Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The Trump mental illness crisis and cover up worsens this kind of reality detachment in such different venues on such different topics, from the West Point graduation ceremony to demanding somebody pay him much of whatever Harvard takes in intuition in the
same weekend. From any other president at any other time, including Trump himself seven or eight years ago, this all would have been greeted by wall to wall television and online coverage and banner newspaper headlines essentially, the president has
gone crazy. Instead, within twelve hours, it was all forgotten, so our national media could ignore the extinction level event crisis of a president gone fully insane, so it could return to regularly scheduled programming about how the past president would not instantly admit that his acuity game had slipped
to a B B minus. Yesterday at twelve fifty one am Eastern daylight time, still considered the middle of the night even if you are crazy, Trump posted this, I defy you to tell me you understand everything he had written here. I defy you to tell me that if anybody other than this political leader had proposed in essence charging foreign countries for buying American products, or had mistaken
fifty two million dollars for fifty two billion dollars. If anybody else had done that, tell me that we would not have relaunched my old show, The White House in Crisis only there would have been a version of it on all networks, and we would not even have decided it had cooled down enough yet to pause to take the first commercial break. I quote. Why isn't Harvard saying that almost thirty one percent of their students are from foreign lands? This is a well known fact. It was
repeated by the Trump administration several days earlier. And yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay nothing towards their student's education, nor do they ever intend to. They don't have to. The students have to pay. It's why it's called tuition. Nobody told us that who's this us? We want to know who those foreign students are. A reasonable request, since we give Harvard billions of dollars,
But Harvard isn't exactly forthcoming. Every student in here is on a visa of some sort, and his name is in the government records. We want those names and countries. Harvard has fifty two million dollars dollars sign fifty two Comma zero zero zero Comma zero zero zero. That's fifty two million. Harvard has fifty two billion. Mised your money, misterr business Trump does not know the difference. Use it and stop asking the federal government to continue granting money
to you. The money grants are largely for research, scientific research, historical research, sometimes military research. Trump clearly wants an outbound tariff on an American product education. He not only wants inbound tariffs, which have crashed the world economy. He wants an outbound tariff. He wants a country to pay for the privilege of paying. In short, in his diseased mind, the tariffs are not some kind of means of regulating
international trade. They are kickbacks, kickbacks to him, personally dressed up as if they had something to do with the American government, which they don't like, the crypto scam by his crypto get to attend an official event with him, complete with the presidential seal. For all of his public life, half a century or more of it. Now, Trump has proudly proclaimed what others would try to hide, that he has never been able to separate the meaning of life
from mon He cannot see the value of something. He can only see its price tag. No price tag, no value, no money for him, no value, no kickback, no value.
This goes hand in hand with the reality that Trump also does not value nor understand education, or the idea that admitting foreign students who pay full freight to go to Harvard brings money into this country, to say nothing of bringing smart immigrants into this country, to say nothing of what his supporters really care about bringing white immigrants into this country. I'll come back to Harvard in detail in a little bit, but simply, Trump has never understood education.
He never tires of explaining that he is smart because other people in his family were acknowledged to be smart. That it's all genetics, he had uncle. Well, if it's all genetics, you not only don't have to work at being smart, you can't be educated. You can't be educated, you can't work at gaining intelligence. You're either born stupid or you're born smart like him. Person woman man camera TV fifty two million, when you mean fifty two billion? Trump smart?
And this.
Was twelve hours after he stepped up to a podium to celebrate the end of the education of the cadets at West Point. If he had mailed in his speech, it might have won him a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer Prize. Instead, he went there wore a Maga cap,
because presumably he had left his hair in Florida. He read a script listlessly and then drifted off into his ad libs, into his real to the soldiers of the future, to the people to defend America in the decades to come, his true advice, when they should marry their trophy wife.
He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife. I guess we can say a trophy Well, it didn't work out too well. But that doesn't work out too well, I must tell you a lot of trophy wives doesn't work out.
But it made him happy for a little while at least.
But he found a new wife.
He sold his little boat and he got a big yacht. He had one of the biggest yachts anywhere in the world.
As an aside, I don't know why, it isn't clear that he was talking about millennia there. In any event, that was the message to the graduates of West Point. That and something about invasions, invasions by trophy wives. I have to say pose and this unrestrained, inexplicable, inappropriate presidential insanity at West Point stuck to nothing. The eulogy for Chuckles, the clown in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, was more coherent and more relevant. What did Chuckles ask in return?
Not much in his own words, A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your paths. That Trump SoundBite, to say nothing of the overnight demand from him of a taste of the tuition action at Harvard had vanished from the news hole by the time the Sunday news shows hit, including the Sunday News Show hosted by Jake Tapper,
especially the Sunday News Show hosted by Jake Tapper. Also missing from Jake Tapper's show and the others the reality the Tapper and his co author, Gossip writer Alex Thompson are going to have to withdraw their book about President Biden's acuity issues, which Trump has not only exceeded in both volume and danger, to say nothing of relevance, but which he exceeds in both volume and danger every goddamned day.
