Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. He who saves his country does not violate any law? Trump Saturday, And what about if you believe this country must be saved from Trump? It will never occur to Trump, it will never occur to a vast majority of his culture, will never occur even to a vast majority of commentators on both sides, American and Trumpist. But in posting that misquote of a probably apocryphal Napoleon quote, Trump has provided
an excuse to ignore the law. For anybody who hates sim there can be no doubt Trump only thought, he who saves his country does not violate any law would apply to him, would inspire those who wish to act on his behalf. That is how crazy Trump really is. That's how far he has traveled from reality, traveled further from reality since the election. Because implicit in Trump's statement is the simple reality that you can never prove the negative here, that you can never prove you saved your country.
You just have to really really believe it, or have others believe it. And for every single person who thinks Trump saved or is saving or will save this country, there is at least one other American who thinks this country has been saved, or is being saved or will be saved from Trump, and to tell all of them that they are not violating any law because they all believe they are saving this country. That way lies the
wild West. Certainly, the media has exclusively treated Trump's post as if it applies, even in his warped, dead mind, only to him and to his supporters. The New York Times actually wrote the story up yesterday and came as close as ever it has to saying that might have been a stochastic call to terrorism on Trump's behalf, but the Times didn't, and nobody else is considering the broader context. What if you believe this country must be saved from Trump?
What if you believe you must save this country from Trump? Well, apparently Trump just gave you the thumbs up. He who saves his country does not violate any law. I never done in that. Trump has now gone from the reality of November fifth. He got forty nine point eight percent of the vote. Everybody else got a combined fifty point two percent of the vote. He is a minority president.
He went from that reality to this state of madness in which he can rationalize breaking any law and quoting Napoleon by merely claiming he has saved or is saving or will save the country, whichever suits him best at the current moment. It's like the wall. What does he need to be true right now? I built it already, No, I'm building it now, No I will build it. To say saving the country rationalizes and legalizes any act would be a stretch if you said it while you had, say,
roughly one hundred percent support. Spoiler alert, he doesn't have one hundred percent support. His opinion poll approval numbers, which were higher than usual but still sucked, have since decreased, especially among young voters, and as they have decreased, his
madness has increased. Still. If you need any indicator of what he intends to do next, he has just told you in that sentence everything attempt to stay in power past twenty twenty nine, stop elections if need be, arrest political opponents or worse, and most obviously ignore all laws. And in the last week he has somehow ratcheted this up because the now unambiguously declared lawlessness of he who
uh what is the quote again? He who smelt it dealt it nah nah, sorry, He who saves his country does not violate any law that has been translated into other languages and offered up by Trump by a musk to Germany's new Nazis and to Russia's old dictator by Trump himself. And it has been shouted at our allies and our fellow democracies in Europe by the Vice President of I mister Vance and his functional IQ equivalent of that of a houseplant on a front porch in Fostoria, Ohio.
So now it's not just as if Trump were trying to destroy America on behalf of another country. It is as if Trump were trying to destroy mankind on behalf of another planet. While Trump was destroying the Justice Department and turning Emil Beauve Beauvet Bloviator, whatever his name is, into the world's oldest legal prostitute in the Eric Adams case, while he and Eric Adams each wound up shackled to
a corpse each other. While Trump was loosening the pestilence that is RFK Junior on health in this country and loosing this illiterate clown who used to be missus wrestling on the education system in this country, and while he was firing three hundred nuclear safety staffers because he was too stupid to realize they were the people who protected the national nuclear stockpile. And then he turned out to be even more too stupid, and he no longer had a way to contact them at home and on fire them.
While Trump was showing just how majestically stupid he is, while he was proving he who saves time in a
bottle does not have an opener nearby. While Trump was doing that himself, his gang of deputy Furres, Vance, Rubio and hegseeth, we're doing their impressions of Neville Chamberlain, actually doing their Nevil Chamberlain impressions in Munich, trying to set out Ukraine, trying to set out Europe, trying to serve Putin, trying to encourage China, and in the case of the desperately dysfunctional, cloudy brained Vance, try to make the world safe for men to wear eyeliner and have a beard.
Who in the hell is JD Vance? To explain in Europe that Europe needs to be more fascist, and in being more fascist, to claim that it's free speech and it's trusting in the pillars of their own democracies. Oh, I know, he's vice president of the United States. Spiro Agnew was vice president of the United States. John Calhoun was vice president of the United States. JD. Vance works for the world's leading purveyor of democracy destruction. JD Vance
is Donald Trump's whore. And we don't know who Donald Trump is a whore for. But if you are now or if you have ever been agnostic, Donald Trump is the best evidence you have seen in your lifetime that there really is a satan. He who saves his country does not violate any law. Great, brilliant, very helpful. If it has ever crossed Trump's mind, it and its little feet echoing thunderously in that otherwise empty gold, rustolium covered space.
