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Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Breaking news. Republicans throw Trump overboard, or if you prefer, Republicans throw Trump under the bus, under the campaign bus. It is the detrumpening by Republican candidates and more startling still by Republican voters. Two days after Trump took office in January of 2025, a company called Echelon Insights, a conservative pollster, asked Republican likely voters to Do you consider yourself to be primarily a supporter of Donald Trump or a supporter of the Republican Party? January 2025, 59% said they were supporters of Trump. Only 36% said they were supporters of the GOP. The loyalty of 6 out of 10 was to Trump. This past week, Echelon Insights asked exactly the same question, word for word, to whom is your loyalty pledge, Republican voters, the party, or the president? The dictator. Only 34% of them said they are supporters of Trump. It went from 59% who said it was Trump to 34% since his inauguration. The Trump loyalists have left the building. The GOP, get out pronto. More than 42% swing from them supporting Trump over party to them supporting party over Trump. Trump? Trump who? And it is so bad that the instant cope is already high-octane, full-throttle, and utterly hilarious. The unintentionally buffoonish Byron York insists this is good news for the GOP. Good news, everyone! Because it shows they're ready for their post-Trump success story. How they can win without Trump. Narrator, they couldn't win without Trump. from 59-36 Trump over GOP to 56-34 GOP over Trump. And the number may be larger, as it turns out, among Republican candidates. I mentioned last time the ad from Maria Salazar, the Republican assistant house whip, straight to camera, breaking with Trump on immigration, saying her Hispanic community in Florida had been betrayed, felt betrayed, Mr. President. Those were her words. She's tried to walk it back. It didn't work. Then it was the MAGA nut Pat Boone telling Trump, in essence, please shut up. Now two essential Republican Senate candidates have left the sinking ship. Years ago, in 2017, in a resistance video, I said that Trump would only fall when you started seeing Republican candidates... realized that they would lose their jobs entirely because of him, when he no longer provided anything resembling an asset, but was solely a millstone. We are now here. Exactly the way it happened in August of 1974, the Democrats did not remove Richard Nixon as president. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott went into the White House and said... in August 1974, Mr. President, do you like these Republican House candidates? Because they're going to lose entirely because of you. Do you like these House Democratic candidates and Senate Democratic candidates? They're going to win solely because of you. It's not about whether or not you survive. You're not going to. It's about whether or not the rest of the party does. We are getting towards that point. This is not a drill. It is the detrumpification like day, I don't know, nine or so out of about 70. The first part is now happening in Michigan. Bluntly, Mike Rogers ought to be flattening Abdul Al-Sayed, the Democrat. The right has tied Al-Sayed to Hasan Piker. They've dirtied up Al-Sayed in every way possible. He gives an overall appearance of being anything but a conservative. Michigan is not red, but its red parts are as red as anywhere in the nation. The people there are as delusional as those in the worst fundamentalist megachurch cult building in the Southwest. They are the ones who had a Michigan GOP chairwoman who believed that evil was transferred from person to person from When a woman had sex with demons, she was the chairwoman of the party in Michigan. That's how red the red parts of Michigan are, and they have a guy who is presentable. He cleans up real nice, and they're going against El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, Trump's Senate candidate in Michigan, new ad is up and on social media, and in it he says, quote,' The war in Iran needs to end.' To bring costs down. Michigan families can't afford to wait. They put a political condom on it. Rogers says this is actually a call for embargoing diesel exports. Because, yeah, that'll bring down supermarket charges because everybody drinks diesel. And anyway, the White House is now saying there will not be any embargo on diesel exports. So he's campaigning for something else that is opposed to the Trump regime. He's against the war in Iran and for diesel export limitations that the administration will not put into effect. The Suffolk poll in Michigan now is El-Sayed 47, Rogers 40. The lead is lengthening from even last week. And the reader from the Suffolk poll, nearly half of the likely voters in Michigan surveyed said they were casting their ballot, quote, to change the direction President Trump is leading the nation. That's 48% dwarfing the 20% who want to support Trump and 28% who said their vote didn't have much to do with him. And wait, there's more. Let's go to Iowa, where Ashley Hinson is getting clocked in the Iowa Senate race. I'll just say that again. That's a Republican Senate candidate getting clocked by the Democrat in Iowa. Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn't have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. Who said that? The Democrat? Ah, Ashley Hinson, Republican nominee. Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn't have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. Boo Trump, she might as well have said. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices. Bye, Felicia Trump. Again, She is performing safe repudiation of Trump's war, diesel rebates, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there was audio of her at a private political event in June with fundraisers, with donors, saying if the war was not over in Iran in a few weeks, it could become, quote, a political liability. You think? How are the polls in Iowa? Josh Turek, the Democrat, leads Hinson 50 to 42. Doing better than Is Al Syed in Michigan. Brainwashing is still ahead, though, in a curious development which I think fits the whole idea of the Trump House of Cards finally collapsing and suddenly in the polling that shows the Democrat up by eight points. Turek voters, the Democratic voters, Hinson voters, the Republican voters alike, think that Hinson will still come back to defeat Turek, and they believe that by about 60%. However... The poll on the ground shows Hinson behind by 8%. It continues nationally and in all kinds of other ways. In the Maine House, the ex-governor, the weirdo and rabid right-winger Paul LePage may, in fact, prevail running for the House second seat. He has now, however, revealed something that at least damages Trump nationally because it's being picked up out of a tiny house race in Maine. He revealed his son's father-in-law. So the father of the woman Paul LePage's son is married to has been seized and deported by ICE. He has a work permit, a valid work permit, according to the former governor, but they found an excuse to deport him