Lachland cart Writ's new site Breaker reports that Tapper's CNN colleagues are volunteering, discussed at what Tapper has now done, and more importantly, claiming that the book got none of the rigorous fact checking that books by other CNN talent are uniformly subjected to quote. Very little of the book was fact check prior to publication, as Cartwright phrased it.
Breaker checked with eight central figures named in the book, and none were contacted by the New Yorker fact checker that Tapper and Thompson have been touting on their book tour rot Row. The fact checking story is in fact
dissolving in fro of the author's eyes. Politico not exactly Biden friendly nor Tapper critical territory fact check the Tapper claim that a Biden campaign town hall in Delaware in April of last year went so badly that Biden was so incoherent that none of the video shot there was usable in campaign ads. They had to throw it all away instead. Political reports it obtained saw and reviewed three completed commercials made from the video that Tapper claims was
totally unusable. It was totally unusable except they used it the ads didn't run because Biden dropped out. Politico now reports Tapper has changed his story about the Delaware April event and the unusable town hall video, now claiming an anonymous Biden advisor had deemed the video not up to par as. Politico and sem four both reported video has also surfaced a Biden chatting with George Clooney at the exact event. At the exact moment, Clooney insisted Biden didn't
recognize him. Recognizing a star is a matter of perception. There is also now a question about how much The New Yorker screwed up the excerpt it published of Tapper's book, The Biden Spokesman Quote published by Politico. Is this The New Yorker employee who reached out to fact check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to
the authors as they wrote it. If that is not a canceling level ethical issue, it suggests problems with Jake Tapper's mental acuity and judgment as to Tapper's desperation to sell this damn book, to do anything up to and including his human humiliating apology to Lara Trump. Lara Trump, the only woman in the world who could have married up intelligence wise by getting hitched to Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Cartwright, and Breaker noted something else that smells really, really bad.
I'll quote Cartwright. We've also learned that Tapper's appearance on Megan Kelly was not cleared with bosses beforehand. Quote Jake does what Jake wants, and in this case, he went rogue. Another CNN staffer tells us, Jake Tapper went rogue. He now may have to go to some other network too. A little song, a little dance, say Jake Tapper? Is that really Seltzer?
Down your pants? Okay?
What in the hell is wrong with Christy Nome? I mean, what the hell do we think is actually wrong with Christy Nome? Because there's something wrong with Christy Nome. I mean she's a dog murderer. Moreover, she built a book tour around publicizing the fact that she shot her daughter's puppy. On the right, it has been widely reported that she is how shall we phrase this active outside her marriage. She looks nothing like she did five years ago or
ten years ago. She was willing to travel to El Salvador to take videos of her looking at dozens of shaved oiled up, shirtless men in a cage. What in the hell do we think is wrong with Christy Nome? Ten renditionees sue the Department of Homeland Security and her it's dismissed. She takes screenshots of the legal papers dismissing it. She tweets them and adds these two words, suck it. This is a member of the cabinet, the former governor of a state. Even if it is one of the Dakotas,
it's still a state. Suck it exactly exactly what are they supposed to suck? Christy? What are your suggestions on the suck front for those people that you tried to disappear from this country? And why are you doing this? What in the hell do we think is wrong with Christinome? Now, we could study this problem and debate it and never come to a conclusion. I've been asking since nineteen eighty three, what in the hell do we think is wrong with
Donald Trump? And we are no closer to an answer. Frankly, not wishing it on him at any time in the future, certainly nothing involuntary, But we may not know the answer to that until there's an autopsy, And we may not even know that then twenty years from now could be the same thing with her. What in the hell is
wrong with Christinome? It did dawn on me for the first time as I reread the quotes about her taking poor cricket into the garbage area or the pit whatever it was, with the gravel, and then she just shot the dog in the face because it wasn't responding well enough to training. And we've seen what kind of training she does. Her training methods must have consisted telling cricket suck it. I mean, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps the whole business about publicizing that,
because who would advertise that under any circumstances. If you are the worst person in the world, you wouldn't advertise it because you wouldn't want people to know you are that sick, unless you wanted somebody to know this. And who do we know in a position of not only authority and power, but being able to dole this out in ever increasing soul control of the power. Who do we know who does not understand like or believe in dogs.
Donald Trump never had one, still doesn't get it. It is perhaps his favorite bad comparison anytime he wants to indicate somebody is doing something wrong or cowardly. Oh, they grobbled like a dog, They begged like a dog. They all the things dogs don't do. As someone described it very simply, Donald Trump still does not understand dogs. Could Christy nom have publicized that whole horrible story to get Donald Trump's attention, to get him if re elected, to
appointer to some position in his Nazi administration. It's the first thing I've ever thought of that suggests there might be an actual, logical, flawed, logical, but logical reason behind her publicizing this What have you been up too lately?
Governor? Know him well?