Just how many million Americans currently think that they are supposed to save this country right now from him? Make sure they know the President of the United States just gave them a pass. You think you are in the process of saving the country? You follow your star kid, You do not violate any law. So what if you're just another nut job with a crazy dream. When they arrest you, you just say, but the President said, I
does not violate any laws. Less explosively about this dumbest thing Trump has ever said, and maybe of more immediate importance about this dumbest thing Trump has ever said, you need to save the country from me, Go ahead, You're not violating any law. Maybe of more immediate importance about
this moronic statement. The Democratic National Committee delegate David Atkins notes that Trump's post from Saturday, he who saves his country does not violate any law, should be used as evidence in every court filing against Trump and against the Doge scammers, and against Musk, and in the Eric Adams case, and in everything that he hasn't even done yet but will. In this context, it is the dumbest thing Trump has ever said, because it shows foreknowledge of intent to break
the law. Because this sweeping madness doesn't just encourage assassins, it also encourages hacking by Musk employees who answer to names like Big Balls or the fop of the country, the father of the country. Oh that's Elon Musk. Twelve kids with four different women counting the newest claim by the fascist nitwit who calls herself Ashley Saint Clair. By the way, that appears to be her real name. Ashley Saint Clair says she just welcomed Musk's newest spawn five
months ago. The update on this is now she's apparently hinting it was via IVF or, as the fertility experts call it, the driverless car of procreation. I mean, I'm sure Musk will bring this child to the White House soon,
because when he does it, it's cute, it's humanizing. If a woman did that, if Lauren Bobert did that, or if Nancy Mace had twelve kids with four different men, or if say, instead of Elon Musk doing that with the kid in the Oval office, Ben Carson had done that, or Ben Carson had had twelve kids with four different women,
they would be run out of Maga by Maga. When Musk does it, they all bark like seals, like South African apartheid friendly seals, and they do features on the suit the kid was wearing, and they imply that the suit proves Musk is not just a reanimated skeleton with botox stretched over its skull. He who's saving all my love for you does not violate any law. Incidentally, the original version of he who saves his country does not
violate any law. Was I'm not gonna pay a lot for this muffler or for this copy of the Washington Post. In the front runner for the twenty twenty five annual Hutzpa Award. This headline appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Quote as Musk reshapes the government, some ask where are the guardrails? The White House has taken advantage of rules with weak enforcement and loopholes, or simply declared it can
outweigh other laws. Lisa Rhyan then goes on at length about the guardrails, without ever mentioning the roles of Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis and the other British ass hats brought in to neuter the Post in removing all the guardrails there and replacing them with ones made out of paper mache. Lisa Rhyne Lisa Rain Lisa R. E. I n, by the way, is identified in her Washington Post bio
that the byline links to Lusie. She quote covers federal agencies and the management of government in the Biden administration unquote. And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the Washington Post at the moment, I don't know what does covers federal agencies in the management of government in the Biden administration. How the hell should just get a byline? Then? I mean management failing to update you know what what president this is? That's one thing,
it's the post. But the author herself never looks. Come on, not to be outdone. The New York Times offers this both sides, just headline. Still still they're doing this. Still, the evidence mounts that somebody is blackmailing Joe con Or the Selisburg News analysis. Trump officials attack a German consensus on Nazis and speech. Vice President J. D. Vance and Elon Musk have challenged decades long approaches to political extremism
that were designed to prevent another Hitler. They won't even say in the headline that the Germans were posed to Nazis. The consensus on Nazis and speech. I wonder where they've they been four or against since the country was destroyed. I don't remember. The Times doesn't remember. Consensus challenged extremism prevent Vance and Musk on the same field trip as this Schlong covered in brill cream Hegseth. Vance and Musk sided publicly with Germany's new Nazis as critical elections loom
in Germany. They didn't attack a consensus. They sided did with New Nazis. They're trying to influence the election in favor of the New Nazis, and nobody here is even publicly humiliating them for this. And I mean, just leave the politics of it out for a moment, leave the horrific pro fascism of it out for a moment, Just humiliate them. Musk and Dvance about their appearance starts simply
with basic insults that everybody can understand. Pull off those Oh, we can't say terrible things about what they look like. This is war. You can throw out an insult about Musk's dead eyes and how Vance overcame his own dead eyes apparently by using Danessa Myrik's beauty line work paintbrush, fluid, liquid eyeliner. A little more materially on the subject of media, or what's left of it, we need a goddamned new use boycott of this White House until the Associated Press
is fully reinstated. There I'll reuse this line from previous episodes. I have neither the time nor enough words to tell you how much this isn't going to happen. It could
cost news organizations ten or twelve dollars each. They would never spend ten or twelve dollars each on a principle, but still in my dreams, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBCABCCBSNPR, all of them need to withdraw their reporters from covering Trump and to stop covering Trump on their broadcasts, to in fact use only the Associated Press coverage of Trump until the Gibbels division of the Trump administration backs off its attempts to crack the door open to controlling what
all reporters say and write, and then ultimately what you say and write if you are unfamiliar. Trump insists the Gulf of Mexico, which has been called that since at least fifteen point fifty, is now the Gulf of America, because Trump does not know that he who saves the cost of reprinting all the maps, does not violate any law.
The Associated Press said, this is bullshit. The White House then said the Associated Press reporters were banned from the White House until it did change the name of the Gulf of Mexico because Trump said so, and he is the law here. Now. The media solidarity the upside to that liberal monolith that rupert I was senile before senile was cool. Murdoch believes exists the media solidarity in defense
of the AP. The Reuter's wire service says it quotes stands with the Associated Press in objecting to coverage restrictions imposed by the White House. Reuter stands with the AP, But of course not next to it is Reuters refusing to send a reporter to the White House. No. The White House Correspondence Association, its latest president is one of the conventional wisdom morons from Politico. It says this is unacceptable and its response is to resolutely do nothing about it.
