Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump keeps digging as he continues to refuse to acknowledge the racist disaster at Madison Square Garden and his rally there Sunday. One of his surrogates has now doubled down in a bitter and almost indescribably racist and foul mouthed attack against Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, a Trump surrogate named Brendan Dilly. I quote him because the tape is too vile to play. There is a concern among many mega regarding Puerto Rico.
I have no efing idea. Why if there are Puerto Ricans who are willing to surrender America to Communism over a comedian making a joke, F you right back to efing Puerto Rico. If you are in the fing United States of America right now, and you're on the actual fing, the lower forty eight, you're there, You're not on your sass island. You have no right to complain about how people perceive your dirty ass island. Period. To continue quoting
Brendan Dilly, the Trump surrogate. And if you're willing to vote against Donald Trump because he accurately, or because a comedian rather not even Donald Trump, because a comedian accurately made a joke about the fact that your country, fing, nation state, whatever the f you guys are, territory is overrun with trash. Fu more from Trump surrogate Brendan Dilly.
I expect more from Puerto Rican Americans. So, yes, there was a joke made at your efing expense, and it wouldn't be funny if your island wasn't actually a floating trash heap. So you're not going to actually impact this election in a negative way, no matter how much you virtue signal about this stupid ass story. Unquote Brendan Dilly. Yesterday, Trump says he quote loves Brendan Dilly. The campaign gives Brendan Dilly credentials and access and video for online propaganda
for Trump. By the way, I cleaned that quote up. The math is simple. There are five hundred and seventy five thousand Latino voters in Pennsylvania, more than half of them are of Puerto Rican descent. Four years ago, the state's twenty electoral College votes were decided by just eighty thousand, five hundred and fifty five of Pennsylvania's voters, and there are seven million of them in total, and Trump seems determined to keep pissing off as many of them as possible.
At another quote news conference unquote, which he has streamlined by eliminating all questions and exhausted listless, Trump pretended there was nothing wrong with the disastrous racist garbage performance at Madison Square Garden, which has been blasted by everybody, from the Archbishop of San Juan to the singer Bad Bunny and his forty five million followers on Instagram to Megan Kelly. He ignored the advice of the archbishop to personally apologize
for Tony Hinchcliffe. He ignored the advice of the chairman of the Puerto Rico GOP, who now says he will not vote for Trump in the island's presidential beauty contest vote. He claimed, I don't know Hinchecliff. Someone put him up there. I don't know who he is. And then he went and campaigned in the majority Hispanic city of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He spent yesterday insisting he was the greatest president Puerto Rico has ever seen, and that Sunday at Madison Square
Garden was a love fest. And of course it was a love fest for people like that Brendan Dilly, for people who are prejudiced against Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans and other Hispanic people.
I don't think anybody has ever seen anything like what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden.
The love, the love in that room.
And I want you to know that Puerto Rico stands behind you, and Puerto Rico well Field, well, we love it, I know it very well, and we help you through a lot of bad storms. I'll tell you we had some really bad ones. You remember you were there when I brought the hospital ship against everyone's advice, and we got it in there and took care of a lot of people. But I think no presidents done more for Puerto Rico than I have.
It is hard to conceive that a disturbed entertainer whose resume consists of all the clubs, shows, networks and talent agencies that dropped him, rather than you know, anything about any actual talent he might have, could actually decide or at least influence the election. But then again, that description fits not just this idiot Hinchcliff, but Trump himself and
the Hinchcliff story continues to expand. NBC News put a hole in the Trump camp implication that they had no idea he was going to say any of that by reporting that the night before he uttered the Puerto Rico line at the Garden, Hinchecliff quote workshopped it at the comedy club The Stand on East sixteenth Street in Manhattan, where it got no laughs, and he told the audience several times not to worry that he would be getting
a better reaction quote tomorrow at the rally. Unquote Trump's inability to keep this thing from growing, let alone actually stopping it in some way, making up for it, in some way, making up for it to the community. The alleged comedian smeared, and this guy Dilly has doubled down on that may literally cinch the presidency for Kamala Harris. Even Politico noticed, actually creating a non cringe pun headline,
Trump faces a pr disaster like a wildfire. The story has also jumped a road and touched off a separate controversy involving other ethnic groups whose unexpected support for Trump is now shaky at best. More on that in a second, and then a conservative commentator got as close to bashing Trump for this as anybody in the cult could conceivably dare when a frantic Megan Kelly not so mad at his campaign staff.