I killed my daughter's dog. And the second message, by the way, was after she revealed how the world looks to her from behind whatever it is that is wrong with her. In this whole issue about Harvard, she announced, and why is Homeland Security dealing with who goes to school here? And who can come into this country to go to school here? And by the way, almost always full rates, rarely scholarships, all all of these tuitions underwriting
the scholarships for Americans. So it's cheaper to go to Harvard and thus cheaper to go to all the other schools because all the foreign students are paying full freight, why are they involved in this sixty five sixty six hundred foreign students at Harvard announcing that they would no longer be allowed to come into this country, thus banned from Harvard, and assuming that that is the end of it.
Because she doesn't believe she can be stopped, sued, overthrown, overridden, run out of botox, She said, today I sent them a letter that said they will no longer be allowed to participate in this student exchange visitor program. And that's up to twenty seven percent of their enrolled students. So it's significant. And she added this should be a warning to every other university to get your act together, which,
what the hell are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's a significant issue that sixty five sixty six hundred students would no longer be going to Harvard. Because of course Harvard does not have a waiting list. It could never find sixty five sixty six hundred new students anywhere in the United States, even if you said, well, there aren't going to be any scholarships here full freight. Trust me. I went to an Ivy League institution that one year
decided it was going to become a football power. Suddenly there were one hundred football players there who had to have help getting themselves to the football stadium, the only one on campus that had big lights around it and signs and looked like in part the stadium at Ohio State, big arching stone edifice on the side about I don't know. It looked against the relief of the rest of the campus. It looked to be thirty forty stories tall.
It was not.
These guys were suddenly there, I don't know how, and then when that didn't work out, they were all gone. Sixty six hundred. Could you could never ever find enough students to pay full or nearly full price to go
to Harvard in the place of these foreign students. Setting aside the legality, the morality, and the brain drain issues, the idea that this idiot who used to be the governor of a Dakota and is now an action dress up Barbie with eight new outfits, who likes to look at sweaty men in cages, topless in crowds in El Salvador worth a trip from anywhere. Huh Christy, that she somehow thinks she's going to put Harvard out of business. No,
we don't. We have nobody left. It's not like the school you went to, Christy Northern State University, which sounds literally like the name you would put in if you didn't have the right to use the name of an actual college somewhere. Northern State University, Central Southwestern Eastern College, Northern State University. She dropped out of Northern State University. Tell Harvard what to do. This belligerence towards the Ivy
League is hilarious. And by the way, if Trump actually believes it, he should renounce his degree from Penn and Wharton. From Wharton anyway, if he remembers how he got it. If he remembers that he has it, IVY League, bad, you went to the IVY League. If you don't want to be bad, you have to renounce your degree again. There is an excellent chance he has no idea how it he happen to graduate, or if he did. Harvard, of course, has handled this entirely correctly, unlike other schools,
which I shall mention in a moment. Harvard's response to this was to immediately sue the Trump administration into the ground in several different lawsuits from several different companies, all of which had no interest in getting the Trump Seal of approval, and none of which we're going to fold to the Trump threats. The Ivy League institutions are endowed.
They have reserves of money and money forthcoming and money coming from whenever they're again not wishing anybody a premature autopsy, but whenever autopsies are conducted on the class of you know, nineteen fifty, that's another couple million for Harvard or Cornell. Cornell is endowed to ten billion dollars. Harvard is about fifty billion. The Ivy League is at one hundred and eighty five billion dollars in endowment, in reserve, in essence, and no matter what you take away from them, they
have enough to sue the government forever. If there is any institution that is specifically designed to fight back against an attempted fascist takeover of this country, it is academia, and particularly the Ivy League schools. Because of course, every Ivy League school that does this makes it more difficult and takes up more time of these monsters. They have to focus on Harvard. Why didn't they just give up, Well, because frankly, they're worth more than the United States government.
You do it that way. You do not do it the way. Sorry Colombia did it. And my poor friend Claire Shipman, I don't know anything more about this just because I know Claire since nineteen ninety eight. I don't know anything more about this, just because I saw Claire earlier this year. I don't know any more about this than you do. I do know this. This is not
how you do it. You do not fold, bend, and mutilate your university and the history of your institution to try to avoid what Trump is going to try to do to you, because he's going to do it to you. Anyway You're saying we'll negotiate only gives him more time to you know, send Christy Nome over with sharp knives or a gun with cricket, and guess what happened to Claire. Claire had to give the commencement address at two separate
commencements at Columbia University. As the old joke goes from Young Frankenstein, could be worse, could be reigning.
I know that many of you feel good morning, class of twenty twenty five. I know that many of you feel some amount of frustration with me. And I know you feel it with the administration.
