an "illegal alien." He was neither. Ari Fleischer actually slams Biden for supporting George W. Bush's war in Iraq that Ari helped sell to a gullible America. And Maria Bartiromo, Nancy Mace, David Sabatini, Matt Schlapp, Glenn Thrush and a random named Rose Graham share the honors for spreading conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge accident.

C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I mentioned those tortured anti-Ronna comments from MSNBC. Lawrence O'Donnell was astonishingly wrong in his recap of how TV news in the old days didn't reward, say, Nixon's Watergate conspirators with gigs (other than Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichmann, Robert Bork, Gordon Liddy, plus Ollie North from Iran-Contra and a series of ice cream commercials for Ehrlichmann). Since I've brought him up, I might as well tell you what a schmuck he is,

Like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was out a few weeks, he tried to get me fired so he could take over the show and when that didn’t work he just stole a couple of the producers and got his own show. Oh, by the way, I WAS away for a couple weeks because my Dad was dying.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann - TRUMP GOES NUTS, COMPARES HIMSELF TO JESUS - 3.26.24

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:04.794

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. One court ruled the Stormy Daniel's hush money trial will start on time. Another gave Trump another ten days and lowered his bond to one hundred and seventy five million. And neither of these is the lead Trump story, because the lead Trump story is Trump is nuts. He has now compared himself to Jesus, No Christ, Jesus Christ received this morning, beautiful thank you. He posted a ten th