You're trying to win an election in which you're hemorrhaging female voters. Maybe when you present in front of hundreds of thousands, at least at Madison Square Garden, you clean up the bro talk just a little so you don't alienate women in the middle of America who are already on the fence about Republicans. Do they have no women advising their campaign? Is there no actual woman sitting behind the scenes coming up with a guest lineup and saying, let's just have a word with the g who are
going to be speaking about. This isn't the bar, this isn't their living room. This is a campaign. This is politics. We're trying to get him elected. We don't need to rally the base or guys anymore. And it's not helpful even if we do want to rally the base or guys, to go full off color insults to different racial groups and so on. I get it, trust me, nothing that was said offended me. I'm almost unoffendable, but I understand how this plays, especially with women, and it was an eft up choice.
The others still growing tendril of this calamity that only Trump could have let fester came on CNN, which has turned its ten PM Abby Phillip Auer into a kind of Jerry Springer's Show of Politics, which is itself kind of ironic, since Jerry Springer was first a newscaster, then a Cincinnati politician, and only lastly the host of the
original wrestling style talk show. In any event, as four or five or thirty or however many pundits they could squeeze around a table ill designed for the purpose yelled at each other over the trumpest shots at Puerto Rico and Latinos. The man MSNBC fired a year ago without a peep out of its millionaire primetime hosts. Made Hassan stated in passing that yes, he supported Palestinians, whereupon a Joe Rogan and JD. Vance bro named Ryan Gurdusky snapped,
I hope your beeper doesn't go off. You will recall Israel managed to sabotage thousands of pages carried not by Palestinians but by the terrorist gang Hesblah in Lebanon last month. Hassan replied with astonishment, did your guests just say I should be killed? On live TV? And Gurdusky wound up making a tepid apology before they threw him off the show and presumably returned his place at the fight table
to its regular occupant, the Trump sycophant, Scott Jennings. It was nauseating television, beneath even CNN in its desperation to continue to outrate this podcast. But for once, that's not the point. Trump's opening acts racism towards Hispanics could not only cost in Pennsylvania and maybe North Carolina, where one hundred thousand Puerto Ricans reside, or Wisconsin sixty five thousand, or Michigan fifty thousand, where By the way, the Susquehanna
poll that closed Sunday has her up by five. The latest nationally is Mourning Consult Harris by three. But they like to look at what voters are hearing. Morning Consults says forty five percent of likely voters say they have heard something positive about Harris recently, and forty nine percent said they have heard something negative about Trump recently, and that's before the stuff at the Garden or Brendan Dilly.
But the garden thing has now also replicated itself Trump versus Latino's crisis into a Trump versus Latino's crisis and a Trump versus Arab American crisis, in part because of the Beefer line, and in part because of a letter signed by one hundred Palestinian, Arab and Muslim leaders in Arizona urging those in their communities to vote for Harris no matter what misgivings they may have about the Biden administration position on the conflict in the Middle East, ostensibly
because Trump's position on that conflict is even more hardline. Plus, Trump also wants this little Muslim ban and those camps he's planning for the Hispanics. They were originally designed in Trump's disease mind for the Muslims. The question facing Trump six days out from the election is is there anybody left to offend? As the proverbial scales seemed to fall from the eyes of groups who had somehow convinced themselves he was less fatal to them than he was last time.