Notice, she tried the David Zaslav thing from a couple of years ago. David Zaslav from Warner Bros. Discovery got up and gave the speech it I think it was Boston University, the commencement address, and didn't realize they were booing. Thought they were chanting boo zazz or zaz boo, and just kept talking, pretending he had this weird look on his face, like is there an earthquake or something? And what's all noise? Are the trucks walking going by? It's construction. No,
they're booing your ass. So anyway, as I said, could be worse, could be raining. That was the first of Claire's speeches. Then she had to go back the day actor and give another commencement addressed to another part of Columbia University, and they booed her and it was raining. The only solution history tells us. Twenty first century history tells us, twentieth century history tells us, nineteenth century history
tells us. All of our personal histories tell us. The only way to deal with people like Trump and this idiot Christy action dress up Gnome, I don't think him a la then the gang can't act together. You tell him Northern State, which he dropped out of Harvard, will never find any more students. Columbia just gonna dry up without that money from the Trump administration. Throw all the students out. Well, I mean, look, there is the issue
of what to do to prevent that. But if you lose and all the students have to leave, your institution is not going to be harmed by Trump. If you stand up and tell him to go f himself and do some damage to him on the way out, he will not come back. He doesn't want to fight. He wants you to fold. Gnome doesn't want a fight. You think she wanted to go into that gravel pit with cricket where cricket has a gun too. They'd be saying, was the name of that governor got shot by her dog?
Broadening this out one more time from Nome or anybody else. The rest of this is not about her. It's not about anybody in particular in this administration.
It just.
Is the question of what the f is wrong with these people. I'm sure this has crossed your mind, this particular answer. I was rearranging some books over the weekend, and I came across one book again and and it just hit me again, this might be the solution. We didn't know this necessarily about the people this book is about. It could be years, it could be decades. Historians may discovered this. This is a book called Blitzed by Norman Ohler. The publisher is Alan Lane. And I'm not going to
read the whole thing to you. I'll just read you the fly leaf the title of this and it's a picture of Hitler looking off to the right as you look at the cover of the book, and he looks really stoned, he looks really high. Drugs in Nazi Germany, the flyleaf reads, the Nazis presented themselves as warriors against
moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs cocaine, heroin, morphine, and most of all, meth amphetamine or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops resilience, even partly explaining German victory in nineteen forty.
I leave you to draw your own parallels. The promiscuous use of drugs at the Verius highest levels, also impaired and confused decision making, and leave you to draw your own comparisons with Hitler and his entourage taking refuse huge and potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician doctor Morrell as the war turned against Germany. That's doctor
Morrell and not doctor Ronnie Jackson. Doctor Morrell. While drugs can out on their own, explain the events of the Second World War or its outcome, Ohler shows they change our understanding of it. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece of the story. The rest of it should read now available without a prescription. Again, not specific to anybody in the Trump administration, but their behavior is not dissimilar to
those people who would be considered strung out. We already know about Elon Musk's drug history that is reported, recorded and sourced very well in a variety of articles, none of which he did anything about. And again it could be nothing, it could be irrelevant. This idea that Hitler did what he did right up to the end, believing that he was winning, right up until just before he
killed himself, was really a function of drug use. Not necessarily drugs, but Norman Oler presents a pretty convincing case because he got a hold of all the documents and some of the prescription forms. This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together again. I'm not accusing anybody of anything in particular. It is very, very true. I would say it's likely I will officially state that I just think Christinom is a monstrous sadist
with no artificial ingredients. Also of interest here, so if this episode sounds a little ragged, I had two choices. It's a holiday, take it off or ad libs of the commentary. I chose, as you can tell the latter. Hey, we're not going to hang this episode in the loover, you know, but it's okay for Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day weekend when we remember all the sacrifice and service by Trump. That's the bad news. The good news is Bill Maher has won the Worst Person in the World
honors again. He kissed Trump's ass again. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead on this edition of Countdown. Oh, it's that time of year again. I was being interviewed recently for an oral history of sports Illustrated magazine and we were talking about a writer they had named Chris Ballard, and how when he started at Sports Illustrated he briefly wrote their TV and radio sports column that used to run every week when people still.
Cared about TV and radio sports.