anyway, so he is off to, although the governor did not say where, we believe Somalia or Haiti. LePage said they got him because they don't like the country he's from. That's a Republican running for a Republican seat in a largely Republican district, trashing Trump, although not by name. And then there is the New York Times average of polls nationally. There's another dramatic swing. In the last demographics of the 2024 presidential election, Trump trailed Kamala Harris by just seven points among Hispanic voters. He was within seven of her on the Hispanic vote. Today, Republicans nationally trail Democrats among Hispanic likely voters by 35. Trump has lost, and the Republican Party has thus lost 28 points among Hispanic voters since November 2024. And it's not just the Senate or the House. In Florida, the Trump stooge, Byron Donalds, one of the most foolish and loyal Trump supporters in the country, the guy who would do anything and say anything for his God. was ahead in all theoretical races for governor to succeed Ron DeSantis all the way through the primaries, every potential matchup with any Democrat. Byron Daniels was ahead by 6%, by 7%, by 8%. When it finally was clear David Jolly was going to be the Democratic nominee, it remained 6% or 7%. Starting last month, the D-Donald-ization, collapse, St. Pete polls, and this is a week old, so we don't have any fresh info. Listen to this. This is the poll for governor of Florida after DeSantis. Byron Donald's Republican 43.5, David Jolly Democrat 43.4. But of course, it's far closer than the score would indicate. By one-tenth of one point, the Republican is ahead in the race for governor of Florida among African-American voters. Jolly is leading Donald 68 to 14. The response? Donald has scrubbed Donald Trump from his website. I'll just say that again. Donald's has scrubbed Trump from his website. There is no mention of Donald Trump on the cover or anywhere else that we can find on the official campaign website for Byron Donald's for governor of Florida. Let me just quote from the Miami Herald for a paragraph, if you'll permit me. Donald's campaign website was previously dominated by references to his Trump endorsement. A button to chip in to support Trump endorsed Byron Donald's was at the top of the homepage. Trump endorsed proven conservative fighter Byron Donalds was the page's main text. A yellow banner, according to the Miami Herald, reading endorsed by President Trump, exclamation point, marked the middle of the homepage and a prominent section quoting Trump's 2025 endorsement said, run, Byron, run. All of those mentions were stripped away from his updated website. His campaign also removed a photo of Donalds and wife Erica Donalds posing with Trump. Trump? Trump who? This is not it, not yet. But between these races, Donald's scrubbing Trump's name and polling showing Republicans going from loyalty to Trump 59-36 to party over Trump 56-34, like Ernie says in It's a Wonderful Life, I've never really seen one before, but that's got all the earmarks of being a run on the bank. And we haven't gotten even to the main polls yet. This is not a drill. Some headlines. We mentioned American research in the episode Monday. Trump approval there at 29%. That is the low watermark for all major polls. The deep dive is coming in, speaking of low watermarks, on strength in numbers Verisight. But CNN put out a poll number yesterday, and I thought the anchor was going to pass out on the air. Trump approval among what they call pure independents. Those are independents who are not leaning to the right or the left, insist they are independent independents. The people that CNN's new bosses will soon becoming pure communists. In the 2024 election, Trump among pure independents was plus 15%. Are you sitting down? Now, Trump among pure independents in the two polls average is not just CNN. Pew is involved in this as well. It was plus 15 Trump in 2024. Right now, it's minus 71. Trump is 71 points underwater with pure independents. He has lost 86 points since January, excuse me, since November of 2024. Do you know how hard it would be to do that in, say, three lifetimes, let alone since November of 2024? He's now at minus 71. How could you possibly do that? Oh, wait, he outdid that on the economy. He went from plus 22 to minus 77. That's a 99-point swing against Donald Trump since the presidential election. This is like Trump math. Support for him is down 11 billion percent. He's reduced his own popularity by 11 billion percent, along with the price of unguentine. Scrub him from Donald's website. Scrub him from the Republican Party. It's not just a disaster. They would literally, at this point, be better off digging up Richard Nixon and making him the face of the 2026 Republican Party. That is how statistically bad it is all of a sudden. The great day is nigh. And as I said, strength in numbers and verisight. G. Eliot Morris, he used to run 538. He did a national poll released yesterday. It concludes Monday. The House generic ballot is Democrats by 52-42. And again, he is the one proposing, G. Eliot Morris is proposing that the undercounted voter this year is in fact the Trump voter, the past Trump voter who's going Democratic in the midterms. Now, listen to this, the biggest problem found by this poll. You were asked to give three biggest problems. 59% of Americans said their biggest problem, prices and inflation. Jobs and the economy, 38%. Kind of the same thing. Healthcare, 34%. Elections and democracy, 23%. Immigration. All that Trump has left in positive numbers for his own performance, and the only thing the Republicans still get high marks on... is only important to 17% of voters. It's unbelievable. Which party do you trust on these issues? The GOP leads by five on crime and public safety, by 11 on border security. They are underwater on everything else. Gurgle, gurgle. Healthcare, they are minus 25. Government funding, social programs, minus 21. Education, minus 17. Prices, inflation, minus 14. Elections and bureaucracy, minus 13. Trade with other countries, minus 12. Jobs and the economy, minus 11. Foreign policy, minus 8. Artificial intelligence, super intelligence, as Trump would call it, because of course he has more than all the artificial intelligence in the world combined. They're at minus seven under that. Immigration. Who do you favor on immigration? Democrats, 42. Republicans, 41. According to their poll, the Trump approval is at 33% on the issues. The approval for Trump on prices and inflation is 21%. He's 54 points underwater. He's 33 points underwater on healthcare. He's 28 points underwater on jobs and the economy. He's 27 under trade with countries and government funding and social programs and artificial intelligence. He's 27 points underwater for AI. Foreign policy, he's 26 points underwater. His approval is 33% there. Elections and democracy, obviously. Education, obviously. 