TRUMP IS LOSING HIS MIND (AND THE ELECTION) - 6.18.24

five days. One if Joe Biden had met with dozens of business leaders who had been supporting him, and the business leaders walked out of the meeting shocked by his inability to complete a thought or stay on one topic, and the attendees reported they were shaken and now doubting he could do the job, and now no longer supporting him. Two if the next day Biden had celebrated a high

numbered birthday. Three if the day after that, Biden had gone to a quote black church in Detroit, unquote, and his surrogates claimed there were eight thousand African American supporters there, when in fact, there were about one hundred people and they were nearly all white guys. Four if Biden had then joined a panel discussion in which he said that Trump was such a weak opponent that he Biden was

considering losing next week's debate on purpose. Five if Biden had again said he might not accept the outcome of the election, only this time he had added that if he lost, he would start an investigation of some kind. Six if Biden's campaign had then doctored, altered, falsified video of Trump doing ordinary things successfully to make him look

like he was hallucinating or lost. And then seven if Biden had then given a speech in which he claimed everybody agreed he was in full robust mental health because he had passed a test administered by doctor Anthony Hopkins, or doctor Anthony Bourdain or Anthony Michael Hall, any Anthony except the doctor who had given him the theoretical test, doctor Anthony Fauci. If that had happened to Joe Biden in five days, if half of that had happened to Joe Biden in five days, there would be nothing else

on television or on the internet. The snowball effect in progress. Trump is losing his mind, and losing it fast. And part of the problem is Trump is so crazy already, so loudly, so often, that it all runs together and perversely, each trump mental disaster stops seeming like it's part of a sequence or part of the fabric of his being. Each Trump mental disaster simply replaces the one before it.

I have a thought experiment about that I want to do in real time in a few minutes to underscore how that's even more true than you or I might realize. But first, Trump is out of control, going downhill and so fast that when he dropped the name of the doctor who gave him the cognitive test, he mistakenly thinks he he aced. He not only got the name wrong, but he got it so wrong that even the Associated Press noticed it and wrote a big story about it.

It's doctor Ronnie Jackson Jackson as in Jackson, I took a cognitive test, and I ASTI doc Ronnie, Doctor Ronnie Johnson. Does everyone know Ronnie Johnson, congressman from Texas. That was

a huge story Sunday. It dropped off the map because nobody will connect the dots to every other piece of Trump insanity, like the author of the new book on the Apprentice TV series saying yesterday that Trump granted him a one hour long interview in May twenty twenty one, when nobody wanted to talk to Trump and then gave him another interview a few months later, and Trump had no memory of him or the interview or the topic.

And these pieces, this chain, this collapse, it goes back not just weeks, not just months, not just years, but decades. Given my analogy of Jackson and Johnson to Fauci and anybody else named Anthony, there is this irony, more evidence of the madness of Trump, and it is from Fauci, and it is coming in his new memoir, which is coming out next week. In it, Fauci details Trump's COVID behavior and put it on the pile of things we've forgotten.

Trump knew how bad, how easily transmitted my air COVID was in February twenty Remember he's on tape telling Bob Woodward all that, and they lied about it for the rest of his term, killing thousands of Americans who should still be alive now. Fauci says, on June third, twenty twenty, he had reminded a journalist that a vaccine, then still in the developmental stages, would need boosters. That evening, he writes, my cell phone rang and the caller, the President started

screaming at me. The President was irate, saying I could not keep doing this to him. According to Fauci, Trump told Fauci he had cost the US economy quote one trillion fing dollars. Trump is losing his mind. This must be the drum beat of the rest of the campaign. Now there is good news, and at the risk of sounding like Eric Blair, George orwell, it's triple plus good news. The mainstream political media has just discovered something it evidently

did not know. A that elderly first offender Trump is getting killed in the polls now because of the stormy Daniel's election interference conviction, and b that this is actually a headline story that they should write about and not some PostScript and see that the Biden campaign yesterday took the big leap forward and actually called Trump a quote convicted criminal. New Ipsos poll for Politico yesterday, one third of all voters one third say they are now less

likely to support Trump because of the convictions. Moreover, the idea of a Trump persecution bounce is so obviously untrue. Politico wrote this up as if it always knowed that that was the case, rather than acknowledging that it and the rest of the mainstrea in political media had served as vessels for this nonsense that he was going to improve his position by being convicted, a vessel for the rest of that malarkey to use a term. Thirty three

percent less likely to vote for Trump because of convictions. Meanwhile, seventeen percent said more likely those are Republicans who are going to vote for him anyway. Among independents, the same number a third less likely to vote for him, but only twelve percent of independents more likely. IPSOS also dug a little deeper, are the convictions important in your decision whether or not to vote for Trump? And twenty two percent say the convictions are important and make them less