He wrote a piece about me just after he started, where he not only contacted the company that had just fired me and asked to talk to me, and when they said no, Keith doesn't want to talk to you, he not only believed they had asked me, but he put it in the magazine that I had refused to talk to him without ever asking me, and of course they didn't ask me. But he also he put it in an article that asserted it as fact that I
would never again work in television. The article he wrote was this time of year in two thousand and one. He got laid off by Sports Illustrated in twenty twenty, and I'm still here and just started working in sports television again, my fifth network, just covering baseball. The firing is the interesting part of the story. It was by Fox. Later it turned out after years of rumors that I actually did not believe. It turned out I was fired personally by Rupert Murdoch, by the way, tick tick tick
rupert tick tick tick. Next in things I promised not to tell first, believe it or not, there are still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute the latest other worse persons in the world Lebron's worse mar Congressman Andrew Clyde. Andy's full time job is he's in the death business. He sells guns, he owns gun shops. He's
a death pimp. He was the one who threw the elimination of restrictions on silencers into the budget bill and wrote about it shall not be infringed. Is not at the deathkin By the way, I'm actually fighting to go further than the current bill elaminate the taxation and registration of suppressors and short barreled farms. This is so his
guns can kill more people. And this allows me to remind mister Clyde, who is an idiot on top of being in the gun business and the death business and being a death pimp, that the second Amendments, which he refers never uses, does not include the word own. Constitution has dozens of words in it, something like fifty or sixty I counted them once. That are synonyms for own, owning, ownership. It's a property document. None of these words is in
the Second Amendment. You have a right to bear, as in carry, and use, and keep as in store in your home guns as part of a state militia. The Second Amendment says nothing about citizens having the right to own guns. They may or may not have the right to own guns, but the Second Amendment has nothing to do with it. It's about state militias, clearly. And everybody who has ever told you otherwise is lying. And Andrew Clyde is lying, and the Supreme Court that found other
WordWise was lying. The Constitution says what it says, and the people who have lied about it, like Andy Clyde, are going to hell. Just a reminder from those of us who can read runner up worser Tim Walls, Minnesota
Governor Tim Wallas. He's still governor, thank goodness. He of course is getting blamed as Kamala Harris was because the Democrats did such a half assed job solving all the problems of twenty twenty four, and Trump didn't have to stick to any of the facts or get covered like he was crazy, which he is, or diminished, which he is. Governor Wallace gave the commencement speech at the University of Minnesota Law School. Donald Trump's modern day Gestapo is scooping
folks up off the streets. They're in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign tortured dungeons. No chance to him out of defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agent, shoved into those vans and disappeared. Yes, correct, Well, of course the Gestapo thing is a big deal on the right because you're not allowed to tell the Gestapo that they're the Gestapo. They think they're just Americans and not
the Gestapo. So why is Tim on this list? Well, obviously because no matter what the handlers told him, and Kamala Harris, and no matter what the handlers and the consultants and all the other idiots standing in between the Democrats saying Trump is a fascist, Trump is a Nazi. We have to stop him, We have to save democracy at all costs. Let's do this. Whoever told him not to? He's on this list because he didn't use this language
during the campaign. Should have called them the Gestapo last October, since it was obvious they had a plan to become the Gestapo. Since that's what they did last time. And I don't mean nineteen thirty six, I mean twenty seventeen, they are the Gestapo. I have no complaints with Tim Walls. He would have been a superb vice president, first of all,
unlike the one we have now. He would have been a human being who did not wear eyeliner, A human being being separate if somebody who doesn't wear eyeliner, I don't mind a vice president wearing eyeliner, the last vice president or eyeliner. This guy pretends he's not wearing eyeliner. Just be truthful about it if you want to wear eyeliner. Eddie Izzard's belief in himself, the British comedian, He told me once in a conversation we had that ultimately he
wanted to become Prime Minister in eyeliner. And I said, given the history of your country, that might get you another one or two percent of the vote. He laughed, and then he said, you know you may be right, Tim Walls. Yes, they're the Gestapo. Just next time we go through this timeline say it earlier, but our winner.
Oh look he's back. It's Bill Maher.
I know, I know you're tired of Bill Maher being on this list, So am I Who the hell am I kidding? We both love this. He deserves it, He's earned it. Every stupid thing we all laughed at because his was the only other liberal show besides mine. We now can pay him back for his podcast company, as we know, went under. Sadly, his own podcast did not go under. It's still being published, and his latest guest on it was, Oh, guess what a Trump supporter?
What a shock?
Jillian Michaels, fitness guru and Trump influencer. As we know, fitness gurus do not use peds or ever get roid rage.
It's a fact.
Guess what. Bill is not only having Trump supporters on his shows again, He is defending Trump supporters again, because, like all really tiny brained people, his solution, when accurately criticized is to put his head down and keep going in the same direction, right off the effing cliff. Only Bill has managed somehow to climb all the way back to the top every once in a while and go right off the cliff again and here he goes one more time. Bill, Let's say it with Bill.
Splack.
Now Bill is defending Trump supporters again, not because he is trying to save his job by going right wing to mix in with the rest of the new right winger propagandists like Jake Tapper under the HBO, Max CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery Umbrella under John Malone, and David Zazz Lab twice for David Za's Lab in this show today. Now, Bill would never sell out. He has nothing to sell out. He never has. Bill would never sell out to keep
a show that nobody watches anymore. When whatever happened to his podcast company going under could not possibly have had anything to do with, you know, a lack of money on Bill's part. No, they just went out of business because Bill was tired of it. I should have had the fist fight with him in nineteen seventy eight, shouldn't I. Jillian Michaels complaining about Tom Hanks and the Saturday Night Live Magas Sketch, which was this year than the winter
weeks ago. Aren't they on hiatus already? They're talking about it now. Jillian Michael says that whole deplorable thing you. Bill Maher says, oh, sure, Jillian Michaels, they're still doing that even when you listen. I've met Tom Hanks a couple of times, and he was very kind and very lovely, and his wife was exceptionally lovely. But when he was on Saturday Night Live, Mar interrupts and says, I hated
it too, and I sat on my show. I know, I hate it in wearing the MAGA hat, not shaking hands with a black person, and that's when I thought, you people don't know MAGA people. And Michaels goes, nope, excuse me, nope, and Bill goes, I mean, they have their issues, and I certainly have my issues with them. You do since when, but they're they're generally, I mean, of course there's some racists everywhere who are that bad, but generally, all the MAGA people I know have no
problem shaking hands with a black person. He met Trump and he thinks MAGA people have no problem shaking hands with a black person. Here, let me shake your hand and then pull you into penury. To continue the Mar transcript, you're just hysterical and you're not helping. And I agree that was not helping, and Michael's interrupts, I don't get it. This is the part where I'm like, is this Titanic?