Axios did the most axios thing possible, showing absolutely no sense that if the White House can punish AP, it cansures how punish weaklings like Axios. Axios issued a statement saying, quote, the AP and all news organizations should be free to report as they see fit. And if that line in the sand isn't shallow enough, Axios found its own solution, quoting again, our standard is to use Gulf of America,
renamed by US from Gulf of Mexico. Absolute clowns, possibly the greatest distance between how they are viewed in this country and in the media of this country. Axios, and how they think of themselves. The names are Van der Hie and Allan, They ares Fops, Fops, they think they are Pulitzer and Hearst. And still other news outlets have done worse than Axios. Other news outlets have said nothing.
Hold on, I'll correct myself on that. The Atlantic has now published a piece with an amazing headline worse than nothing. The Gulf of America is the wrong fight to pick. Jelad Edelman writes that quote. It draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it's a fight that the AP
probably should never have picked in the first place. What you have just witnessed in one and one half sentences from mister Edelman is called the shifting of the Overton window. We are no longer arguing about whether psychotic bullies should be able to dictate what news organizations right and what terms and names they may use, but how often and
under what circumstances. And more broadly, we are no longer arguing whether Trump should run rough shod over the laws and customs that have been the only thing holding this country together. For two and a half centuries. We're now arguing over which laws and customs he can run rough shod and which ones we should bother to defend. To quote Angela Lansbury as missus John Yerke's Iceland in the Manchurian Candidate, what are they saying? Are they saying are
there any Communists in the Defense Department? No, of course not. They're saying how many Commune his star there in the Defense Department? And the Atlantic just helped the media continues to collapse like a poorly built house of cards. I like to think a house of cards made from the deck that they use in the Manchurian Candidate. I don't
think there's any question of it now. Whatever combination of blackmail and plain old fear of making only thirty seven billion this year, not forty seven billion that caused the Washington Post and Facebook and the others to fold under the slightest possible pressure. It's clearly at work at the New York Times too. That piece I mentioned before about Hitler. Oh, we've hurt the consensus about Hitler. We won't say what
the consensus was. We might offend Hitler. He might be still reading somewhere somebody at the New York Times is being pressured. A Times guest op ed Trump might have a case on birthright citizenships the venue for the Peace, and that qualifier might makes you think, well, this must be something from a neutral writer or source. Of course it isn't. It's a piece that could have run on Fox News, or maybe it's stupid enough for Gateway Pundit.
Two authors, both lawyers, One argued to the Supreme Court that Obamacare was unconstitutional and the other one is worse, an anti COVID vaccine nut lawyer and Fourteenth Amendment originalist whose argument boils down to the belief that Trump expressed again yesterday, that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to and thus should now only apply to X slaves, all those ex slaves in the country at the moment. That's who the Fourteenth Amendment applies to, not anybody else. This is
in the New York Times. Trump might have a case on declaring himself emperor. I'm sorry I was reading ahead. Of course. Eventually, all of the spineless, weasel news outlets who act like this do get hoisted on their own petard. When ABC settled Trump's nuisance lawsuit. I said it was a legal bribe. When CBS reportedly began to debate settling Trump's nuisance suit against them, I said that would be
a legal bribe too well. A Wall Street Journal now reports that the CBS owner, Paramount Quote, is wrestling with Weather to settle Trump's lawsuit against its CBS News unit, and how it might do so without exposing executives to future legal threats such as accusations of ribery. Told you so, But wait, there's more. Paramount executives Quote in recent weeks have talked about the risk that paying such a settlement could expose directors and officers to liability in potential future
shareholder litigation. Were criminal charges for bribing a public official and an additional concern that such litigation and here's the telling point, an additional concern that such litigation may not be protected by director and officer insurance. Oh how rich. It has only just occurred to them that by bribing a president they might be charged with bribery, and worse, that their insurance might not cover either the bribe or the resultant lawsuits from stockholders who don't want to pay
the money. Wait until somebody reminds them that theoretically paying blackmail to Trump will only encourage him to blackmail them again. I can't leave you in this state of depression. There's actually a media note that is oddly an unexpectedly encouraging. The ex Republican strategist and comm's specialist, Sherry Jacobis, has a really really good idea low effort, low danger, high
yield idea. She has been suggesting for a while that the Democrats should hold a daily press briefing on Capitol Hill, appoint a kind of shadow press secretary, giving an alternate White House press briefing the Democratic press briefing. Name a Democratic press secretary, give him a staff, and have him or her hold a daily news conference. Last week I said AOC should do this every Sunday morning, so she could own that news cycle Sunday and Monday and control
the Sunday news shows. But this is better. Somebody suggested Pete Buddhajeedge as Democratic press secretary, and that's gold too. You could have guests show up at the press conference, but the week should be the work week for the press secretary, the Democratic press secretary. And by the way, the competition would be the actual White House Press Secretary, the former center fielder of Saint Anselm College softball. But the week for the Democratic Press Secretary should be not