20 points each. Deportations, he's underwater on deportations by 15 points. Crime and public safety, approval is 42%. Disapproval is 52%. And on border security, Trump's approval number is now three points underwater. Can't imagine why anybody has this sense that the wheels are coming off Donald Trump finally. Did you see the speech at the UN the other day? I'm not mentioning the part where he asked the United Nations, the United Nations, which no matter what else you think of it, is the United Nations. You don't go in there and propose... absolute flat out genocide and the use of nuclear weapons on another country much smaller than yourself. And not the part about him asking whether or not he has a big decision to make, whether or not I can obliterate Iran. That's about average insanity for him, not that part. This was the part in which he insisted to try to convince the people of Iran, the delegation for Iran, which had already walked out by that point, that they're not going to get a better deal after the midterms. Because he then insisted to them that he is not on the ballot in November. He is not part of the midterms, which is insanity even just within the small world of Donald Trump's lice-ridden brains. The entire point of that Nuremberg rally he held in Texas a week and a half, two weeks ago now, was to convince Republicans that they have to vote in the midterms because he is on the ballot. They should be voting on him. It's a referendum on him. So he is literally contradicting himself in public forum, one to Republicans, one to the world, saying exactly the opposite thing— There is no nuance, subtlety. There is nothing to parse here. He's saying utterly contradictory things. Everything's fine. Don't worry. I want to take a moment right here before I get back to what's happening, because there's one punchline to the madness of King Donald that must be mentioned here. It's about Ford's Theater in Washington. Again, if you're not sitting down, if you are sitting down, please stand up and then sit down again in preparation for the Ford's Theater thing. But I want to take a moment for a quick apology, please, to the world on behalf of us, the actual Americans. who are not part of this conspiracy to pretend that Trump is not a psychopath, who has lost his mind and is lost impenetrably in the wilderness of his own delusions and his need for self glorification and self gratification. He should be in a rubber room, not insulting you anywhere else in the world and insulting reality. And yes, we are working on the problem. And just when you think you have reached the bottom of the problem, here it is. Did you read the story from MSN, now MS, whatever it is called, their website? Trump aides explore attaching president's name to to Ford's Theater. Quick history quiz, what happened at Ford's Theater? That's right, that's where President Lincoln was assassinated right after the end of the Civil War. It's a historical monument, not exactly as a landmark, a big upbeat place that you'd want to be associated with. Keith Olbermann stars in a live performance at Ford's Theater? I don't think so. Desperate for Trump's approval, according to the MSNOW story, White House staffers are proposing trying to rename any D.C. landmark that will hold still with putting Trump's name on it. The new football stadium in Washington, Dulles Airport. They're going a little further afield and saying Penn Station in New York should be Trump Penn Station. Actually, that fits, because you could call it then the Donald J. Trump underground rat maze labyrinth and in-hallway open bathroom station, Donald J. Trump proprietor. I like that. But Trump's Ford's theater? For this campaign, now hemorrhaging Trump all over the place, for this president who's made entirely out of lard— As the Republicans implode, as they scrub Trump from everywhere they can find him, as the de-Trumpification accelerates, the tragedy of our greatest president now brought to you by the world's worst president. Lincoln's dead, Trump's alive. Other than that, how did you enjoy the campaign, Mrs. Trump? Trump's Ford's Theater It's the craziest Wait a minute It's growing on me Actually, Mrs. Trump did say something yesterday, and it's even more hilarious than my hilarious joke there. Asked on Fox how she thinks her husband is doing as president, she answered, he's doing the best that he can. Well, in the entire world, he is the worst possible person to do this, so that tracks. No lies detected. To the White House correspondent's pool boycott, and a note that you may not have been told by anybody else, it was actually useful, but in a way that was not expected. In other words, this thing has been a success as a protest. in ways that were not anticipated. It's an accident. The networks thought it would punish Trump. In point of fact, it's actually punishing not Trump, but the Trump TV stooges. It will again later circle around and get Trump too, and he'll probably have to settle this quietly and quickly with some sort of climb down. And maybe he can get the Supreme Court to rule against him before the end of the week. Who knows? He may have fixed it by the time you see or hear this. But in the interim, the damage is not being done to the White House. It's being done to Newsmax, News Nation, all the Sinclair stations. The White House correspondent for News Nation was on the BBC the other day, seemingly on the verge of bursting into tears because her network, her show from Washington, her White House update, would not have any feeds of Trump in action doing everything. Every Republican paid podcaster and streamer who relies on free video of Trump doing anything and everything, they don't have a feed now. That's what's being killed off by the lack of a pool. So yes, now Trump, yes, he controls the video narrative. He established Trump TV, and I understand why. Fox and Newsmax and News Nation all called and threatened to sue him. We're Trump TV, but they don't have the brainware or the hardware. They don't know how to do TV. They have a camera. Now, if you want to do a podcast and you have a camera and maybe a microphone or maybe two microphones, you can get away with it. If I went out to try to cover the president 24 hours a day with this phone, that microphone, and that pod recording device, it wouldn't get very far. Nobody knows that better right now than the White House. They went with Trump TV to his beloved helipad, the opening ceremonies, the ribbon cutting at the helipad. It was televised, except they didn't know how to do anything with audio. They'd never heard of microphones before, never mind ambient noise. All you heard as Trump was flapping his lips there was helicopter sounds. It was terrific. Also, the best speech he's made in 27 years. Also, this may just abuse or disabuse ABC's and CBS and NBC and CNN of their panicky and longstanding obsessive belief, their false belief that they have to show the president of the United States live doing anything and everything, particularly this one. Oh, the president is farting. Let's go live to Joint Base Andrews. Let's get our 71 microphones out. Maybe we can catch the full resonance of the echo. News viewers tuned out Trump long ago. Even the people who like him and still support him will tend to watch him for less time now than they did last year, which was less than the year before, which was certainly less than 