Who knows?
Bill Maher also, But mostly what I hate is it's what I call a zombie lie. Don't lie to me, it's a lie. Jillian Michaels, Yeah, Bill Maher, that Maga people aren't. We won't shake hands with I get it. It's part of a skit, and it's exaggeration, and that's comedy. It's a little too delicate a subject to just make to go there for that one. So you know, look, we all in comedy step over the line sometimes, or do one that we they want to take back. I doubt if they want to take that one back. I
think they probably think it's great. But I'm telling you, as a liberal, I don't like it. Bill. You you still think you're a liberal. You still think other people still think you're a liberal. You praised Trump, you fell for Trump's Ted Bundy routine. You think anybody's still watching you? Who's a liberal? You think anybody watching you thinks you're
a liberal. You're not a liberal. You're an aging TV figure who ran out of the funny several years ago and you're now doing whatever is necessary to keep your fascist bosses from firing you, to keep you on television. All this time, you think you're going into a television studio to do a show, and you find out, as we all do, no television has gotten into you, and you are doing television show. But you're just doing whatever's
necessary to stay on TV, like Dennis Miller did. Remember Dennis Miller who was on that HBO show before Bill Maher Dennis Miller. Someday they'll be saying, who did that HBO show before the guy.
Does it now? Bill? What was his name? Sclar?
Bill Sklarr? Remember Bill Sklarr? Little guy pretended to be liberal all those years and then suddenly became a Trump fan and then they got criticized for it, and he got even worse. Eventually they fired him and had Jillian Michaels hosted the show for a while, remember that. And then David Zaslav, the executive, came down. He did the show for a while, and now they have that new guy. I don't know who could it be. There won't be an HBO by that point. They'll have changed the name again.
Bill.
You're not a liberal, You're a whiny little ex comedian mar two days worst person in the World, to the number one story on the Countdown, and my favorite topic, me and things I promised not to tell. Over the weekend watching hockey, I had occasion to invoke my days hosting the Baseball Game of the Week and the World Series for Fox, and it reminded me of the delightful way that ended with me being paid one hundred thousand
dollars a month not to do anything. I have changed jobs a lot, and seldom have the departures included gold watches and going away parties, at least not going away parties to which I was invited. But in forty three years in radio and television, I have only actually been fired in the traditional sense of go clean out your
desk and get out twice. Once the order was from a drunken radio executive who did not like the fact that I was twenty one years old, and he was overruled, and he was sent home with a warning by his boy hours later, and I was back on the job forty eight hours after that. The other time, when it actually happened, you're fired, clean out your desk, that was, unsurprisingly at the hands of Rupert Murdoch and Fox, and
I mean Rupert Murdoch personally, or so he claims. When I finally convinced NBC News that I was serious about no longer hosting its Monica Lewinsky Athon in nineteen ninety eight, the head of NBC Sports, Dick Eversoll, had an ingenious solution. He knew his friends at Fox Sports longed to have me front their version of SportsCenter, and so he proposed the following NBC would give my agent ten days in
which to negotiate two deals. A deal for me to go to LA and host Fox Sports News and Major League Baseball on Fox, and another deal in which Fox would pay NBC one million dollars for my contract, like I was a mediocre baseball pitcher. Amazingly, it worked. I got what was then a record breaking salary for any cable sportscaster. Ever, NBC got its million, and maybe most startlingly, NBC then asked me to stay on the air as
a lane duck at MSNBC for like six weeks. Curiously, throughout my career, no matter how abrasive the exit, my lane duck employers have always, for some reason trusted me to stay on their air, even though I was leaving in local news in Los Angeles once I did this for three months.
Anyway.
At first, going to work at Fox Sports was a delight. Their news guys, the evil Roger Ales and his henchman John Moody, pitched me on doing stuff for them, maybe co anchoring with Bill O'Reilly, I'm serious. I passed sports. We spent money. I worked with friends. I didn't have to talk about politics. I could narrate highlights. I could do funny voices way downtown bang I lived on the beach.