What else could go wrong? How about Elon Musk, Trump, commissioner of tax breaks for stoned megabillionaires and friend of Putin, saying that to save money, Trump will have to crash the economy and there'll be haircuts and hardships for everybody except him, because what kind of hardships could he get? And also what kind of haircuts could he get given that he buys his in the lawn and garden department
at Minards. Also, speaker Mike Johnson chose now to attack Obamacare at a private event in Pennsylvania, insisting Trump would make massive changes to the wildly popular Affordable Care Act because of how mean it is to the insurance industry.
No Obamacare, one attendee asked Johnson, incredulously, No Obamacare. Johnson jauntily replied, and yes, of course, that's sent off yet another problem for Trump, a reminder that when he asked for details of his health plan during his debate with Vice President Harris, Trump had come back with what was even for him a moronic answer that he didn't have a plan yet, but he quote has concepts of a plan. Oh and options options of concepts of a plan in
the not too distant future. Oh and the Puerto Rico insults revived interest in a little noticed snippet from one of the endless books about the Trump administration, the Peter Baker Susan Glasser Effort, The Divider that when in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, Trump became obsessed with buying Greenland from Denmark, one of his ideas was to trade a US asset for Greenland, a US asset he had just
called quote dirty, a US asset called Puerto Rico. Okay, Dana Bash says, it's exactly what the Harris camp wanted. So I guess the Vice president's speech on the ellipse worked, where she was perfectly framed by countless American flags and the White House portico in one of a thousand photographs
you can find with a two second Google search. She had a bigger crowd last night than Trump did on January sixth, then don't think he hasn't heard about that, and she actually did sell her closing argument last night.
America. For too long we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust, and it can be easy, then to forget a simple truth. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. It is time to stop pointing figures, to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear
and division. It is time for a new generation of leadership in America, and I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United America.
I could play much more of the Harris speech, but I wouldn't know when to stop. We are now at two hundred and fifty thousand canceled Washington Post subscriptions for David fulcnflict of NPR. The numbers shot up by one quarter after Post owner Jeff Bezos's self stroking article explaining why he decided to suddenly stop endorsements of all political candidates just before the presidential election. Well not him, of course.
He didn't do this. His people, well not his people, the Post's people and those people who met with Trump on behalf of his people at the rocket ship company Bezos owns. According to NPR, those weren't his people either. Two hundred and fifty thousand cancelations, which according to the NPR calculation, represents ten percent of all of the Post's
readership income. Semaphore News as the La Times, had around four hundred thousand subscriptions lost eighteen thousand, that'd be a little less than five percent of its incoming and seeing an opportunity to slip stream behind the big scared names. The Tampa Bay Times revealed that it didn't endorse in the presidential race either, but it had decided that in July. It was just that nobody noticed. Andrew Mitchell says she is retiring from her midday show on MSNBC after the inauguration.
Two points, how could anybody tell? Secondly, she is doing so, presumably to devote more time to falling asleep off the air rather than on it. Mitchell says she'll do more reporting now. The Reporter's Club from Washington hailed her as one of the all time greats. In point of fact, even when I was still at NBC, which is now more than thirteen years ago, producers were warned to check her scripts, that she viewed all news stories almost exclusively
through one lens and one lens only. What did it mean for the economy, what did it mean for the investors? And speaking of leaving MSNBC, I have to tell you this story. I think if I tell it to you, though, I should just quote it verbatim. At least a couple of paragraphs of a very interesting piece and a very long one from former investigative at Gawker, Gizmodo insider and business insider JK. Trotter, now writing at Interesting Mysteries dot com.