Monday through Friday, but Sunday through Thursday. It should start at eight am at Sunday. You would own the Sunday shows now and forever own the news cycle on Sundays. Also of interest here on this all new edition of Countdown a Confession, why I really killed the twenty sixteen seventeen GQ video commentary series The Resistance. It's not exactly what I told you previously. None of that was untrue,
but there was more to it. More importantly, the explanation pertains to what it says now about exhaustion in the battle against the forces of President Pimp. He who saves his country does not violate any law. Okay, I got the message. Thanks, thanks, thanks for giving me immunity. He who saves his country does not violate any law. Well, I was going to do the rest of this podcast, but I'm off to save my country first. The confession that's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
old Woman just going ahead. In this all new edition of Countdown a Confession, the real reason I discontinued the GQ video series The Resistance in twenty seventeen. Actually it is four reasons and why this is relevant to the subtext to our current nightmare, the fact that everybody fighting these American fascists so goddamn tired. Next on things I promise not to tell first, believe it or not, there's
still more new idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's other worse persons in the world Brons worse residents, some not all, of Redding, Pennsylvania. This is from the New Republic reading Pennsylvania voters. There seventy percent Latino. They moved sixteen points towards Trump last year over twenty twenty sixteen points. The Democrats still won the town, nevertheless, as
the Republic rights the New Republic. Indeed, that led some Dominicans to develop a particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some came to believe that when Trump talked about not wanting quote illegals in the country, he was really telegraphing that he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the undocumented who don't merit removal. Amnesty, the mayor of the town, mister Moron said, is something they fondly associate associate with a Republican president due to Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty six
immigration reform bill. A lot of Dominicans believed that could happen. Moron told me, speaking of hopes for Trump amnesty, I heard that one too many times. They thought the Leopards were going to grant them amnesty because Reagan did thirty eight years earlier. It's nice to know people are alike all over. The runner up wor Sir Mark Zuckerberg again said it before, I'll say it again. Whatever Trump has on him, it is a dilly Facebook refused to allow
ads local ads boosted posts for the Invictus Games. You know what the Invictus Games are. You've seen this right. Everybody has an opinion about Prince Harry, I suppose except me, But whatever you think of him, one of the things he's done with his time over the years is to establish a kind of Olympics for injured athletes, many of them, perhaps a majority, wounded soldiers who wanted to continue continue in sports despite the most horrific of injuries and whose
success comes in their decision not to stop. The Vancouver Ad Agency the Invictus Games this year were in Vancouver. Running these boosted posts on Facebook was told quote, these ads can't run because it is about social issues, elections, or politics. But you have not authorized your account to run ads with political content. You will either need to have an authorized page admin place this ad, or go
through the authorization process yourself. As part of the authorization's process, all page admins and advertisers who want to run these ads must enable two factor authentication and verify their identity and location. The page admin must also link ad accounts used for political content to the page and create an approved disclaimer to show who is paying for ads. Once you have become authorized, you can go back to the ads creation interface and select social issues, elections, or politics
from the special ad category section during campaign creation. In other words, you can't advertise Prince Harry's Invictus Games because that's politics and elections and social issues because apparently somebody somewhere thinks it's controversial to have injured ex servicemen competing
in the one mile run. Facebook is no longer fact checking President Pimp, but it is requiring a line by line detailing of where the money is coming from to promote an international sporting event celebrating people who have achieved athletic greatness despite getting their limbs blown off. Delete your Facebook account today. It is as compromised as Elon Musk, but our winners Jim Van de High and Mike Allen
of a This was written under their bylines. Trump and Elon Musk, arguably the two most unorthodox and influential American leaders of the twenty first century, are practicing and fine tuning a fused theory of governing power masculine maximalism. I'll
just read that again, masculine maximalism. Why it matters. Trump and Musk believe powerfully in maximalist action and language, which is being carried out by strong, mostly white men as blunt, uncompromising instruments to prove new limits both to power and what's possible. I'm still stuck back here on the idea that somebody in the world thinks that Trump and Musk
are masculine, not only masculine, but define masculine maximalism. You mean weight Trump, masculine Musk, the Pillsbury dough boy, Trump three hundred pounds of shit in a two hundred pounds suit and hair and skin dyed with Restolium. Axios I mentioned earlier has already sold out to Trump a thousand times thinks as the founders do Alan and vanda Hi
that they are Pulitzer and Hurst. Just now they caved by renaming the Gulf of Mexico quote Gulf of America renamed by us from Gulf of Mexico, which just flows off the tongue and really makes an article sing, while insisting that by doing that they were maintaining journalism and independence. And Jim Vandahi and Mike Allen of Axios and by
the way, masculine maximism them. Look, I will never claim ever to be Captain Beefcake over here, but have you ever seen Mike Allen in Jim van Hi masculine maximalism? This is as dumb as calling Musker Trump masculine band Hi and Alan today's other worst persons in the world. JD. Vans's mathles finally to the number one story on the Countdown and Things I Promised not to tell and a confession. This is about the video series I used to do for GQ dot com. First, it was called the Closer.