likely to vote for him. That is a loss of one in five Trump voters. YPSOS did a separate poll for ABC looking for and grilling double haters voters who do not like Trump and do not like Biden, well beers don't like and theirs don't like. Two thirds of those who will vote while holding their nose, two thirds think that after the convictions, Trump should drop out of the presidential race. Not just they don't support him that much anymore or they're less likely blah, blah blah. Two

thirds of double haters want Trump off the ballot. More new polling. Actually it's old polling. Bet somebody at the Wall Street Journal gets fired for reporting this in twenty sixteen. In twenty twenty, Trump won the vote of sixty five and up. He got fifty one percent of it. In twenty twenty, the Journal cites its own polling nationally and in the swing states showing Trump has lost about a

tenth of that support. He is down to forty six percent. Biden, who had forty eight percent of US old timey voters four years ago, Biden still has forty eight percent of US. That is now the winning score. And one last set of polls, wider content, narrower geography, Vote Hub has found enough swing state polls to come up with a swing state pole average, and after the conviction, they continued to crawl. Swing would honestly be too strong a term, but they

continue to crawl towards President Biden. On average, he is up by a point in Michigan, by two tenths of a point in Wisconsin. He has closed within two and a half in Pennsylvania, three in Arizona, six in North Carolina, and he's inside seven in Nevada and Georgia. Is it optimal? No? Is it improvement. It's about twice as good as it was before. And finally, finally, the Biden campaign has gone gloves off on the central issue. If you didn't hear it,

here is the money shot. And I do mean money, in part of a fifty million dollars Biden ad buy just for the rest of this This election is between a convicted criminal who's only out for himself and a president who's fighting for your family. I'm Joe Biden, and I have proved this message a convicted criminal. Amen, hallelujah. Now I need to hear the president say that himself. This is a hunch. There is no source for this,

just a hunch. I expect Joe Biden will call Trump a criminal, but on the theory that you might as well save that metaphorical shot for point blank range, and also that Biden still has something almost extinct in politics called standards and the knowledge that he would prefer to say something like that to the man's face. I suspect, I guess I hope President Biden will call Trump a criminal, and he will do it at the debate A week

from Thursday, that, of course, if Trump shows up. Of course, one of the main problems with the latest Trump story is that by this time tomorrow we may not remember the latest Trump story. If the man actually has one skill, it is indefatigability. He has an infinite capacity to find something new to send the rest of us to hell with every day. And the reality is the rest of us have lives that do not focus solely on ourselves and are not as obsessive and neurotic and not quite

as human as his is. And therefore we cannot process everything he does, and we certainly can't retain it. To prove this, I want to do a real time thought experiment. I have fished out of the closet the scripts for the last two months of this podcast, So going back to the middle of a and I'm going to read just some of the headlines, just some of the cover sheets from the last two months. And I want to know you don't have to actually tell me, but I

want you to answer for yourself. How many of these stories do you even remember, let alone remember how mad they made you feel? And to address this issue of why we cannot carry over our anger from one story to the next. I guess each story is so appalling and would have in previous incarnations of this country. Each one of these stories would have been disqualifying for life. And whoever did this, we would have never heard from them again. And we will start at the top of

the pile. Last Thursday. So this was in Friday's episode, but this is from last Thursday. Do you even remember this? The headline on the cover sheet is the Trump plot. He was supposed to talk to Capitol Hill Republicans about overturning his convictions in ste dead he insulted Milwaukee. Remember this, Trump to House Republicans. Milwaukee, where we are having our convention,

is a horrible city. Where did this go? Where did the truth behind that that he had intended to talk to all of them about what he said in his May thirty first phone call to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, which was about his convictions on the Stormy Daniel's election interference case here in New York we have to overturn this. Where did that story go that he wants the House of Representatives to somehow overturn his convictions

in a New York State criminal case retroactively. I might add, that's last Thursday. Where did that story go? What memory hold? Did it drop into the Wednesday story the day before how Congress was holding Garland in contempt for refusing to turn over the tapes of his conversations Robert Hurri's conversations with Biden, which of course they would have leaked and used in campaign ads. Where did that story go? It was last time Tuesday, and was my headline on Wednesday.

Trump floats planned to reinstate military draft. The entire lengthy story in the Washington Post about this idea of mandatory national service, including exams for every high school student male or female aged seventeen eighteen, nineteen twenty and to be assessed for which service they should go into and what their military aptitudes would be. And if you didn't take the exam, you wouldn't graduate, and if the school wouldn't administer the exam, it wouldn't get federal funds. That story

happened a week ago today, and it's already disappeared. It didn't even get any pickup just because Trump denied this was his idea, as if he didn't use other people's ideas at any point in his life, like every five minutes, the story was denied and it was dropped, including by the Washington Post. On the other hand, a Washington Post does remain in the middle of a five alarm fire inside its own building, But where are the other stories

about it? Last Monday polling, more polling on the convictions. You remember the convictions? You remember the political impact of the convictions? Twenty eight percent said the convictions would be a major factor in their votes, and another seventeen percent said it would be a minor factor. The Morning Consule weekly tracking poll a week ago yesterday, let me quote what I said then New York trial hurt Trump's image.