I hope you're sitting down quote. Eight years ago. In the spring of twenty sixteen, reporters in New York City began to hear whispers about a drama unfolding at the Midtown headquarters of NBC. Sources, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. All of them had heard something about the relationship between Today's Show co host Tamaron Hall and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The rumor went like this. In the latter half of twenty fifteen, NBC journalists unearthed evidence that Hall and Trump conducted an affair in the years before he declared his candidacy. Some of the evidence, mister Trotter goes on, indicated that Hall became pregnant by Trump and later obtained an abortion. Says mister Trotter, the whispers appeared to be leaking out of thirty Rockefeller Plaza because NBC officials were unsure of
how to address the situation. Continuing the quote. Eager to scoop a competitor on its own turf, Reporters outside of NBC swarmed their sources within the network for information, but they struggled to find a path to publication. Important details were fuzzy or disputed, and sources knowledge was often third or fourth hand. The gravity of the allegation and the visibility of its subjects provided little margin for error. Any
story would require nearly perfect sourcing. No news outlet published a single word about the rumor to continue from JKA here, but there was in fact some truth to it, according to people familiar with the matter. NBC journalists did indeed investigate Hall and Trump's relationship in the fall of twenty fifteen, and says JK. Trotter, found evidence that supported the existence of an affair that led to Hall's pregnancy and subsequent abortion. They had gathered this material as part of a larger
reporting project about Trump's past girlfriends. The evidence was compelling enough to continue investigating as Trump's campaign gained steam. To finish up the long quote from mister Trotter. However, nothing ever, came of the reporting project. NBC never published a story about Trump's ex girlfriends or his relationship with Hall, and less than two weeks after Trump's inauguration, Hall abruptly left
the network. These events created a mystery that has never been solved what exactly happened between Trump, Hall and NBC. For the rest of it, I'm just going to go over and stand out of the traffic lanes. I refer you to Interesting Mysteries dot com. Do you need me to spell it? I notice there is nothing in there about Prince and the endless rumors about my old friend Tamarn and Prince, most of which did, in fact seem to be fueled by Tamarn. I never did figure her out.
In point of fact, I asked her out. She said, yes, we had one dinner planned which I had to cancel when my dad got sick. Then a few months later she asked me why we hadn't gone out yet, And then I left NBC and that was the last of that. So who knows. Maybe the answer is it Interesting Mysteries dot com? Are you the daddy.
Not me?
Pell? Also of interest here, in an all new edition of Countdown, somebody prominent has defended the racist remarks by this guy. Hinchcliff compared it to Tony Hinchcliff's performance at a roast of the football player Tom Brady and the man who defended it is the most overrated person in the history of political television commentary. No, not me, somebody else. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
Olberman still ahead on this edition of Countdown. I am so old that I went with Trump news conference where he actually didn't give a speech and sort of fell asleep while standing up, but instead of answered questions and did interviews. And it was just the other day. Well, no, forty one years ago. Things I promised not to tell. I met Donald Trump when I was twenty four years old, and even then I knew he was nuts. Oh, and
he later wrote me a fan letter. Coming up first, So my guest announcer you heard there was Tony Kornheiser from ESPN, because six years ago I was in DC co hosting Pardon the Interruption with him there for ESPN, having a great time doing it. And I was sitting in the executive producer's office at the middle of the day and he had three TVs on his wall. One had CNN, one had MSNBC, one had Fox. It was midday,
so The MSNBC anchor was Katie turry. Hey, the producer said, it's your ex Then I looked at the CNN monitor. Their guest was Olivia Newsy heard too, I said, sort of quietly. He didn't quite understand what I meant. Fox was in a commercial break, and I said to him, you know, if when they come back from break, Laura Ingram is somehow on the air on Fox right now, I expect silver dollars or gold bullion to start pouring out of your television because I hit the X jackpot.
On that note, Let's put more coins in the machine and pull the one armed bandits lever and see how we do as we look at the latest new idiots to talk about the daily roundup of the misgrants morons undone and krugrif x specimens who constitute two days worse persons in the world. Come on, baby, the bronze were Olivia Newsy. I have stayed out of the substance of this perfect soap opera because they're all wrong. They're all idiots,
they're all behaving like children. They're all behaving immorally and amorlly and self destructively. It's a if you were to offer this up to the nation's psychiatrists, there'd be a bidding war for each of them. New Zy, her badly haired, dyed ex fiancee, whom she used to call a stalker, Ryan Lizza, And of course my ex friend RFK Junior, who is slightly more in my favor maybe is sort of number one in the rankings in my mind, because, as I've noted previously, he's five years older than I am.