It was supposed to be the closer argument in the twenty sixteen presidential election. We all know how ineptly named I named it. Then it became the Resistance, which kind
of took off. One of the Resistance videos was interacted with fifty four million times on Facebook in late twenty sixteen and early twenty seventeen, and an independent Internet kind of thing evaluating interactions between people and say Keith ol Ruman videos determined and was quoted by CBS News as indicating that that was the most interacted political thing on
Facebook in the entire year after the election. So the GQ series, which was ultimately referred to as the Resistance and got I forget how many one hundred million views in total now, was something of a success until I suddenly canceled it. I have told truths about why it
was canceled, but they have all been half truths. And in the spirit of there are no more f's left, let alone fs that I want to get, I think I ought to fill in the complete story because it's a little bit more complicated that I let on at the time, and it is apropos of the current moment as well. With so many of us struggling to fight back.
Now that our worst realizations and dreams have come together, we are seeing all the things we said might happen, all happening all at once, and we have brilliant responses. Like the Washington Post, after a year of not being anything resembling the guardrail it was supposed to be, writing an article actually headlined what happened to the guardrails? You ate them, Jeff Bezos, or you turn them into plastic
and use them on your girlfriend. Sorry for the analogy, and more importantly for the imagery, but here's the point. I was doing about three commentaries a week, usually for GQ, and we did them, recorded them Monday afternoons, took one trip down there. I got no money for it, except for some charitable donations to dog charities and carfare, and initially it was only carfare in one direction. I swear to God, the Conde Nast people were so cheap at
the beginning. They only gave me carfare and uber in one direction. You didn't have to give me any money. There's no insurance required. Therefore, you don't have to send a car for somebody, which is why TV organizations and other video organizations and news organizations send cars for people because they are liable for them insurance wise. But of course if you're not paying the guy anything, if there's
no real contract, there's no insurance. I digress. Eventually the thing began to make money, even though we were not doing it for money, and I'll give Conde Nass credit for this. They were not doing it for money either, but it did make money. Those pre roll ads on YouTube, just those generated something like a million dollars for Conde Nast, and we didn't have to do anything other than hire a teleprompter once a week so I could record three
of them. One that was kind of news of the day for Monday release in the afternoon, something else that would go on Wednesday, and then a third one that would run Thursday or Friday that tended to be a little bit more philosophical or predictive towards events later in
the week. The system worked fairly well, and I'm not sure it was going to The real benefit I got out of it, other than venting my spleen was the fact that I was dressed by the head of styling for men for GQ magazine, and I have never looked better in my life. And the suits that he gave me are still in fashion, and some of them were ahead of their time. And his advice about how I should dress was the first not only good advice I'd
ever gotten, but the first definitive advice. I literally put on the suit that he suggested, and the narrow tie he suggested, and the narrow lapels, never having thought for a moment that these things mattered at all. And I looked at myself on the video and I went, hey, when did I lose twenty five pounds? Okay, so we'd go down there and record these and I believe they have had some value. I think they had value to me, and if that fifty four million number was accurate in
any way, they had value to you. And then one day I stopped them. Well, there's a backstory to it. It was speculated at the time that I had been threatened or blackmailed, that I had been as Jeff Bezos has been, or Mark Zuckerberg had been, likely the victim of somebody coming to me and saying, hey, remember that
time that you did this, Well, we have pictures of it. Unfortunately, in one respect, my life has largely been totally dull and has not included anything that pictures of them would make any difference, or anybody would go, that's appalling, We're going to put you in jail. We're going to sue you. People would go, that's it, that's what you spent your
life doing. So it wasn't that. But there were other psychological components, and again they come to bear now on me as they did then, and as they are doing in an extraordinary almost epidemic level with those fighting back against trump fascism and Elonnodziism right now. There is a weariness abroad in the land on top of everything else. And you know it, and I do know it. We're
not just afraid, mortified, depressed. We're tired. All I wanted to do after the election was retire from this, or maybe do one commentary a month or something like that, or I don't know, do a dog series of podcasts or a sports series of podcasts, or no podcasts at all. I've been on the air or online or on microphone pretty much every day since nineteen seventy five. I still have many things to say, but frankly, I'd rather not
say most of them. And you've heard most of them already. Okay, One day in the summer, I think the early summer of twenty seventeen, I was sitting with my two dogs, then the two dogs the two girls in a little part of Central Park near the mall, near the Bethesda Fountain, where we used to all congregate, all of us who
had small dogs. And there were twelve or fifteen humans and twenty or twenty five dogs, and they'd mix and match at various times of the day, but always on the weekend there'd be a late crowd in the afternoon somewhere. And one day we had almost everybody in this little cleiku together, and we were sitting there minding our own business, and I was saying something to one of my dogs
or one of my neighbors. And a guy, a creepy looking guy in his late twenties, early thirties, and this woman with him, with her head bowed like she was out of the handmaid's tail, only she'd left her hat at home, wouldn't look up, make eye contact with anybody.
And this guy is just walking ten or twelve feet in front of this gaggle of ten or twelve people and then twenty or so dogs and he stops and he goes, wait, you're Keith Olderman, and I said yes, there's no point in denying it, and he went, kill yourself now. Several other people around me gasped when they heard this, and I went, here we go. And he went on about Trump this and Trump that. We got into a shouting match, and I told him I'd see him at the impeachments and he'd have a nice time
in hell. And the woman got her head bowed further down. If it had been any lower, she would have been a contortionist with her head between her knees. But the guy kept saying, no, really, you should go home and
kill yourself right now. And several of my friends who were not at all versed in the history of my experiences with listeners, viewers, people who sent me fake anthrax, Dodger fans who called into CANX radio in nineteen eight complaining that I referred to a Dodger player as a loafer, so they were going to come down to the studio
and cut out my tongue. They didn't understand that, whereas this was always going to be a disturbing thing, it was not necessarily something I needed to call the cops about. I was prepared to have a fight with the guy if need be, and I was prepared to get at hell out of there if need be, and I was prepared to, if necessary, call the cops. But I didn't gauge this. This was a bully who was trying to
impress himself that he was saying. So I gave as good as I got and he staggered off and the woman behind him, and I just thought, flee, madam, flee. And I was thinking about this on the way home with the dogs, not about me, but about the dogs, because these people, the Trump people, are the kind of people who would try to hurt somebody like me by hurting the dogs. Simply put, they're bullies. They have very little connection to reality, and they certainly have no empathy
or human understanding. And as many dog lovers as there are inside the right wing, these are the same people who believe in taking care of their dogs and the dogs they rescue, as opposed to all dogs, regardless of the denomination of the humans connected to them. And I thought about that for a while, and I said, that's
how bad this situation really is. Coincidentally, two or three league weeks later, after doing those two or three commentaries every week for GQ, I was in the Apple store nearest my home in Manhattan, and somehow or another, as I walked in, I walked into just the optimum moment where the floor manager, who was the oldest guy in the building somewhere in his forties, stopped me and said, mister Alderman, welcome, Can I help you? And it quickly was revealed that he had grown up on the West coast,
San Francisco Bay area. If I remember correctly, this is after all, twenty seventeen. He's on the West Coast, and he might have been the youngest guy who I was likely to run into in the year twenty seventeen who had watched Sports Center religiously in the years that I anchored it from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety seven, because he was on the West Coast, and what I did with Dan Patrick as the eleven PM Sports Center
was for him the eight PM Sports Center. He watched it when he was ten eleven years old before he went to bed at night, and he couldn't stop talking about it and how things had changed, And I said, well, the whole thing has changed. We couldn't do that now, and he goes, no, you could do it now. I would watch it now. I know I would have all seen all the highlights in advance. It doesn't matter. It's a question of quality. What they put on the air now is terrible. It was the fact that you and
Dan were doing. And I said, well, the little rosiness of nostalgia, all nostalgia is valuable because you were younger than and further away from death, among other things. And he laughed and I went, no, I'm serious, and he laughed again. I went no. We went on for a while, and then he brought in a colleague who was a little younger than himself, who was also from the West
Coast and also watched. And these guys could not have been happier to have seen me and to have gotten all nostalgic and to insist to me that I should go back and do Sports Center again. And yes, they were arch liberals. They knew of the video series for GQ, they knew that the MSNBC show, and they said, this is what we need right now. First full year of
the first Trump presidency or dictatorship. Dictatorship one, the Kingdom of Trump, Round one well, it took me an hour to get my phone fixed or whatever it is I
was in there for. And I was walking home by myself, juxtaposing the incident in the park, with the guy who told me to kill myself, and with these guys who were so happy at the memory of SportsCenter, and I got all nostalgic about it, forgetting, of course, every negative that was associated with doing the show, or working there, or living there, or anything else that went on during that five and a half year span of my first
tenure with ESPN. But remember I had just done another tenure with ESPN from twenty thirteen to fifteen on ESPN two every night, in a kind of kind of flashback to that style of Sports Center, only on ESPN two at eleven o'clock. Only they never ran at eleven o'clock because they bounced this around from network to networking timeslot to timeslot. That's another complaint for another time. Regardless, I got to thinking about SportsCenter nineteen ninety four and how
much fun it was to have everybody like me. We're in television, we're in media. We want you to like us. If one person liking us were sufficient, we wouldn't have the mental problems that led us to work into television or radio or media of any kind. If you need a crowd of people to love you, something's wrong, and that is solved by television and also created by television. So I was thinking about these two things where I would now have to run into for the rest of
my life. And I wasn't surprised by the guy who said kill yourself. But it was just sitting there opposite this glowing memory provided to me by two viewers who wished as adults that we did that show that they so loved when they were kids. By coincidence, I had been in touch about something else with several of the people I'd worked for at ESPN in twenty thirteen to fifteen, and we were talking about the possibility of my going
back to work there again. Well, now, I escalated that, and suddenly we were having meetings every couple of weeks about my going back to work there and possibly doing the six PM Sports Center. The then president of ESPN, John Skipper, wanted me to do baseball play by play, and I said I've never done it before. He said, I'm sure he'd be great at it. And he said, and by the way, I think you should do it by yourself with no color announcer. I can't get anybody
to do that. If Vin Scully doesn't, and he's the most popular sports broadcaster of all time, why doesn't anybody else do it? You'd be second best. And I was like, well, he's Ben Scully in any event. That's another argument again
for another time. But we were talking about this, and we were talking about sports centers or a new show in New York, or maybe my moving back to Connecticut or something, and it just seemed well, I was then fifty eight years old, and I was thinking, I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this, but
you know what I'd like to do. I'd like to do a job here before I retire and before I die that I simply enjoy at least the parts about being on the air that I don't WinCE and wake up sweating in the middle of the night over because I so hate the man I am talking about, and I so wish that the world that he has ruined could be fixed. And then I know that I might be able to stave some of this off, but I can't fix it no matter what I do. I can't
fix it. I might be able to improve it for the ten minutes I'm on the air or in the video, but I'm not going to fix it. He has powerful forces behind him in a time in which all you need is cash, and yet I thought, well, yeah, maybe I want to make a decision here based on what
I want to do. And so we neared a deal at ESPN, and it began to be in September and October of twenty seventeen evident that I would return to ESPN in twenty eighteen, probably anchoring the six PM Sports Center by myself in Bristol, Connecticut, with the goal towards moving it back to Manhattan within six months. That was the plan, and I'd be doing baseball play by play,
although not by myself. So I knew I would have to wrap up the GQ series, and the announced reason that I gave for leaving that series was that I believed that the mainstream media had finally assessed the reality of Trump's threat to mankind, to continued human population of this planet, and in fact, any life form on this planet menaced every minute, and increasingly so by Trump, as we are now seeing again. I thought that the media
had begun to pick this up. Finally, even the Chuck Todds of this world seemed to be understanding just what a dire situation we were in. I really did believe that was the case, and I also thought the Muller report was going to be of some value. And I also thought that the media, when Trump inevitably tried to bury it as he would and did, that they would fight back and read the actual report and do their reporting based on the report and not the summary from
bar Are. Anyway, that was to some degree an excuse because there were a couple of other factors. I wrapped up the GQ series suddenly in a video saying Okay,
my work here is done. And I needed to do that to clear a little space between the end of that series, and I needed perhaps a month until we were going to announce my third tenure at ESPN, possibly anchoring the six pm Sports Center, or at least going back into the Sports Center mix and baseball play by play, and a full time job again with ESPN for the third time, and the second time since it appeared that we had descended into a role of perpetual antagonists in
a nuclear war. ESPN and me peace. Ain't it wonderful? So I needed something to say, Okay, I've decided that I can't do anything more here and I need to for my own life go and move back to ESPN.
And then there was the precipitate event. In producing these commentaries, the Resistance ones and before that, the Closer ones for GQ, I had been in the good hands of a man named Jeff Gagnin, who was an editor at GQ, and who had suggested through somebody I didn't know who had called me for a quote on a story, had said, by the way, if you do get to talk to Olderhiman, ask him why he's not doing a video series somewhere about the upcoming election. And I said, who asked this question?
And I got his number and I called, and the next thing I knew we were having a meeting. And the next thing I knew, he said, we can host these, we can put them on our platform, and we'll fact check them for you. We had a deal between the first mention that they might be interested in something or
at least questioning why there was no series. Between that first mention and the first video was ten days and Jeff was involved in editing and producing these things, although he was more of a magazine editor and still is, and he assigned me to their video producer for GQ magazine, a woman named Derna Newton, who was from New Zealand, who had worked previously at arms distance from Michael Moore, but in that group of people, and mostly produced fashion videos.
Because she worked for GQ, she wasn't in any way limited to that kind of material, but that was her world. And so when I presented the first script for the first Trump commentary for GQ, it was in my mind at my timing, seventeen minutes long. And she looked at it and she said, you think maybe you could cut this to two and a half, And I said, no, the point is it's seventeen minutes. You can't put out of seventeen minute video. That was the start of a
very contentious relationship. She brought everything that she knew about video, which was celebrities, fashion, rock stars, people dressed in funny hats, all that. She brought, that short attention span audience. She brought that to the table, and I brought my experierience with political commentaries in which seventeen minutes was not the longest commentary I'd ever done. And we didn't butt heads. We ran from opposite ends of the earth at high speed for like an hour in each direction, and then
hit head to head day after day after day. There was no week that passed where I did not say, you have got to get Durana off this series. And I'm sure there is no week that went by where she didn't say I've got to get off this series.
And this went on for several months, and then something happened at a meeting before the recording of the three commentaries on Monday afternoon, where Dorenna said to me, you know, I've been thinking about what you were doing here and what you said, and these are the areas where I think you're right. And I had been thinking on the way in, now that they were picking up the cost
of the uber. On the way in, I had been thinking that she had been right about something that she had wanted to do in terms of production, how she wanted to shoot these things. She said, you move your hands a lot. I had wanted it tight on my face. She said, you move your hands very eloquently. We need
to see your hands moving. And I thought this was the dumbest thing I ever saw until about six people in a row said, you know, by the way, the other thing I like about those commentaries, you're talking with your hands. Finally she had made a good point. I had made a good point. Well, that was the beginning of one of the great collaborative experiences of my life.
Suddenly we found that there were vast amounts of material that the other one could use and improve upon, and then we smoothed out a lot of the rough edges of this series, both in terms of what it looked like and more importantly, how we produced it. We cut the production time in half so I could actually spend another two hours every Monday thinking about what I was going to say, rather than rushing to record it in time, and how to remove the bounce in the audio in
the room. Because we worked together, and I was delighted to see her every week, and one day she came in, and I came in, and I was about to wrap the series up, and she said, you know, they're going to be more cutbacks here. There had already been so many cutbacks that during my time there, which was less than a year, they had gone from having Durna as the head of video for GQ magazine to the head of video for all the Conde Nas publications, and she said,
more layoffs. I'll give you a call later as to who got laid off, and I said, oh, Christ, this is going to beat him or them or that. She called me after I got home that night and it turned out the person who they've laid off was her, and I said, this is outrageous, and she said, I know, I didn't see it coming. I don't know what I'm going to do. And I said, well, I'm going to be talking to these people about doing this and these
people about doing that. Maybe we can work something else out, but for now, I don't know if I can do anything other than I quit. She said, what do you mean. I said, I'm quitting right now. I'll come in and do one more to wrap it up, and I'll put out some excuse me, bullshit story about why we're doing it.
But I was going to end this anyway now. I'm going to do it right now, rather than a month from now, or rather than after I signed the new contract with ESPN, any of those things, because this is ridiculous. I haven't done this too many times in my life. Outright quit on the spot. Because somebody else had been mistreated. But that was, if not one hundred percent of the
reasons that I stopped the GQ series. As I've mentioned before, the suicide guy, the event at the Apple Store, my own sense that I should try to do something I enjoyed rather than gave me pain every time, and then
finally the last straw. So it wasn't the only reason I quit, but it was when I quit, and I called up the publisher's office and said, or sent him an email and said, I understand you've dismissed her and a Newton with whom I forged not just a great working relationship, but one in which, for the first time ever, my blank, unyielding, uncompromising confidence that I knew everything had grown from that into a sense of collabor with somebody
from a totally different background. I worked very hard in this relationship, and you just fired her. I quit. So the relevance to today, obviously is this The motivating factor in all of it was when someone suggested, go back and enjoy yourself, have fun, go back and do sports again,
have fun. The weariness of doing what I did then and what I am doing now took over again, and I know you know this weariness as well as I do, because whereas you don't do a commentary on this twice a week or hopefully more in the weeks to come, I'm sure it affects you. Nonetheless, it affects all of us. There is only one thing you can actually credit Trump for. He does have endless amounts of energy. He certainly doesn't
spend any on anybody else but himself. None of the rest of us really exist, of course, he has boundless energy. He never thinks of anybody else or the consequences of what he's doing, only what it means for him, and feeling that infinite void in his soul. If you don't dream, if you don't aspire, if you don't need, if you don't exist in the same universe as everybody else, you don't need to sleep, and you have endless amounts of energy to devote to your animal needs. An animal that
must eat will probably not take a nap. All he can do is eat for his ego, because that's all he has. So that's his advantage. We who have lives, and who have needs, and who have empathies, we tend to get exhausted by this, and that's the great advantage of being a fascist and a psychotic. They don't need that. They are virtual machines. So I don't know if there's a conclusion here. I will point out that I went through all these machinations, and if not, lies to the
audience about why the series was stopping. I did think the media was picking it up. I did need to do something for my own health, But there were these other factors in there, including the suicide guy and the firing of my friend and Newton. Ah, the end result might be, and the lesson might be, and it might be pertinent here as I went through all of that and made all the arrangements of ESPN and told everybody there, Hey, good news, I've got I found the reason to stop
the GQ series. And it's organic and it's valid, and it's true, and it'll give us like six weeks before you went ounce this. In the six weeks that I prepared the window between the GQ series and the resumption of my sports career, the president of ESPN stopped being the president of ESPN, and the whole deal went up in smoke. It was later revived in small portions by
an executive. They just got rid of named Norby Williamson, who managed somehow in the disaster yearist period after the president of ESPN stopped being the president of ESPN to get this thing done where I went and worked for them part time and did ballgames and had a certain guarantee and a part time contract. But I never wound up doing the six o'clock Sports Center. I did not move back to Bristol, Connecticut. I did go back to Bristol,
Connecticut three or four different times. And then that whole ESPN experience ended because COVID closed the New York studios that I largely worked from. So if you are flagging and tired in your fight, remember number one that even if you leave the fight, the problem is going to follow you. And number two, it may very well be that the thing that you run to to satisfy yourself or to give yourself a happier feeling in your life, or to focus on it may or may not still
be there when you get there. I'd like to say I feel a lot better after that, but no, I just feel more tired. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thanks for listening. Listening, Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle and musical directors of count impt Sorry Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle. The musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music. Mister Chanelle had at orchestration and keyboards, mister Ray was on the guitars, bass
and drums, and it was produced by TKO Brothers. That's the two of them and me, We're your brothers. Our satirical and fifty musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Old Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis and courtesy of ESPN. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today was my friend Jonathan Banks. Everything else was as ever
my fault. That's Countdown for today, Just one four hundred and thirty four days until the scheduled end of his lame duck, lame brained term, unless Musk removes him sooner or the actuarial tables do. But just remember, he who saves his country does not violate any law. I didn't mean you trying to save your country. The next scheduled Countdown is Thursday. As always, bulletins as the news warrants. Remember impeach Trump. It won't work now, it will win
the Democrats the midterms if there are midterms. Until next time, I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Alderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.