This is how Morning consult had phrased it. This is the sixth successive week in which Biden's net favorability rating has bettered Trump's, a trend that began as legal proceedings in New York ramped up. The latest data shows Trump's worst net favorability rating since late January. Where did that polling go this one? Oh well, this is not about Trump, so perhaps it registered a little bit longer. June sixth timing is perfect in order to jail on d Day. Yes,

that was from last Thursday. Convictions cost Trump seven percent in the polls, and the more important question, did he do a quid pro quo with the Wall Street Journal? Remember that extraordinary Wall Street Journal piece about how everybody's worried again about Biden's age, except only Republicans were quoted in it, and several Democrats by name Senators came out and said, we were interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and we said Biden's been fine, and our quotes were

not included in the article. The Wall Street Journal deliberately skewed an article in Biden's detriment to Biden's detriment in Trump's favor. At the same time, but Trump was saying that he would free the reporter from the Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, after he was elected, a clear indication that there had been some contact between Trump and Putin to

prevent the release of an American hostage. This is from the fifth of this month, and this story, with the exception of a couple of tweets and occasional references by the impeccable Brian Boutler, who I always cite here, this

story has disappeared. On the fourth Biden did call him convicted, fellon Donald Trump and a story about from Pro Publica that day about nine witnesses who spoke in favor of Trump in some context who then got new jobs, more money, stake in truth, social Boris Epstein, campaign manager, Susie Wiles, various lawyers and spokespeople. That story's vanished. From the morning of Saturday, June first, the new first polls after the convictions, ten percent of GOP voters, eight percent of ardent Trump

supporters want him to drop out of the campaign. Where did that story go? That's from the first of this month. We figured out on May thirty first that if Trump, as my headline wrote, Trump incredibly guilty, if verdicts cost him two percent, he just lost the election. The flag story, well, the flag story has lasted because you can only have

so many sam Alito stories at the same time. That was May twenty ninth, And then moving on to the point about ethnic cleansing, the story about Trump posting reposting a video a fig Leaf deniable video. He didn't make the video, he just posted the video. It was the guy encountering Joe Scarborough at the New York Airport, rolling his camera phone, swearing at Scarborough for twenty three seconds and as I said, we've all done that, Joe Scarborough. But the point was the quote was healed, get rid

of all you fing liberals. You liberals are gone. When he efing wins, you efing blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie's going to take this election. Landslide, landslide, You fing half a blowjob, landslide. Get the f out of here, scumbag.

And then Trump posted it so that people want to know who are supporting him, that he is serious about deporting people, and that well, we will start with immigrants, but we will also move on, as he has said previously, to those he wants retribution against and to terrorists and

potential terrorists. And if you are a one man government and you run on a platform that you are going to deport everybody who is a threat to this country, all you have to do is point at somebody, could be me, could be you could be Joe Scarborough, and say you are a threat to this country. I am having you arrested, especially if on their first day in office, on January twentieth of next year, you have invoked the Insurrection Act, which would legally give you the right to

do that. Trump moves towards f cleansing. May twenty eight, twenty twenty four, already off the radar. There is nothing much particularly on May twenty seventh, but the week before the sam Alito flag stories emphasized throughout the day. There is a story from May twenty first about blowback against

Trump's third term talk. The Rematch wrote Bloomberg between Joe Biden and Donald Trump draws near and political professionals are detecting an unusual concern among some undecided voters that if Trump returns to the White House, he'll refuse to step down when his term is up. Sag Carpenter, vice president at David Bender Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in twenty twenty but became disillusioned and we're considering

switching sides. We were talking to Latino men and Asian American Pacific Islander women in battleground states, and they went straight to the issue of what if Trump won't give up power. It's not something we'd been testing for, but we've been singing it so far, indicating a real concern there. This is somebody who's done focus groups for Democrats for ten years, and they were unprepared for the subject of whether or not Trump would be willing to relinquish power

if he has given it again. That's May twenty first, those quotes that story's vanished. Trump violated the gag order twice. The Trump witness in the waning days of the case in New York enrages the judge. We had more on the Alido flag story May seventeenth, were the Michael Cohen quotes the testimony at the trial May sixteenth, and now we are a week and two days away from the first of the two scheduled debates debates, and as I said on the May sixteenth podcast, Trump lays groundwork to

back out of the debates he just agreed to. There is always the chance I might be misreading this, I said on the podcast episode one seven six from May sixteen, But if you go through what happened yesterday, I don't think I am. They agree to ABC and CNN as venues, and Biden makes his video taunting Trump. CNN reports Trump is irked that Biden has taken control of the debate narrative.

