Impulsivity and Irresponsibility in Public Life

SEASON 4 EPISODE 20: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT:  “The President is unhinged. He is Unwell. The President is Unwell.”

Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania with perhaps the most important eleven words in the past decade, perhaps the most important eleven words in the history of this country, CERTAINLY the most important eleven words for the FUTURE of this country.

“The President is Unwell.”

We have at LEAST one – probably TWO – presidential health crises in full flower at the same time: And near as I can tell, only Representative Dean is talking about it (and directly to Speaker Mike Johnson, in what was not intended to be a public conversation) along with Governor Pritzker of Illinois, whose diagnosis was SIXTEEN words long and just as important. Quote: "There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked."

The two crises are obvious: at his insane speech to the Generals Tuesday, Trump sounded as if his charger had been left unplugged for three weeks, his voice husky, indistinct, words slurred. And what he DID say made next to no sense. Pritzker suggests dementia which could explain both the rapidly declining mental capacity AND the audible collapse AND why Trump was invisible yesterday and had to send Vance to ride Day One of the government shutdown Trump orchestrated. It would all ALSO explain that missing week around Labor Day and the cabinet meeting – the LAST televised cabinet meeting – in which his Departmental Slaves shoveled twice as much laudatory BS as usual, as if it were a going-away roast for Trump.

Maybe it was.

“The President is unwell.”

CAN TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST? I have grown old talking about Trump's sanity. I first did it publicly in June, 2016, and a month later Vanity Fair published my article "Can Trump Pass A Sanity Test?" As I wrote then: short answer? Probably not. This is a layman using professional tools: an actual kind of "triage" test used by working psychology professionals to assess if somebody is injured, tripping, or psychopathic. I had an active therapist walk through the examination and assign the points per topic. It's an important time to review what we knew - or should have known - nine long years ago. Because he was unwell then, too.

B-Block (35:23) PART TWO OF "CAN TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST": We conclude the annotated 2016 piece on Trump's already provable mental distress with the disturbing reality that takes us back to where we began with Madeleine Dean's lament: "The president is unwell."

C-Block (56:00) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK

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