I mean, my next door neighbor was Hawaii. Every time there was a newspaper story about ESPN, even though our ratings were terrible, there was also my picture in it with a caption like challenging ESPN. It was great. But then two things happened. The Fox guy, who knew we needed five years at minimum just to tie ESPN in the ratings, took me to lunch one day and said, sorry, mate, my missus is moving back to England tomorrow without me,
so I'm going good luck. He was replaced by guys who replaced the five year plan with a five week plan to raise the ratings by literally one fifth of one point. I left that meeting in which they explained their suicidal plan and revealed that my salary represent and an unsustainable twenty percent of their entire budget. And I called my real estate agent and put my house on
the beach up for sale. Not long after, my doctor gave me a physical and a warning, cut back on work and stress and everything else, or you can have a heart attack ten years from now. I told my bosses this, and their response was to blackmail me. We have a clause in your contract which allows us to send you on the road once a week while you are still working five days in the studio. We're going to enforce that unless you kick back two thirds of your salary. They put this in a document. There are
as the kids, say, receipts. So I folded to blackmail because two thirds of three million dollars a year is still pretty good. But I kept doing the job. In nineteen ninety nine, I broke a story that everybody laughed at that Michael Jordan was unhappy in retirement and he wanted to come back to play in the NBA, but instead of getting a salary, he wanted an ownership stake in a team two years later, he did exactly that.
In two thousand, I got to host the first Mets Yankees World Series, and hosting baseball every Saturday on Fox was a pretty good gig, and we were just gearing up for the two thousand and one baseball season when I got a tip on April twentieth that the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers had unofficially put their team up for sale, and in fact, they were talking to the old owners, the O'Malley family, about taking the Dodgers off their hands, selling the Dodgers back to the son
of Walter O'Malley. This was a great scoop, but it had great danger because the owners of the Dodgers were Fox, my own employers. The next day, after getting this scoop, I made about one hundred phone calls, and sure enough I got the friend of a friend of a friend of my agent to confirm that he and his family were in preliminary discussions joining the O'Malley's to buy the Dodgers from Fox. Two sources. Great scoop, and that night I reached out to my bosses and said, what the
hell do we do here? The story is solid, The Dodgers are for sale. But look, this is your candy store, and I do work for you, And if you don't want me to report this, I'm obviously not going to report it, and I'm not going to pouch, and I'm not going to give the story to somebody else. My boss has replied, good for you. Why don't we all get on the phone with the top. Rupert Murdoch has his own Personal News Corp Public relations department. Let's see
what he says. So on Sunday, April twenty second, two thousand and one, we got Murdoch's own PR guy on the blower and I explained it to him. Now, mister Murdoch has a policy about this. He never interferes in editorial decisions, not even in sourced business stories, not even if they involve him. So long as you make it clear your sources are not from within the company, and so long as you're confident in your sources, and so long as you include our denial, you should proceed with
this Dodger story. That is what we are paying you for. For a brief moment, I thought maybe I have misjudged Rupert Murdoch. Well, it turned out to be a very brief moment and a very wrong moment. I reported the story that night howls of denials. Five days later, though the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper had its own story said, despite denials, Dodgers are for sale, with far more details than I had, And that really was the end of it.
The team was unofficially for sale. Dodger fans, who hated what Fox had done to the team seemed happy, and the vast stinking pile of burning excrement that was Fox and News Corp. And Murdoch sailed on unperturbed. But twelve days after that, just before I was getting in my car to go to the first Fox Baseball meeting for our two thousand and one season coverage, the president of Fox Sports, yet another Aussie called David Hill, called my agent and told her case, not doing any baseball for
us this year. Business decision click, end of conversation. Nothing else, no firing, no get out, no clean out your desk, no announcement. But then two days later they turned off my access to the Fox computer system, And four days after that they called and canceled my cable show. And then that night I got two weird calls from Rich Sandomir, who was the TV sports critic and TV sports business
reporter for the New York Times. And Rich asks me, so, did you know you got fired by Rupert Murdoch personally? And I said, with genuine astonishment that I not only didn't know that, but even given my thoughts about Rupert Murdoch, I didn't believe that. Well, that's what my sources at Fox tell me. Apparently your Dodger story really pissed him off. But really, I said, I had cleared it through his
personal PR guy. I don't know, Rich Sandomir said, Apparently he was on vacation and he got back like the ninth of this month, and he read all these stories about the Dodgers being for sale and how Fox Sports was the first to report it, and he called up David Hill and he told Hill to fire you immediately. So I told Rich, this is the first I have heard of this, and I still don't believe it, even though the day he mentioned May ninth was the day David Hill had called my agent and told her I
would not be doing baseball for Fox that year. An hour later, the phone rings again, and it's Rich Sandomir again, and he sounds shaken. I got it wrong. I don't have any sources at Fox who told me Rupert fired you personally. My source said that you were telling people Rupert had fired you personally over the Dodger story. And I gave Rich a sequence of well, kind of friendly uh huhz And I said, no, I didn't and know you've never been dumb enough in your life to make
the mistake you're saying you just made. And he said, well, I never said somebody at Fox said Murdock fired Joek.