Trump then posts, please let this truth, meaning his post serve to represent that I hereby accept debating Biden on Fox News. The date will be Wednesday, October second. The host will be Brett Baar and Martha McCallum. Thank you the use of the word hereby. I noted indicated to the Rubes that this was some sort of legal document when it was not. There is no Fox debate. There was not one scheduled, even when they announced the debates originally in the middle of May. Not even Fox claimed

there was one. And then Biden's campaign statement came out from Jen O'Malley Dylan. Trump has a long history of playing games with debates, complaining about the rules, breaking those rules, pulling out at the last minute. He said he would debate President Biden anytime, anywhere, any place. In fact, he said and posted it dozens of times, with varying degrees of comprehension and basic grammar. President Biden made his terms clear for two one on one debates, and Donald Trump

accepted those terms. No more games, no more chaos, no more debate about debates. We'll see Donald Trump on June twenty seventh in Atlanta. If he shows up so as I said, then between now and June twenty seventh, my prediction was he demands Biden reconfirm his commitment to this apocryphal October second debate on Fox, Biden says, I never agreed to that, and I never said anything up close to agreeing to that, whereupon Trump says he has violated

the agreement. That is, Biden has violated the agreement. So there won't be any debates. We'll see what happens. But I just want to point out that was Wednesday, May fifteenth, from the day before that Senator Tommy Tuberville confirmed the Trump plot to evade the gag order. You remember those senators and congressmen and other Republican derelicts showing up at the courthouse in New York and being interviewed outside of it.

Anybody remember that story Going to the preceding week. Here's something of a lighter note from the ninth of May. Never hire a lawyer with a rating of three and a half stars. This is a reference to Susan Necklace, who managed to lose the Stormy Daniels during the second day of cross examination in trump On trial. I did see, and this is the first story. We have to go back to May ninth to have seen an actual follow

up to this story, there's something about Susan necklace. Has not had any connection nor made any comment about Trump, has not been referred to by anybody in Trump's circles, and has not appeared on any Trump documents relating to the New York case since the trial ended. So that was the only following up of anything that we've seen in here on any serious basis. And it's about one of his lawyers. From May eighth, This was the day of the RFK junior brainworm story, and yet people are

still taking him seriously. Stormy Daniels testifies May seventh, Gnome Trump and the MAGA belief they have the right to kill. May sixth, the Christy Gnome murder of her daughter's puppy? Where did that story go in one month and one week? Wasn't she on one of the major Sunday shows a week ago? Did anybody ask her about that? She said over the weekend that she was being prosecuted and persecuted

by Democrats and liberals because they were afraid of her. Well, perhaps what they were afraid of was that she would shoot their dog. And yet where's the Christy Nomes story? She is now being taken seriously to some degree. The rehabilitation tour has continued sufficiently so that she's not going to have to resign as governor in whichever Dakota she's the governor of. Trump lies claims gag order prevents him from testifying. May second, That got a little bit more, Carrie,

But again, is it front of mind? Trump violates d C bail and DC gag order by attacking witness Cassidy Hutchinson. That was the first of May the gag order and bail violation. Then Trump confessed to the meaningful part of her testimony that as his scum organized to attack the capital and begin his coup attempt, he wanted to join them and watch. He said, if you remember, in a SoundBite, that he wanted to go to the capital on January sixth,

twenty twenty one. Tried to talk the Secret Service into it, but that Cassidy Hutchinson was a liar because he never tried to strangle one of the members of the Secret Service. From the May first edition of this podcast, Trump all but promises twenty twenty four election violence. Mershn threatens to say and send him to jail. Trump does not dismiss the possibility of political violence around the election, the interview with Time magazine, the cover story with Time Magazine, Where

did that go? That's six weeks ago? Quoting Trump? If we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of the election. The author asks him about his social media posts in which Trump claimed a stolen election allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Trump then denies, he said that I never said that at all. I never said that at all. Within moments of this lie, it turned out he merely wrote it on truth social

on December third, twenty twenty two. Within moments Time Magazine, he declares that the current government has quote broken the constitution. They have gotten very far astray from our constitution. I'm talking about the fascists and the people in our government right now because I consider them the enemy within. I think the enemy within in many cases, is much more dangerous for our country than the outside enemies, et cetera.

About the twentieth time he had said something like that, and he said that twice since then, and nobody flashed back to the Time magazine cover from the end of April, An Extraordinary Document, a revelation and the beginning of the indication that Trump is in fact losing his mind at a faster pace than ever before. We need a special council to investigate the Supreme Court. I suggested on April thirtieth.