So when Olivia and I broke up nearly a decade ago, turns out I was actually too young for her. AnyWho The Daily Beast, where Olivia used to work and with whom I secretly negotiated her contract. I mean, why not I've negotiated and signed like one hundred and seventeen contracts she had signed. Why shouldn't I do the bargaining behind the scenes for her? And I charged her way lower than my usual rates. I did it for free reports
that Liza. The Daily Beast reports that Liza has filed outrage paperwork fighting Olivia Newzy's attempt to put her entire lawsuit against him under seal, in which she has accused him of blackmail, phone hacking, attempting to force her into sex and back into their engagement, and all sorts of other stuff about their Trump book that will be coming
out in Check's notes the year twenty twenty. She wants this case, which at one point she let leak she was turning over to the FBI, which meant she hoped to get him arrested. She wants it conducted out of the public view. I hate to agree with Liza on anything, and this predates my knowing that he even knew her,
or that I even knew her. But as the Daily Beast notes quote, the crucial point liza a lawyers make is that Newsy made no attempt to seal coverage of the case or her initial filing for two weeks and after her filing on September twenty ninth. He only did so after Liza lodged his counter filing on October eleventh, filing first reported exclusively by The Beast at the time. Mister Lizza's answer to the petition should be just as public as her Newsy's self serving and self publicized allegations.
Liz's lawyers argue the petition was available on the public docket for a full two weeks after September twenty ninth, Yet Miss Newsy did not move to seal. To the contrary, why do I keep seeing a seal? Why do I keep seeing a Thurber seal? I don't know if it's still there, By the way, but Olivia got the moral to one of Thurber's fables that I read you periodically. She got a tattooed on her shoulders across her shoulders when we were together. I forget which one. It may
have been, the Moth and the Star. I'll have to figure that one out anyway, because I had the moth done on my arm anyway. Yet Ms Newzy did not
move to seal. To the contrary, she affirmatively stoked press coverage. Then, mere hours after Miss Newsy's council received mister Lizza's answer, and the day before the public hearing on her petition, Miss Newzy suddenly moved to seal everything Ms Newsy cannot provide and discuss her petition and its allegations with news organizations, and then seek to seal the very record she created so as to silence mister Lizza in this litigation. By god,
I can't argue against him. Plus, what fun will this be if it's under seal, because if you think this is going away, it isn't. There's another detail that has come out now. He's hired a former Bill Clinton attorney, Bob Barnett. She's hired a guy who charges five thousand dollars for the first meeting and then eight hundred dollars an hour. And trust me, if there's one thing I'm an authority on, it's how Olivia handles money. And the summary of that is she doesn't. I wonder if there's
a secret bankroll involved in this? Who in this scenario with two ink stained, poorly paid wretches and Robert F. Kennedy Junior, maybe somebody else might have money?
Oh?
I wonder is that possible? Is he bankrolling her in this? Just like wiring her the money or sending it to her from Venmo? Never in person? Obviously? Okay, the runner up? Why look? Look who it is? The runner up? Wor Sir Laura Ingram? Did you know that? In addition to her nightly Fascism Hour on Fox, she has a website in which she writes about herself in the third person, Can I pick them?
Or what?