2016. They've seen all of it already. They don't need to see it again. Most of them are tuning out, and Fox usually cuts him off within 10 minutes of the start of a speech. But news bosses don't believe this, don't know this, don't want to know this, don't want to believe this for one reason so obvious that we don't even register it. Trump is cheap. Trump is free programming. Free programming hours at a clip. And the news networks have gradually, over the last 25 years, begun to think that they should have to cover everything. And this is not true just of Trump. It was true of Biden and Obama. It was true of Bush. It began to be true during the Clinton presidency. CNN is covering it. Well, we have to cover it. It's a kind of merger of networks here. It's a Wolf Blitzer, Katie Turr reaction. Let's go live. What is it? We don't care. It's live. We did it this way in 2002. We have to keep doing it this way. No Trump. No Trump. CNN and MSNOW ratings will go up. Meanwhile, the other TV story. I'd like to congratulate the state of California and its leaders for giving in to the fascists. Well done, Rob Bonta, attorney general of California, sold out the American public on the verge of victory in stopping the sky dance subsuming of CNN. Or he could have delayed it in court till at least the end of the Trump administration or at least punish the fascists in some way by pushing them past Congress. the date at which Paramount and Skydance would have been owed billions of dollars in penalty fees, or they would have owed billions of dollars in penalty fees to the owners and stockholders. No, he didn't do it. He's Solbanta sold out. He'll get reelected as attorney general. He's dead to me. He's useless. He's a sellout. He's coward. Hope you have other career plans, bub. And Axios is reporting that Gavin Newsom helped broker the deal. to keep some jobs in California. I don't think he ever had a real shot at the presidential nomination. He might have been a vice presidential candidate. He'd look good on a podium. There's not much to him. He clearly changes opinions every six months, but he's done two. He and Bonta, Newsom and Bonta, are finished politically, nationally. They are done. Goodbye. Good luck in the rest of your careers. Also, if you think that the Ellisons, having now steamrolled the attorney general and probably the governor of California, are now going to be slowed down by a board of supervisors that will make sure CNN is just fine, when it wasn't just fine anyway, having already been destroyed by David Zalsnick or whatever his name was. from the Warner Bros. discovery, having already been slowed down by that operation, they're now going to be stopped by a phony baloney board of supervisors appointed by the new owners of CNN to overlook CNN. If you think that's going to work, Rob Bonta, you're a moron. A moron like Gavin Newsom. F you, Rob. F you, Gavin. Because this is the side that Bonta and Newsom wound up on, ultimately. On Sean Hannity's Fox show, which I believe is titled Whiskey-A-Go-Go, Caroline Levitt, who at one point thought the name was Hilter, said that letting networks, quote, making the editorial decisions themselves about whether or not they should carry Trump's speeches live, that was, quote, scary. She was proposing, in the kind of backwards, stupid way that she speaks, that there not be any room for the networks to decide what to put on the networks if the president is speaking. It should be Trump in charge of the TV networks, at least as it relates to how often Trump wanted to speak on TV, which, as we know, is all the effing time. This woman is full-scale authoritarian propagandist slime. And now the attorney general of California and the governor of California have gotten into bed with her. And I will just make this clear. I only mean that metaphorically. I don't hate Rob Bonta and Gavin Newsom that much. Okay, it's been a busy show so far, and there's more to come. The Worst Persons is delightful. There's a Stephen A. Smith reference in there I'm looking forward to reading to you, but I have to do one sports headline, please. Just let me do this. Just let me get it out of my system in my one venue. When former National League RBI champion Pete Alonzo, formerly of the New York Mets, a completes his barrel roll towards becoming the American League RBI champion with the Baltimore Orioles this year. The reports are beginning to come in. The first version of it was no one in baseball history has in separate seasons ever led the National League and then the American League in runs batted in. Wrong. Absolutely 100% inaccurate, not truthful. Well, then they revised it. Well, since RBI became an official statistic in 1920, he'll be the first to ever lead each of the leagues in RBI. And my response to that and the only response to that is, so what? What does 1920 have to do with it? In the 19th century, baseball teams were looking for baseball players who could bring in runs. There were lists of who had batted in the most runs. That's where the idea came from. By 1907, one of the early great baseball statisticians— he was an advanced stat man in 1907—Ernie Lanigan— began to start to compile and publish a stat he called runs batted in. It took him 13 years to get them to make it an official statistic in 1920, which is where we get this nonsense about who's the first player to do this RBI number since 1920. It is an utterly arbitrary and meaningless date. All the pre-1920 runs batted in have been calculated and had been calculated by 1920 and retroactively compiled, and they all count towards players' career records, and they're all in the record books, and they're all official now, and they're all among baseball's all-time leaders. If they didn't count the RBI before 1920, Babe Ruth's RBI total from 1914 through 1919 would be zero. It's not zero. All his RBI were counted, and they count. 1920 is an artificial deadline. The Pete Alonzo thing means nothing. And I want to make it a little bit more visceral while I still have a little time on this. One of the touchstones of baseball today is on-base percentage or on-base average. From the 50s on, this has been a critical number. It basically means how many times you come up to the plate and you get to first base or one of the other bases. That's it. You do it 40% of the time, you're a superstar. In 1984... The year I formally joined the Society for American Baseball Research, now 42 years ago, 1984, baseball proudly announced it was adding a new avant-garde statistic called on-base percentage. It took them till 1984 to make that official. So what are you saying here? Every on-base average before 1984, every record doesn't count? What about OPS, on-base average plus slugging percentage? That doesn't count before 1984? Of course not. It's nonsense. You just go back and look up the records and compile the numbers. We have calculators now. You could have done it on an abacus. I think Ernie Lanigan did do it on an abacus. If they make any of the sabermetric stats, the advanced stats of today, of this century, if they ever make them official, like BABIP or Wins Above Replacement, WAR, say they make WAR an official baseball stat in the year 2070, will that mean that all of today's players don't count? I mean, if there are new statistics in the future, does that mean that, say, Shohei Otani... Or the Miz don't count because new stats have been added? No, of course not. That's nonsense. Nap Lajue of the Phillies had 127 RBI in 1898 and led the National League. Then he had 125 RBI in 1901 with the Athletics to lead the American League. Then 102 RBI in 1904 to lead the American League again. If Pete Alonso leads the American League in RBI this year, he will be the first to do it since 1904. The A-L-N-L combo. Boy, that's good enough. You don't have to make up a phony baloney statistic relative to 1920. And you want a phony baloney statistic? No German Kaiser has bowled a perfect game left-handed since 1920. Also of interest here, what careers will Bonta and Newsom pursue now that they have sold democracy down the river? Worst persons in the world pursues them and you. And the story of the late Elizabeth Edwards, my friend. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscreants, morons, and Dunning-Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world. LeBron's good old international punching bag and easy mark, Stephen A. Smith. However, he's not only absolutely clueless, he's absolutely clueless that he is absolutely clueless. He's also bordering on racism and anti-Semitism now. Smith has declared his choice for the Democratic nomination for 2028, and stunningly, it's not himself. In fact, it's worse. And he's also declared who he thinks is the current favorite. These are two different people. His choice, quote, my favorite, in terms of who I think is the most qualified for the job based on their record, is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro is still governor of Pennsylvania? Did not know that. Smart as a whip, absolutely successful at his job, very popular elected official governing the state of Pennsylvania, works with a Republican legislature and gets the damn job done. This again would be an amateur's view of politics. It's very important to work with the Republicans. who are trying to destroy the Democratic Party and democracy in America, Steve. You don't get the point. It's no longer some question of bipartisanship. Not only is bipartisanship a total lie, but nobody in the Democratic Party, no Democratic voter, wants bipartisanship. You sound like Chuck Schumer. That is perhaps the worst insult I can give to you. But wait, there's more. To quote again, his Shapiro's problem is very simple. Smith says, I do not believe the American people will vote for a Jewish individual and put them in office for the presidency of the United States of America in a general election. Never mind that he's opposed to Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Never mind that he's for a two-state solution. Never mind that he has spoken out against these issues. Although he supports Israel, I don't think America will put a Jewish individual in office. Hereby, Smith is conflating once again somebody being Jewish with support for Israel. Stephen A. Smith is, in many respects, Donald Trump with less hair. And it gets dumber than this. As I said, he also mentioned who he thinks has the momentum. Shapiro, according to Smith, will have to overcome the candidate who's currently running away with the field. According to Stephen A. Smith, super genius. And that individual, the one he says has the most, quote, momentum is Kamala Harris. Oh my God, I haven't heard her name in like two years. Stephen just has his pulse, his fingers on the pulse of the American political system as of July 15th, 2024. Way to go. Smith also said, A, that Gavin Newsom should be called out for saying he would not run for office if Harris does run for the presidency. So Smith's solution to Newsom saying he might not run is to disallow him from running. He says Newsom should be disqualified for saying he wouldn't run. Think about this for a second. Stephen A. Smith believes that a at least viable, theoretical 8% candidate for president of the United States... should not say he's not going to run under certain circumstances, and if he does say he's not going to run, he shouldn't be allowed to run. Which is the same thing, Stephen. Smith also said, B, liberals are afraid to go on his podcast. Yes, we're afraid we will laugh too hard. The runner-up, Congressman Jared Golden, lame duck Democrat, at least that's what's stitched into his granimals. Congressman Mike Lawler of New York State is that worst kind of Trump whore. He is the Trump whore who always votes with Trump, and yet... He wrote an opinion piece endorsing a Republican for USA Today. Wait, there's still a USA Today? There is a blue wave forming, at least relative to the House. That last number quoted was 97% chance of the Democrats taking the House. And this idiot, a Democrat, at least that's what it says in his collar, is endorsing a Republican because, wait for this, because Golden worked together with Mike Lawler to advance the Northeast Lobstermen Protection Act. I like lobsters, and I hope to protect lobster men. I'm sorry. I like lobster men. They are a disaffected minority who are often prejudiced again because they're, I'm assuming, half lobster and half men, hence the name lobster. Oh, no, they're guys who go out and fish the lobsters. Well, that's the most important issue facing America today. I mean, seriously, you're going to protect the lobstermen while democracy is eaten by giant, irradiated, 700-foot-tall lobsters working for Trump and AI. Good idea. A little background on Jared Golden of Maine. He tried to tie support for Ukraine to more deportations of immigrants in this country. He voted against legal paths to citizenship there. for immigrants. He supported Trump's tariffs. In fact, he introduced legislation that would put a universal 10% tariff on all imports into the U.S. After the tariff stock crash, he dismissed it by saying, quote, the vast majority of Americans have no stocks because that's the only effect that has on the economy, boy. Nice work. And he and Gleisenkamp voted against the Biden College debt waiver. He said it added to the debt. Yeah, because we're really going to knock down the debt by not helping Americans to get out of debt, you moron. And stop calling these people like Jared Golden blue dogs. That is literally an insult to blue dogs. Have you ever seen a blue dog like an Australian heeler? They're beautiful. Jared Golden is not beautiful. Jared Golden is a conservative who used liberal platforms and the Democratic brand name to get his ass into office. F them and F Jared Golden. He excuses hypocrisy and unreliability and intellectual laziness as being, quote, a progressive conservative. I mean, what the F is a progressive conservative? That's like saying you're a very alive dead guy endorsing law. Or why not just endorse Trump for a third term? You're just Fetterman with hair, you clown. Happily, there is one silver lining here. Nobody listens to Jared F. and Golden in Maine, let alone in New York. That is why Jared Golden is being forcibly retired from the house. Just a Fetterman