I suggested on April twenty six that Alito should wake up and get mo all right, that's my pet project that has nothing to do with Trump, really, and April twenty fifth. From April twenty fourth, so this is the end of April. Trump has already won the Supreme Court presidential immunity case beginning today. I don't mean I said

at the time. They're actually going to make up an unconstitutional, nonsensical political science fiction thing called presidential immunity know to do its part in Trump's cover up of his January sixth treason. The Supreme Court only has to do what it has done, pretend, just like Trump is, pretending that the concept of presidential immunity is just plausible enough that it has to be debated and adjudicated. They've already done that. The Samuel Alito conspiracy to delay justice to save Trump

is well underway. If only I had said he had signaled it or raised a flag and then April twenty fourth, the last one of these scripts in this stack, Trump could face a month in jail for contempt of court what the judge had said in the New York case, and we never heard anything else about the gag order or the violations of the gag order, or whether or not he's going to spend time in jail, or well,

we'll hear more about that one. That is one of the few cases, one of the few stories about Trump that has to be revisited again because there is a sentencing date. But all the other ones, which are just as important, die on the vine because they don't have sentencing dates or other official contexts to them. And this

is the real danger. We don't appreciate how much we appreciate how bad Trump is, but we don't appreciate the volume and the linkages between stories, and the repetitiveness of these stories again and again, talking about the enemy within, preparing his people for violence at the election one way or the other, before the election, after the election, if he loses, if he wins. All of this has been laid out, and yet we have forgotten it because there's

just so much to process. That's the last two months. Shall I get the last two years worth of scripts out and do this. Have you got a day and a half to listen? I will flash back now to the old GQ series. First it was called The Closer before the twenty sixteen election, and then when it didn't turn out to be much of a closer, it was

called The Resistance. The first piece that I proposed to do for GQ when I met with them in August of twenty sixteen was a simple list of all of the disqualifying things Donald Trump had done in his life and in his campaign only to August that year, any one of which I thought should have been enough to make you not vote for him. The piece and the GQ people were appalled at This was seventeen minutes long, and no story was covered as fully in depth as

I just covered everything from the last two months. They were all between five and fifteen seconds. It was a list that was the point when possible, I dropped unnecessary verbs. I wrote that thing as tightly as I could, and the producers were well, could you make it three minutes? And I went no. The point is that it takes seventeen minutes of me talking as fast as I can to get this entire list out. We put it out at seventeen minutes and it got something like seventeen million

views the first week. This is the problem. Each atrocity in Trump's life crowds out the previous one for those who believe in him, for those who are taken in by him, there is this sense of excitement and continual change and something new, which they need because we are living in a world of short attention spans, and his, of all people in this country, have the shortest attention spans. And the saddest part is that this election will be decided by people who know almost none of this, none

of the negatives. Certainly they see the constant activity, They see the vitality, and some degree this idea that Trump is vital and energetic and young or younger anyway, and Biden is the opposite. That's not a physical thing. That's as simple. How much stuff are you doing? How much are your arms flailing in the air? How much meaninglessness is seen by the public. President of the United States. Joe Biden has a job to do. It's a job I could never do for one hour, and he does

it every day at an older age. But most of it requires meetings and trips and conversations and debate and thought internally in private, dealing with the most secure and sensitive issues. Trump can just get in front of a podium and ad lib and say anything he wants, no matter how much it contradicts what he previously said, and it can be as vile and virulent as he wants. And what many people who will design this election see is, oh, he's giving another speech. He flies around a lot, He

must have great stamina. So what do we do about this? Are we doing enough? Am I doing enough to stop this from happening? Are you? I do not want to reduce my point here to a self promotional effort, but I will say that there is something low effort that

you might be able to do. I have taken certain steps in the last couple of days in which I have swallowed my pride and asked for help from people who I have not been in contact with for years, who are perhaps avenues of publicity and distribution for this podcast. When I asked a couple of weeks ago for everybody who listens to this to take the episode they were listening to and forward to somebody who did not listen to it, I thought we might see some sort of response.

The download total increased by ten percent that day. At it has maintained that we gained I'm not sure how many thousand new subscribers to this podcast based on my asking you to hit forward on the link to this podcast to somebody you know who doesn't listen to it

and should not necessarily some Trump supporter. I'm not asking you to start with a duel tomorrow morning in which you can take ten paces and then say I support Keith Alderman's podcast and the other one says I don't, and then you see what happens, and maybe we get Aaron Burr all over again. I'm not asking you to do anything like that. I'm not saying send it to somebody who supports Trump. If you can do that, so

much the better. But I'm just saying send it to somebody who supports democracy in the United States, because I think the point of this entire podcast is not so much supportive Joe Biden, but support of, you know, representative government here. So, as I said last time I asked you, we went up ten percent. That's all we can do right now, longest damn promo I've ever done, and Honestly,

that's not the point of it. The point of it is, for the first time in my life, I actually think a week in review, the cheapest form of journalism, A week in review, might be of some value to remind everybody as we continue to weigh waste high in the oak meal that is Trump's mind, just to remind us that it's snowing, and it's not just snowing. These aren't just flurries. It's not just a couple of inches. Trump

is an ongoing avalanche. Anyway. Also have interest here the daily example that the democracy survives not by our efforts, but by the stupidity of those who would destroy it. A Republican Senate candidate puts out a map on social media purporting to show violent crime out of control in his state. The map supposedly graphically shows where all the shots have been fired, except it doesn't. Somehow, some way, this idiot did not use the where all the shots

were fired map? He used the where are all the water fountains map? Water fountains are out of control in our state. That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown, with Keith Olberman still ahead of us. On this edition of countdown. After thirty five years, the national sports behemoth, started by my old boss, Ted Turner, is about to lose its rights to carry the games of the National Basketball Association. Charles Barkley gone, although he can go to

another network if he wants. But this got me thinking about the time Ted Turner not only nearly got the National Football League games for Turner Sports, he nearly got the entire National Football League, like he would have owned the whole thing. It was a little quick sonic. It was a long shot, but it could have happened instead of getting the NFL. Though all Ted actually wound up in sports that year was one hundred CNN Sports baseball caps. That story coming up in Things I promised not to tell.

But first there are still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miscrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute two days rife person's in the world's but Ted Turner impression dishonorable mention to start Nut Gingrich back again, Nut demanded that whoever flew the Palestinian flag over the US Treasury Building on Sunday should be summarily fired. What is it with these idiot Republicans and flags, just to shut up about the flags. You failed about flags,

you are flagging about flags. It was the Pride flag on Pride Day. It took new twenty four hours to kill the post because he's not good at social media either. Again, this is the same Nut Gingrich who said the New York City subway is used only by quote elites, The same one in nineteen ninety eight who planned to impeach Bill Clinton, and then the new president Al Gore would pardon Bill Clinton, so he would impeach al Gore and that would make Speaker of the House Nut Gingrich president.

And who was the only guy who lost his job after all that. The same Newt Gingrich who last week called the Vice President Kamala Harris quote really shallow, uneducated and uneducatable person, Newt and a mirror wildly untrue. But at minimum, Newt, we know this. The vice president can tell the difference between a four color Palestinian flag and a ten color rainbow Pride flag. The brons worse Anthony Hudson. You may remember him from such failed bids for office

as running for president as a Republican this year. Now he's trying to get the Republican nomination for Congress from the Michigan eighth el Sir Anthony has a problem. The primary is August sixth, and his biggest supporter, at least the guy he thinks is his biggest supporter, will not be there. The guy Anthony thinks is his biggest supporter, he says, his biggest supporter is Martin Luther King Junior. I have another dream. Yes, it is me, Martin Luther King.

who then posted an AI video without my knowledge. It appears they not only used AI for MLK Junior's voice, but also with my voice to make it appear more authentic. He also says he fired that staffer. Well, then he changed his mind. If MLK were alive today, he said the next day, I do believe he would endorse me and my vision for a better Michigan. Hodson says he's given that staff for a raise. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there is no staffer.

It was only Anthony himself or his staffer is Tim Scott's fiance. Where the staffer goes to a different school, you wouldn't know them. The runner up worser the Associated Press, Yes, they noted the Jackson for Johnson for Jackson Trump gaff and treated it like the big story it was. This is only after they did it again. They've been doing this a lot, as so many imperiled news organizations have been doing, you know, preparing for fascism just in case.

By sucking up to Trump after he met with Senate and House Republicans, you know, the Milwaukee is horrible meeting there. I followed up on a story the AP tweeted Donald Trump made a triumphant return to Capitol Hill on Thursday, his first with lawmakers since the January sixth, twenty twenty one attacks, embraced by energized House and Senate Republicans who find themselves reinvigorated by his bid to retake the White House. Unquote.

The AP fortunately did not add quote. Let me tell you this, and you're getting it straight from the horse. Trump was better looking than Churchill. He was a better dresser than Churchill. He had more hair than Churchill. He told fun of your jokes, and he could dance the pants off of Churchill. But our winner the worst, everybody's favorite Republican candidate for Senator from Minnesota, Royce White, the former pro basketball player whose career lasted exactly eight minutes

and fifty nine seconds. The publication The Minnesota Reformer reports that White tweeted out a map showing that quote crime in Minneapolis out of control. Turned out it was a map of minneapspless, all right. It was a map of all the drinking fountains in Minneapolis. When this was pointed out to him that very few crimes in Minneapolis have been committed by those drinking fountains, mister White deleted the tweet and called everybody who had mocked him a quote

cuck unquote. He then tweeted out an actual map of shots fired in Minneapolis, still insisting that crime here is out of control, even though those shots showed the map itself showed that shots are down seventeen percent year over year and down one third from the three year average. What a shot though, A guy who played in the NBA but only for eight minutes and fifty nine seconds wouldn't know anything about shots and shot averages. And remember

the real perpetrators there. Do not turn your back on those Minnesota water fountains. Man Republican Minnesota Senate hopeful Royce White, whose career in politics may not last as long as his career in the NBA two days, worst person.