Two worse persons? And they're both my exes? Although to be fair. Laura was only one date, and that time she took me hostage quote. In her recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Laura shared a powerful message with hosts and viewers, underscoring the undeniable momentum building across the country. She addressed the enthusiasm for former President Donald Trump, enthusiasms, and the broader populist movement, painting a vivid picture of a nation that is ready to embrace change and restore
American values she meets white people. Reflecting on the scene at Madison Square Garden, Laura noted the palpable excitement the crowd proudly sported red hats and pro Trump attire a courageous statement in New York City. Well, they were in the Jim Dolans building. He's a fascist. What was brave about that? You've got James Dolan, owner of the garden, the Rangers, the Knicks, fascist who bans people who criticize
the team? I mean fan and not media. You want to ban the media, I guess ban fans who criticize him or the teams, and install facial recognition systems so that anybody who works for a company that's suing one of his companies. They don't get admission to Radio City Musical or a Knick game or a Rangers game. But yeah, it was dangerous to be in Madison Square Garden. If you're a Nazi, you feel the energy in the room, Laura observed, emphasizing that the atmosphere was not overstated. There
was a happiness in there. I'm sorry I haven't done my accent now when the happiness in there, she added, countering the often negative narratives portrayed in the media. Yes, I would agree with her here the people who hate Puerto Ricans, Latinos and Hispanics were extremely happy on Sunday. Moreover, Laura suggested that this visible support reflects a shift in attitude nationwide the days of heine who you're supporting our owner,
she asserted. She recalled her recent visit to Texas A and M, noting that even on college campuses, Trump supporters are beginning to express their beliefs openly. Laura emphasized that Americans deserve the right to voice their views freely, whether backing Trump or Harris on college campuses. At the end of the day, I think a lot of kids have been afraid to be who they are she said, this is true. The racists have been afraid. There's been a
sheet shortage at most colleges. Think about it, until people like Laura and Fox enabled the racists, they were afraid, suitably afraid, permanently afraid. You know who else Laura has enabled, based on the photo on her website, people who get serial plastic surgery. If you go look at this, don't say I didn't warn you. All right, So here we are in a podcast version of that scene I described in the Pardon the Interruption offices Ingram on one screen,
Newsy on another. Could the third one b Katie Turr or any of my other exes who names I never mentioned because they're not in the media, and I would have had to bring them up and sort of expose them to public comment. No, I don't do that. The winner the worst, Ah, Sorry, it's John Stewart. John Stewart, the all time third best host of the Daily Show after Kilbourne and Noah. Kilbourne and I last spoke in two thousand when he retracted an apology on me. It's
not like we're still buddies or anything. And I was probably his best friend at ESPN. I have to say this. The only Katie Terr connection is. Katie Turrer agreed that Kilbourne was much better on the Daily Show than Stuart was. I don't get John Stuart. I didn't get him in the nineties when he was the host of Comedy Central's
Short Attention Span Theater. I didn't get him when he only got the Daily Show assignment because somebody at CBA got stoned and thought Kilbourne was the ideal follow up to Letterman and they gave him the Late Late Show.
During the Bush years, I thought John did some brave stuff, but it was amazingly formulaic and stopped being funny very fast, and he had this weird grudge against me and anybody else who criticized Bush on TV with just occasional humor, because I don't know, he was the only one allowed to do that. I don't get John Stuart. Well, now I don't get him even more than I used to
not get him. John Stuart has defended Tony Hinchcliffe, the racist who posing as a comedian, got up at Madison Square Garden and called Puerto Rico garbage and compared Latino's moving here to a cheap method of birth control, and did so so he could get cheap laughs from the cheap racists at Trump's cheap Nazi rally at Madison Square, cheap Garden, And as we found out, he workshopped the jokes the night for at a New York comedy club and he got no laughs, and he did the jokes anyway,
And anybody who's ever done comedy knows that is the surest sign that the point is not to get a laugh with your material, but to wear your racism like an emblem or symbol. I don't know emblem or symbol. I just read random emblems, like a swastika maybe. Anyway,
