Keith Olbermann - Trump is Fucking Crazy (This is Not a Joke)

B efore 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 clich, 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 Mahers HBO show, hopelessly lost in a Trump story. I had mentioned that Id 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 thatcontrary to this hybrid of Huey Long, Mussolini, and Buzz Windrip that seemed to inhabit Trumps body during the campaignthe 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 dont 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 personalitiesBenito Trumpolini and Eddie Trump-Haskellwere both incredibly convincing and the longer he used them both, the less it mattered which was the real Trump, I knew Bill; after all, wed originally run into each other in college in 1978and 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 didnt.

He completely agreed with me.

He couldnt have agreed more with me and my assessment of Trumps in-person non-Mussolinism had he said, Golly gumption, Keith, youre 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 Bills bullshit detector was so much better than mine that it was weaponizedand somehow even he had been taken in by Trump. If you see the video of my appearance that night on Bills show youll 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 wasnt implausible that Trump had conned me. But Trump had conned Maher? Those arent two integrated personalities Trump wears interchangeably like different penis-draping ties. These are manifestations of acute mental illness. Trump isnt just a scam artist and he isnt merely a reincarnated P. T. Barnum. This is a psychopath. This is a clear and present danger. Soylent Green is people. Theyre after you, theyre after all of us, our wives, our children, everyone! Theyre here already! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell! Youre gonna need a bigger boat!

Ill 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 isnt 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.

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When the perfect Russian storm hit and the nightmare came to life on Election Day, Geoff and I, and GQs 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 arent going to get a trialand 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. Its like digesting a diary rescued from the Titanic and actually finding yourself hoping against your better judgment that this time the damn boat wont hit the damn iceberg.

Id love to say I planned it that way, but I didnt. I dont think its been noted anywhere, but views for each commentary began to rival, then surpass, the high-water-mark ratings of cable newsthe total audience for the series eventually exceeded 300 million. I never got a dime out of the videosI 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