with more hair. GTFO, pal. But the winner, we go far afield for the winner. It's Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, or at least he still was when I sat down to record this. Friedrich is here? Friedrich isn't here. Friedrich is here. His party lost regional elections in states early this month, I guess it was, or perhaps late in August. States that don't like his center-right party, historically parts of the old East Germany, so, you know, still loyal to Lenin, to the foreign-funded, anti-democracy Nazis in fascist clothing that call themselves the AFD, the Alternative for Germany. And then over the weekend... Merz's party lost more local elections in states in which his party was a little bit more popular, and in one, it failed to get the 5% vote threshold that is required, and now none of its members will be allowed to serve in the German parliament, the Bundestag, or the Bundesliga, or the Bundesadler, or whatever they call it these days. Merz has been in office. He's been chancellor, the leader of Germany for a year. He's been pretty solid internationally at home. He has no future at home. And the sooner that his party gets somebody else in there, the better for the world because we kind of need a free Germany because otherwise we know what happens in Germany. He is the second leader to try to and to fail to succeed Angela Merkel. who of course was the chancellor. She wasn't exactly AOC in the job, but she had a lot of liberal attitudes. She was smart as could be. She had another profession. So she actually lived in the real world and just wasn't a professional politician. And basically she retired for age reasons. It's now, I don't know, six years ago, seven years ago. Angela Merkel is now 72 years old. In November, Chancellor Merz is 71 years old. Nobody in his party, even though this is the most politically vulnerable leader in the world at the moment, nobody in his party has stepped up to simply say, I'll do it, at which point the entire party would abandon Merritt's, he'd have to resign, and somebody new would become the leader and perhaps the new chancellor, but certainly would become the new leader of his party. Nobody has done this. Nobody in that center-right party wants this. Now, there's a couple of possible explanations for this, one of which is the other parties are hoping they will gain major control or the leadership in a coalition. And the other possibility that it occurs to me is it makes me wonder, and I'm just speculating, nobody said this, are they asking Merkel to come back? Are they trying to convince her to come out of retirement? Because obviously she's so old, being 18 months older than the current who has aged about 70 years in his one year in office, which reminds me also that Obama is 65 now. He's still an entire teenager's life younger than Trump. As to Merz... Gee whiz, this is such a shock. A political leader having trouble fending off fascists who are intent on ethnic cleansing in Germany. Come on. Vi, that's impossible. Actually, Vi Mar, that's impossible. Am I right? Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany. Friedrich is here? Friedrich isn't here. Friedrich is here. Friedrich Merz might as well be Ethel Merz, today's other worst person in the world! The End To the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell, and I thought recently of my friend Norman Lloyd. Norman Lloyd was an actor associated largely with Alfred Hitchcock. He played the saboteur in Hitchcock's Saboteur in 1941. He was Dr. Auschlander in St. Elsewhere in the 1980s, and he appeared in movies as late as 2009. Norman lived to be 106 years old. He went to a World Series game in 1926 and another in 2017, and he remained as sharp as a tack to the end. He could speak with equal fluency about Babe Ruth and seeing him play and about seeing Shohei Otani debut for the Angels. That's how sharp Norman was. Norman said there was a price for long age, and that was to see people younger than you die. He was very practical about this. He was, I think, a little cynical and yet at the same time life-affirming. Norman pointed out that if you were allowed to leave a funeral at its end, that was a good funeral. If you want to be a little bit selfish on that topic, life or death, you're allowed to be. But one thing Norman did not mention about growing old or older, at least, the number of friends who died young and you have succeeded to stay alive and pass their age or sometimes double their age. This is a shock I have yet to adjust to. I have a friend, Glenn Cornelius. I have mentioned him here on the show many times. He was my frenemy before the word was invented at the college radio station. And I named it in part after him when I built them a new one at Cornell at WVR in the previous decade. And Glenn died in 1996. And it's impossible for me to do the math on that. It is impossible for me to think that it's that long ago. And yet it is. And I am now approaching twice Glenn's age. Another friend who died young, not nearly as long ago, and not frankly as young, but who died long ago now, came to mind recently. You may know this name. If not, you should. She was perhaps the most remarkable woman I ever met. Her name was Elizabeth Edwards. She was the wife of the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, Senator John Edwards, who challenged for and did not get the Democratic nomination in 2008, largely on a universal health care program and a bid and a platform for that. In 2004, when he ran for the vice presidency... We could not at MSNBC get an interview with him. We certainly could not get an interview with John Kerry, the presidential nominee. In fact, we could not have gotten an interview with the person at the Kerry-Edwards campaign who would have told us, no, you can't have an interview with either one of them. That's how small we were. MSNBC was the national media joke. and particularly the national political media joke, because year after year, the only thing we had in large volume was new shows. MSNBC specialized in canceling programs, sometimes after one or two episodes. I'll go through the list one day, and you'll see that I'm not being hyperbolic in the slightest. But in the middle of this presidential campaign, where we might have been all the We got an odd request. One day, the executive producer came into me and said, Elizabeth Edwards would like to do an interview with you. She wants to talk about the campaign and then something else she'd like to reserve for the interview itself. And I went, uh-oh, what did I say now? And it was revealed to me at that point that, no, it wasn't like that. It was something positive. So she asked to do an interview and she asked that I be told that it'd be a positive thing, that I shouldn't feel like she was trying to set me up for some criticism or a gotcha moment, which, by the way, I think politicians and political figures ought to do more often with the media. Regardless. Comes the day to tape the interview. We talk about her husband's campaign. I know of her that she is an intelligent and thoughtful woman with a lovely voice and a tragic loss of her son at the age of 16 in a car accident about 10 years prior, I guess. And the fact that she had responded to his loss by taking the necessary precautions and procedures to regain fertility. She was at this point older. Her son had been 16. And this changed her appearance and to some degree changed her appearance, probably not positively, but she didn't care. She wanted another child with her husband, John, because she missed her son that much. Anyway, that's what I knew about her. And we sat down. and did this interview remotely, and we got our part done. And she said, okay, have you got your questions done? And I said, I do. She said, because I have a story to tell you. And the story she told me was about her son, Wade. Wade died in a car accident driving home one day. He just lost control of the car. I don't know if it was because he was a 16-year-old driver. There was no impairment. No one else was injured. He simply drove off the road and his life ended. And that was the whole story. Actually, that wasn't the whole story. Elizabeth Edwards explained that as Wade got closer towards his middle teens, unsurprisingly, he and his mother kind of went their separate ways. It happens to all of us. It happens to the best of us. There was no day-to-day connection as a mother has with her nine-year-old or 10-year-old, and then suddenly it's not there and she doesn't know what to do about it. Somewhere, she said, about 14 or 15, She was sitting at home as a great sports fan would, watching the 11 p.m. SportsCenter on ESPN, me, Dan Patrick, and more importantly, the highlights, when her son came home, walked past her with a grunt, and then turned around and go, can I sit with you? I want to watch that. The next thing she knew, she said, she and Wade were watching SportsCenter every night and laughing at my jokes and appreciating my point of view. And she said, you brought Wade and me back together. And then she told me about his death. And then I thought, well, this is a sad story after all. And she said, no, it's not. Because every time I see you, I think of him. might be the nicest thing that ever happened as a result of something in my career. If not that, there was a story I think I've told before about the father of an autistic boy whose first spoken words came at a ball game when he recited every one of my baseball catchphrases because something about the tone of my voice registered with him he had never spoken before. And like he was fulfilling the old joke, he was In fact, he just never had anything to say before. And suddenly he had all of my he hit the ball real hard catchphrases that he used as his younger brother played Little League ball. That one was pretty good. But I didn't know that family. I came to know Elizabeth Edwards and her story of always being reminded of her son when she saw me and reminded positively has stayed with me ever since. I met her, as I said, only once at the Republican of all things debate one year. I believe it was in the Carolinas. I don't remember where, and I'm not sure why she was there, but she was there. And we sat and talked in the makeup room for about half an hour. And then we got on the phone once later on to talk about her husband's candidacy and the rumors about him and an off-the-record conversation about what the hell's going on. And she said, I don't know what the hell's going on. I know that what is happening with him and what he represents. It is important for him to stay in this race. And I am concerned about health care. And I am concerned about rights for everyone to marry. And I am concerned about the future of the atmosphere. And I am concerned about the future of people who are perceived as minorities in the country. And I am most concerned about the disparate nature of wealth and money in this country as it grows and gets worse. and I am concerned about the rise of fascism in this country. This is in 2007. Elizabeth Edwards called me one day after her husband's presidential candidacy, and in fact his time in politics blew up when the rumors about his infidelity turned out not to be rumors, and the fact that there was a child involved, the child of his loins and somebody else's womb, That turned out to be a fact and all of the stories were true. And Elizabeth Edwards had, with the whole of her heart and all of her sincerity, backed this man. The phone rang. Keith, it's Elizabeth Edwards. I was concerned about her and how she was doing because as far as I was concerned, her husband could jump off a bridge and I probably wouldn't go in after him. I might even stand there and applaud, at least until they fished him out alive, I hope. maybe I hope. And she said, I'm calling a few people. And this is within days of the confirmation that her marriage had been a trick pulled on her by this scumbag, John Edwards. And she called and she said, I'm calling a few friends to explain. And I said, I think as you might explain what she said, why I did what I did. I feel as if I had deceived you and other friends. And I said, are you serious? You were the one deceived. No, no, no. I deceived myself to some degree. It was important to me. He represented and believed in the things that I did. And I could not be a candidate. I did not have the presidential timber that was involved. And I wanted to argue the point with her. She would have made a superb president. She would have made a better president than her husband could have in 15 lifetimes. She would have made a better senator than he did. That's for sure. But she went on and sincerely apologized. And that's when I found out that not only had she made these calls, which are just extraordinary, who else would do this? And apparently there were a couple of dozen of them. And who else would call a member of the media who she'd only known a couple of times? But then again, I had this larger than expected role in her life as a reminder of her son, Wade. So I took the call as the honor that it represented. And then just to make sure that I would always remember her as a fine, honorable, dignified woman who also used a shiv when necessary. She said something off mic, off the telephone, that indicated that her husband was in the room with her as she made these calls. She made him sit there and listen to her apologize for defending him. And I know that with the forcefulness of her personality and her trained lawyer expertise, and she gave up her career for him to support his both as an attorney and as a candidate and as a politician and as a senator, all of that with the expertise that she had and did not use professionally she could rivet him to his seat with one look. And he sat there in his own little preview of hell and listened to his wife apologize to her friends and in many cases their friends because she believed in him and he was not worth believing in. One of the more extraordinary things and one of the more both effective and ethical means of revenge for anybody wronged in a private relationship that I've ever heard of. An extraordinary thing. I don't know who else would have done it, and I don't know how somebody else could have done something like it, but Elizabeth Edwards could. As I