Thanks.
By the next day, they had me come into the Fox building on Pico Boulevard and clean out my office while a guard watched. And she was a really nice guard. In fact, she brought donuts but a lovely way to go out. As I packed, I thought more and more of what had happened in the month since I had gotten that tip about the Dodgers being for sale. As I left the Fox lot for the last time as an employee, I went back a couple of times to
attend table reads for the Simpsons. Table reads for the Simpsons were much more fun than being an employee at Fox. I called a couple of reporters I knew and my agent and some people in the business, and we tried to put together a timeline that made some sort of sense, because the slow motion firing thing. May ninth, you're not doing baseball. May eleventh, your computer won't work. May fifteenth, your cable show is canceled. May sixteenth, clean out your office.
A week long firing made no sense until one reporter friend said, you know, Fox called me and said, call Keith up and provoke him, get him to call us names, tell him about this story in that paper, calling him washed up, get him going, And then it all clicked. My contract ran through the end of the year two thousand and one because Fox was firing me without any cause or even claiming there was a cause, without any
violation of my contract or their rules. Because I had left a trail of good behavior on the Dodger story. They were trying to enrage me and get me to say something nasty that itself would be a violation of my contract so they could outright fire me and keep the money. And the money still on the contract was about eight hundred thousand dollars. Now, after decades of contemplating this, I am confident that I am no crazier than the next guy, at least not the next guy in television,
but on my worst, craziest, least rational day. If you said you have two choices, Alderman, you can blow up these people who are firing you, and you can make them look bad in a newspaper for a day and then they'll fire you and keep all the money.
They owe you.
Or you can keep your big bazoo shut for just seven months. You can keep the eight hundred thousand dollars, and you can spend the summer doing whatever the hell you want, and you can then spend the rest of your natural life blowing these people up. If that's the choice, I will always take the scenario that gives me the eight hundred thousand dollars for doing nothing.
Always so.
On January first, two thousand and two, after the last Fox check cleared, I began making a professional avocation out of attacking Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business, Fox Murdoch, Fox O'Reilly, Fox Tucker Carlson, whatever. And I got the eight hundred thousand dollars. But there lingered for years this kind of academic question of whether Rupert Murdoch had actually fired me for having followed the rules set out by his own personal pr guy. As usual, these things resolve
themselves when you least expect them to. Murdoch was speaking at a Dow Jones conference in Carlsbad, California, on May twenty eighth, two thousand and eight, seven years to the month they got rid of me and a story came across the wire with my name on it. The guy interviewing him at this conference talked about whether there should be dissenting voices on Fox quote news unquote, like that guy who was killing it on MSNBC Keith Olderman. Now
Murdoch barked, I fired him five years ago. He was crizy, timing was off, But there it was, Rupert Murdoch confessing in front of a crowd that he fired me personally, the red badge of courage in quotes. I wondered if it still pissed him off that he had to pay me the eight hundred thousand dollars when I didn't take the grievance bait. Three years after that, Murdoch said it again,
like I hadn't heard it the first time. On February first, twenty eleven, Rupert Murdoch was interviewed by his business talking had Neil Cavudo, who for some reason asked him if he would consider hiring me to put me on Fox News. Now we fired him once. We don't believe in firing people. Twice, Kavoodo replied, you called him a nut wall he was a nut on. Well, we had him on late night Fox Sports. There was never any such show called late night Fox Sports. But never mind, Rupe went on, it
was impossible. I fired him. He was crazy, fired me for following his rules, and I was the one who was crazy. Finally, speaking of crazy, I have had for sixty three nearly sixty four years now a love hate relationship with the name Keith. But did you know that Rupert Murdoch's real first name is also Keith, but that rather than call himself Keith, he voluntarily chooses to call himself Rupert. I mean, sure, my name is Keith, but at least my name ain't freaking.
Rupert.
I've done all the damage I can do here. Tick tick tick, Rupert, tick tick tick, thank you for listening to this. Rather than not do a show for Memorial Day, I pretty much had lived it. It wasn't bad. I'm not submitting it for any ways, it's better when it's written. But you know, Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanel, the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums. It was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today to celebrate the anniversary of my firing by Fox was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else was
as usual my fault. That's countdown for today, Day one hundred and twenty seven of America held hostage. Just one, three hundred and sixty three sixty, one hundred and twelve. This is the ad lib part, just one three and thirty six days till the schedule to end of his lame duck and lame brained term, unless Putin removes him
sooner or the actuarial tables do or we do? And speaking of the actuarial tables, win a free prize by writing down whatever that number was I said when I tried to say one, three hundred and thirty six and send it to your own address. Care of you, You Town, USA. The next scheduled countdown is Thursday. As always bulletins, as the news warrants, remember he's laying the groundwork now to not leave office later. He must be stopped until next time.
I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olberman is fection of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts