SEASON 2 EPISODE 59: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The cheese slid COMPLETELY off Trump’s cracker yesterday in Derry New Hampshire. The first time I ever posited in public that his brain doesn’t work right was in a piece and video I did for Vanity Fair in 2016 called Could Trump Pass A Sanity Test and I do NOT know what the next step DOWN is mentally or psychologically or intellectually from “no he could NOT pass a sanity test” but Trump has now reached it: one speech, five statements that in a previous century would have been examined as signs of possible tertiary syphilis. At Derry, New Hampshire he a) showed he believed he was the first person to ever realize the letters U and S could spell "us" AND "U.S;" b) revealed he didn't know why FDR "sat" while he spoke nor what the thing he sat in was called; c) confused Turkey's Erdogan and Hungary's Orban; d) claimed he was Nelson Mandela; and e) told his voters not to bother to vote.

Trump is crazy. Those who opposed him shied away from this in 2016 and 2020. It needs to be mentioned hourly, because it's not only true and an existential danger - it's also perfect politics - the ideal answer to the slanders about Biden's age and acuity.

Also: Judge Michael Luttig is back with another Constitutional answer to a Trump lie. If you don't know about the Presidential Vesting Clause in Article 2, it's why Trump does NOT have "absolute immunity" for trying to overturn an election while president. Luttig and 23 other former Republican officeholders filed a brief with the court saying this was a threat to the integrity of all future elections.

Trump continues to dare a judge to jail him for violating his various gag orders; he's caught in a bald-faced lie about whether or not Sidney Powell ever worked for him; the essence of the Jack Smith case against him is proved by Kenneth Chesebro taking a plea deal; and is the Republican Civil War over the Speaker of the House (now extended to Trump pretending he's not trying to sabotage Tom Emmer) enough to send five Republicans to form their own third party and get one of their group elected by the Democrats as the new Speaker? Is the GOP about to re-enact what destroyed the Whig Party in 1852?

B-Block (24:04) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Have you ever heard of the poll that indicated a third of all Trump supporters favor building a wall along the Atlantic Ocean to keep Muslims out? (32:27) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Tom Cruise's agent discovers what "genocide" actually means. A Stanford neurobiologist concludes there is no free will. A Jim Jordan colleague says the naysayers got all those death threats because they deserved them. And why, yes that WAS a picture of Hitler on Michigan State's football stadium scoreboard. Why do you ask?

C-Block (38:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The anniversary was Sunday, and the story continues to unfold 23 years later. The night in the 2000 World Series when Mike Piazza's bat shattered and Roger Clemens picked up the barrel and threw it near (or at, if you were a Mets fan) Piazza. And I thought Clemens was throwing it at me. And then Piazza announced he was suing me. And then it turned out he'd threatened others. It's an amazing saga within a saga.

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NS#177: Tory Special