a job as their New York sports reporter. Even earlier than that May of nineteen eighty and when I did not get it, I was genuinely relieved, because I was convinced there was no way they would ever get CNN on the air, no chance. Ever. Obviously I did not account for Ted Turner's stubbornness. Anyway, I wound up going their freelance in nineteen eighty one, as I have related in some detail here, when Lou Dobbs and his girlfriend, the New York Sports reporter, had to get out of

town fast at the existence of missus Lou Dobbs. Eight months later, as the nineteen eighty two NFL strike loomed, they had made me staff and given me a contract, first, offering me one thousand dollars less a year than they were paying me freelance. Even CNN of nineteen eighty two

acknowledged the absurdity of that mathematical proposition. So I was a vested already whining about Ted Turner, employee of CNN when the football players walked out in strike in September nineteen eighty two, and that strike was my beat every

day from March to November. A day or so after the strike began, we set up an interview with the president of CBS Sports Neil Pilson about the effect that the strike would have on TV Sports in general and CBS Sports in particular, And as the camera crew and I filed into his office, Pilson wearily said, nothing against you guys, but I've done so many interviews already about this strike that if you actually come up with a question I haven't been asked already, I'll give you. Well.

We all leaned in towards him. Give us what the job? A job interview at least fifty dollars, I'll give you CBS Sports caps man. Not exactly a job, but better than nothing. So we rolled tape and I said, so, mister Pilson, in light of the strike, do you wish CBS Sports did not have the Super Bowl this year? As it does? And he laughed, and he took off his mic, and he went over to his office phone. He buzzed his assistant, bring in three caps, will you?

And he sat back down. He said, you guys, did it? Nobody asked me that yet, and it's like the only question that really interests me. You're still rolling. Neil Pilsen then proceeded to give a lengthy and thoughtful answer about how as long as the season was not canceled. It was probably better to have the next Super Bowl because people would be so grateful that after the strike they

wound up playing in any way. So now a week goes by after that interview, and the bargaining sessions between the players and the owners are taking place in a Manhattan hotel, the Lows on Lexington Avenue, a dump with a nice lobby. All that matters to me is the Lows with the dump and the nice lobby is literally three blocks from my apartment. The players and the owners just march through a long hallway into private rooms. That's all we see of them. It is not heavy lifting.

There are nice seats at least in that lobby, but it is enlivened one day by news that our boss, Ted Turner has asked the union if he can come in and meet with their twenty odd player negotiating team because he wants to pitch them on something. He was

in fact due there yesterday but was unavoidably detained. The rumor the players told me never confirmed, was that while changing planes in Chicago, Turner and an air hostess had ensconced themselves in a dumpster or the other version was in a janitor's closet for twelve hours of whoopee, and

that's why he was a day late. Anyway, I walk into the Lows that morning and if somehow I had not been able to recognize my camera crew, sure enough it is the same two guys who had been with me at Neil Pilson's office at CBS when I asked him the question he had not been asked before, earning us free CBS sports caps, and the cameraman and the deck operator are of course wearing their CBS sports caps and understand. In nineteen eighty two, CNN was not an upstart.

It was not the feisty outsider, It was not the future of news. We were called pretend TV. It was said that CNN stood for Chicken Noodle News. One day, I called somebody up and asked for press credentials for Cable News Network and the guy said, Cable News Network either people own the news stands downtown. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went to one of the newstands and I asked the guy who owns this place? And he pointed to a plaque and

it said owned by Cabbell News Company. The Cabell News Company, owner of downtown newstands, was better known than Cable News Network. We got scoffed at in some arenas and venues like Madison Square Garden in New York. Our crews were not admitted because they were not in the Union, So the CBS sports caps were an important, albeit borrowed touch of legitimacy and dignity, especially for my cameraman and my deck guy.

So the three of us position ourselves in that long haul in the lobby waiting for my boss, Ted Turner, me holding the mic with the big red CNN logo on the mic flag, and the crew wearing their gaudy CBS sports caps, and in Ted walks emerging from the brilliant early autumn sunshine, filtering in from behind him from the street like this was a perfectly lit movie scene.

And he sees me and recognized me and smile and comes over and beams hot, damn, it's my CNN crew, And he shakes my hand and we roll tape and I start to asking my first question, and suddenly the joy drains from his face and he stops me. Old it what they wearing on their heads? He gestures at the cameraman and the deck guy, and I explained the baxter, I don't give a damn who gave him them. This is a CNN crew. They wearing CBS sports caps. Get them off they damn heads, and he pushes me, I

mean really shoves me and strides past us. Now, even then, I'm five six inches taller than Ted Turner and twenty five pounds heavier at least, and maybe I can live with my employer embarrassing me in public, but I do not have to let him shove me in front of all the other reporters. So for a second, I think, Ah, I'm just gonna run down the hall and catch him

and horse collar the bastard from behind. About a year into my TV career, I have already accepted that there are positives to television, but I've also already learned nearly all all the negatives. And not three months earlier, I had gone over to ABC to interview with them about going back to do radio sports. Seems to me, given what I know about Ted Turner, dragging him to the ground and then quitting TV forever would be a pretty appropriate farewell. And then one word popped in my head.

Rent ah right, right, Rent, So quickly I go to Plan B to be fair in thought, if not an action, Ted Turner was right. Look pretty silly to have the CNN camera crew wearing CBS sports caps while interviewing the founder and owner of CNN, who, by the way, was in the newspaper constantly because he kept saying he was

going to buy CBS. Plus, I still had a story to do that day, and that crew is going to have to go back into the room where Turner would be meeting with the players about an hour later for the proverbial spray shot that would give us some video to use of their meeting, and simply having my guy take their caps off was not going to suffice. So I ran the three blocks back to my apartment to grab the only bit of merch or swag produced in the first two years of CNN, something they had and

apparently inexhaustible supply of CNN bumper stickers. I must have had a hundred of them in my place alone, and there were boxes and cartons and boxes and cartons of them in the New York Bureau, which was funny enough as it was, since I don't think all the people who worked at CNN in New York in nineteen eighty

two owned six cars among them. Anyway, I trimmed a couple of the stickers down to just the CNN logos and raced back to the Crappy Low's hotel, and just as they were calling for the crews to come in to get the spray shots of Ted meeting with the players, I put those CNN logo stickers over the CBS logos on my guys caps, and to my delight, they stuck in place a little large, but it worked. Minutes later, the boys came out of the meeting room and the

cameraman was in hysterics. He wound the video back and had me watch it through the viewfinder of the camera. As soon as they had walked in, Turner started to give them dirty looks, and then suddenly one of the NFL players said, Hey, Ted, there's your crew. There's your CNN crew. Hey CNN over here. Everybody was laughing, and now Ted was beaming that them. That's my CNN crew,

all right, good work boys. When his meeting with the players broke up an hour later, I got a message from Ted's assistant to wait for him around a corner from the main lobby so he could give me give CNN exclusive details about what he was trying to sell

the players on. It was a series of exhibition games so the striking players could make a little money on the side that he could televise, and there would be a pitch to the National Labor Relations Board that the strike had been forced on the players by the owners, which would have meant the players would have all become free agents. Ted wanted them, all of them, every player in the National Football League to sign instead with him.

He would create a twenty four team league. He would give the Union half ownership of every team, he would find backers for the other half, and all he wanted was the TV rights. It didn't happen, obviously, but what a breathtaking scheme. Anyway. Turner was all smiles when he came out of the meeting to tell me before he met with the rest of the press, and he said, great with the hat, good work, but I have to get you guys some real sea in ed sports has

for Christmas. Ted stayed another fifteen or twenty minutes doing god knows what with God knows whom. I didn't see any dumpsters in the hotel and then he left by the main exit as the rest of the camera crews and reporters trailed him. I went along just to see if there was anything he hadn't told me, And as he went out the doors to his car, he said, see overman, and I said, don't forget the hats, and Ted Turner gave me one of the dirtiest looks I

have ever gotten in my life. Sure enough, couple of days before Christmas, I get a call from my boss in Atlanta. I mean, just got a box of one hundred CNN Sports Truckers caps from Ted Turner's office. I don't know what the hell this is all about, but his assistant says, if we wanted to know, we should call you. I was very proud of making the correct choice between correcting mistake and getting us all hats and dissaulting him. There is one PostScript. Ted talked the players

into the exhibition games. I mentioned only two of them, one at RFK Stadium in Washington, which I went to on assignment. Seated next to Ted Turner. He had two flasks with him. Anyway, the crowd was so small at RFK Stadium in Washington that at one point they got on the PA system and asked all the fans to go sit down behind the player benches so the TV shots of the game wouldn't show all those empty seats.

The other game was in the Los Angeles Coliseum. They drew even less, maybe a thousand, probably more like five hundred, five hundred fans in the LA Coliseum. Five hundred fans looks like the raisins and rice pudding. But it was the name of his ad hoc league with these games in Washington and LA that still sticks with me. Forty years later. Ted named it himself. I'm pretty sure he did this deliberately. I know nobody else noticed it until

I made a big deal about it. Ted Turner called his ill fated venture his Erzatz National Football League the quote all Star Season, and I said, perfect. The acronym you have built for it is a s S. Years later, they gave Ted Turner a Lifetime Sports Emmy and I a tribute to him on the ESPN two Show. And a few days after that, a fan letter showed up

in my home mailbox. And I never used my home mailbox, didn't want to give out my home address, and it was a fan letter about the Turner Report and about Ted Turner, and it ended keep up the good work, signed Donald Trump, I swear I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. As the first sign he was losing his mind, thank you for listening. Countdown. Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on

the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. He was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer

today was my friend Stevie Bands. Everything else was pretty much my fault. And that's countdown for this. The one hundred and forty second day until the twenty twenty four presidential election. The two hundred and fifty ninth day since convicted fellon Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States, use the July eleventh sentencing hearing, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity

if it happens. Use the Biden campaign budget to stop him from doing it again while we still can. Thanks for your inquiries about the dogs and their dental work. Everything went aok. Stevie lost two teeth, Ted didn't lose any They're fine, just a little sore. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletin says the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.

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