John Stewart defended this guy Hinchcliff quote. Obviously in retrospect, having a roast comedian come to a political rally a week before election day and roasting a key demographic probably not the best decision by the campaign politically, But to be fair, the guy's just really doing what he does. First off, the misunderstanding here that the issue is how this affects this idiot nobody ever heard of before and now we'll never hear of again, except in this context, Hinchcliff,
that's not the issue. That's like, you know, blaming the bullet but saying that it's fair here. It's okay because the guy's just really doing what he does his job, his job as being a racist in public on behalf of Donald Trump. Well, then why isn't he in the House Republican leadership Because they're not funny either, they're just racist bastards like this guy. Everything is fine as long as you're just really doing what you do. Is that true for a bank robber? John or Ted Bundy? I'm
just doing what I do. John Stewart was not done. He continued to defend Tony Hinchcliffe by showing highlights of Hingecliffe at a similar event to the German American Bunned eighty fifth anniversary Roast of Minorities at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. John Stewart played video of Hingecliff making jokes at exactly the same kind of thing, a roast of Tom Brady, the football player, the most vanilla man in the history of sports. And then John Stewart played these
clips and laughed, Yes, yes, of course, terrible boo. There's something wrong with me. I find that guy very funny. I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, bringing him to a rally and having him not do roast jokes. That'd be like bringing Beyonce to a rally and not and then he gave the patented oops stare that John Stewart has used only seventeen thousand times so
far this decade. The implication is here that being a Beyonce not singing at a Kamala Harris event is the same as it would be if Tony Hinchcliffe went to a Trump fascist rally and was not a racist bastard and did not slander Puerto Ricans and Hispanics, And that slandering Puerto Ricans and Hispanics at a political rally a week before an election is exactly the same as making a few jokes about Tom effing Brady because I guess what I finally get, John Stewart. John Stewart is a
freaking idiot. Somewhere long ago, John Stewart decided that comedians were always to be defended, no matter if they harmed individuals or groups of people, and that jokes were just jokes, and if you have a problem with jokes, it's your problem.
Tony Hinchcliffe was just doing his job. Of course, you should make sick racist jokes about a minority group that is already under attack a minority group, jokes about them that will encourage violence against them and aid the effort of a madman who wants to become dictator, and then put people like John Stewart in a concentration camp. Because that's the same as saying Tom Brady has banged too
many supermodels. Because we should all be good sports about comedy, and we should laugh whenever it helps a comedian, even if it leads to death threats against the people the comedian clearly hates. Comedy Central has just announced John Stewart will continue to do one episode of The Daily Show per week into next year, unless Tony Hinchcliff's demented racism helps Trump get elected, in which case John will be busy living in the cell next to mine in the camp,
insisting but they were just jokes. I mean, Tom Brady didn't put us in a camp, right, Let me go, John, People don't matter. Racism doesn't matter. Only laughs matter. Stuart two days worst person. I'm sorry it wasn't Katie Turr in the world to the number one story on the Countdown and the Things You Never Know and the things you'll never realize at the time that someday you will need to promise not to tell. I met Trump when I was twenty four years old. It's a pretty good story.
His hair was still its original color. Then more or less it was thinning. He'd done something to it. It was combed strangely. He was weird, unsettling, unnatural. But it was New York in nineteen eighty three. Everybody had done somebody of their hair. I had a perm everybody was weird and unsettling. But if you had said this this in the future, this is how this will end up.
I would never have believed you. The president thing, the coop thing, the dictatorship thing, the violence thing, the burying the wife on the golf course thing. No, no, no, I would have believed all that. I mean, he was really weird. I meant the President mccheese thing.
I like China and I like President Cheese.
And here's another clip that slipped through the cracks, but only for a moment. This was Newsmax. This was the interview where Trump just kept talking and talking and talking, and even poor dumb Greg Kelly glazed over as he listened, and Trump said his big takeaway from the New York trial was that none of the jurors smiled at him. The light bulb went off over my head. This is far more important than it could possibly seem at first. Blush.
There's no way. You heard me say, you're long before the verdict that mother Teresa couldn't get a fair trial here. I said that, and no, you couldn't. I never saw a glimmer of a smile from the jury. No, this was a venue that was very unfair. Oh my god,
did I have a flashback there. I have had the misfortune to meet Trump in person four times, the first late in nineteen eighty three, and each time I saw the exact moment that his face went from an emotionless, almost lifeless, certainly non human mask to a beaming, phony smile. That's who he is, That's what he thinks is his asset,
an irresistible smile. You and I look at him and see a face of evil and debauchery, and mostly a guy who claims to be rich and yet clearly buys his makeup at the cheap end of the notions department at Filein's basement. But he really thinks he can sell anybody anything and somewhere early in life he decided his means of doing that was to mimic a human smile and really make it as big and as preposterous as possible. And he's done this now for at least seventy years,
from his childhood dementia to this dementia. And the way he registers a sail with people, his receipt for convincing them to do his bidding is their smile in return. So the jury didn't smile at him, so the jury was biased against him, so the jury was corrupt, so the trial was rigged. So when he it has these crazy things, there is a part of him that truly believes it is ridge, because they are, as the kids say,
not buying what he's selling. He believes life is a transaction, and when he gives you his smile, you have to give him yours, and then he owns you. I met him in the lobby of the apartment building I used to live at here, the no longer Trump Palace. I saw him first, then he saw me. Then he whispered to one of his flunkies. I'm guessing he was double checking it was me. Then he stared at me for
a moment. Then when he thought I was first looking at him, his dead face turned immediately into that fake smile. Remember the Senko de Mayo Taco Bowl tweet from twenty sixteen where he says, I love Hispanics, like there were actual Hispanics in the taco bowl and he was eating
them that fake smile. But his eyesight is not as good as he lets on, so he doesn't know that you have seen him from He had done the same thing twice in the lobbies of thirty Rock at NBC, once stopping just to shake hands, once actually stopping to tell me how good countdown was and how pissed off his buddy Bill O'Reilly would get whenever he told him
how good countdown was, and then striding off. And I watched to see if I could see that fake smile that had appeared so suddenly vanished just as suddenly, but his back was turned to me. However, December fifteenth, nineteen eighty three, CNN sends me to cover a New York Post sports forum where owner George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees, owner Fred Wilpond of the New York Mets, Sonny Werblin of the New York Rangers, and Nixon, this real estate hump Trump who owned the sort of pro
football team in New Jersey. They would speak and do interviews and meet fans and whatever, and I interviewed them all briefly, and when it came time to interview this Trump guy, he stood there and looked at me like he was trying to guess my weight. Then we put the camera light on and there it was, this big fake smile out of nowhere. And I asked some questions about the New Jersey Generals, and he boasted he was hiring a new name coach who used to coach the Jets.
Only turned out he hadn't hired him yet, and he spent a week cleaning up that mess. And when I said thank you, when we turned the light off, he turned off the big fake smile zap, it was gone, and the blank look repeated in his eyes. A couple of years ago, on a cold night, I turned a corner here and a familiar but older face shouted Keith, And suddenly I realized, it's a CNN cameraman I haven't seen in thirty years. Remember when we covered Trumpet that
sports thing? He says, and I realized he was the cameraman that day at the post thing. Remember what you said about him? And I didn't And he laughs, and he says, we were walking back to the truck and you didn't say anything, and that worried us, because when have you ever shut up for five minutes? And so finally I say, what's bothering you? And you stopped and you turning, you looked at me and Jimmy, and you said that last guy we interviewed Trump, What the f
is wrong with that guy? I think back often to that day in nineteen eighty three. I know I'm not going to say what I'm thinking. Thanks for listening. I've done all the damage I can do here. Five episodes a week. Again, we're posting nightly just after midnight Eastern. Follow me for the podcast promo videos as well. We run them on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, x, Instagram and of course facetick once again. Soon I will run out
of these hybrid names for the social media platforms. Once again, there is a Monday countdown, and please forward this podcast to anybody. Forward it to John Stewart, I don't care, Brian Ray and John Phillips, Shanelle musical directors of Countdown arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards, Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums,
and it was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fifthy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today has mentioned was my friend Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today. Six days until
the twenty twenty four presidential election. How's the breathing going out there. It's also the three hundred and ninety fourth day since convicted felon dissociative fugue Jade Trump got away with his first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Use the election, use the metal health system, use presidential immunity to keep him from doing it again while we still have chance. The next scheduled
countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news requires till the next one. I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.