said, she would have made a great president. At some point, and I'm not exactly sure when, Elizabeth revealed that she was battling cancer, breast cancer, and had been, I guess, since 2004, maybe even 2003. It had been under control and then in remission and then without symptoms. And then, sadly, it came roaring back. So all that she did on his behalf while he cheated on her, All that she did was while she was sick and managing and fighting and fighting tooth and nail to stay alive for her kids, including the one that she had to succeed weighed in her family, an extraordinary person. And then as it almost always does time and cancer win on December 6th, 2010, Elizabeth Edwards announced she was ending treatment for cancer because the doctors, the oncologists had told her that it would not do any more good. And she put a statement out on social media that I would read to you now. It's only two paragraphs, two of the greatest paragraphs ever written to my mind. December 6th, 2010. You all know, she wrote, that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces. my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times, and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives for all of us are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that, I am grateful. It is impossible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you, I simply say, you know. Elizabeth Edwards, December 6th, 2010. Elizabeth Edwards died December 7th, 2010. And I miss her still. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chanel on keyboards and handling the orchestration. Brian Ray on guitars, bass, and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. When we use the sports music, it's from the Old Olbermann Show from ESPN2, hosted by Old Olbermann, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc., other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today was my friend John Dean. This program was produced by Stevie, Rose, Kit, and Ted, and everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today, day 613. America held hostage again exactly 850 days until the scheduled end of his lame-duck and lame-brained term, unless it ends early due to the unexpected rise of a new political party called Byron Donald Scrubs You From Ford's Theater. If you're listening, remember you can see the whole thing now on YouTube. If you're watching, remember you can just listen to the whole thing wherever you podcast. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Bulletin's as the news merits. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. Breaking news. Republicans throw Trump overboard, or if you prefer, Republicans throw Trump under the bus, under the campaign bus. It is the detrumpening by Republican candidates and more startling still by Republican voters. Two days after Trump took office in January of 2025, a company called Echelon Insights, a conservative pollster, asked Republican likely voters to Do you consider yourself to be primarily a supporter of Donald Trump or a supporter of the Republican Party? January 2025, 59% said they were supporters of Trump. Only 36% said they were supporters of the GOP. The loyalty of 6 out of 10 was to Trump. This past week, Echelon Insights asked exactly the same question, word for word, to whom is your loyalty pledge, Republican voters, the party, or the president? The dictator. Only 34% of them said they are supporters of Trump. It went from 59% who said it was Trump to 34% since his inauguration. The Trump loyalists have left the building. The GOP, get out pronto. More than 42% swing from them supporting Trump over party to them supporting party over Trump. Trump? Trump who? And it is so bad that the instant cope is already high-octane, full-throttle, and utterly hilarious. The unintentionally buffoonish Byron York insists this is good news for the GOP. Good news, everyone! Because it shows they're ready for their post-Trump success story. How they can win without Trump. Narrator, they couldn't win without Trump. from 59-36 Trump over GOP to 56-34 GOP over Trump. And the number may be larger, as it turns out, among Republican candidates. I mentioned last time the ad from Maria Salazar, the Republican assistant house whip, straight to camera, breaking with Trump on immigration, saying her Hispanic community in Florida had been betrayed, felt betrayed, Mr. President. Those were her words. She's tried to walk it back. It didn't work. Then it was the MAGA nut Pat Boone telling Trump, in essence, please shut up. Now two essential Republican Senate candidates have left the sinking ship. Years ago, in 2017, in a resistance video, I said that Trump would only fall when you started seeing Republican candidates... realized that they would lose their jobs entirely because of him, when he no longer provided anything resembling an asset, but was solely a millstone. We are now here. Exactly the way it happened in August of 1974, the Democrats did not remove Richard Nixon as president. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott went into the White House and said... in August 1974, Mr. President, do you like these Republican House candidates? Because they're going to lose entirely because of you. Do you like these House Democratic candidates and Senate Democratic candidates? They're going to win solely because of you. It's not about whether or not you survive. You're not going to. It's about whether or not the rest of the party does. We are getting towards that point. This is not a drill. It is the detrumpification like day, I don't know, nine or so out of about 70. The first part is now happening in Michigan. Bluntly, Mike Rogers ought to be flattening Abdul Al-Sayed, the Democrat. The right has tied Al-Sayed to Hasan Piker. They've dirtied up Al-Sayed in every way possible. He gives an overall appearance of being anything but a conservative. Michigan is not red, but its red parts are as red as anywhere in the nation. The people there are as delusional as those in the worst fundamentalist megachurch cult building in the Southwest. They are the ones who had a Michigan GOP chairwoman who believed that evil was transferred from person to person from When a woman had sex with demons, she was the chairwoman of the party in Michigan. That's how red the red parts of Michigan are, and they have a guy who is presentable. He cleans up real nice, and they're going against El-Sayed. Mike Rogers, Trump's Senate candidate in Michigan, new ad is up and on social media, and in it he says, quote,' The war in Iran needs to end.' To bring costs down. Michigan families can't afford to wait. They put a political condom on it. Rogers says this is actually a call for embargoing diesel exports. Because, yeah, that'll bring down supermarket charges because everybody drinks diesel. And anyway, the White House is now saying there will not be any embargo on diesel exports. So he's campaigning for something else that is opposed to the Trump regime. He's against the war in Iran and for diesel export limitations that the administration will not put into effect. The Suffolk poll in Michigan now is El-Sayed 47, Rogers 40. The lead is lengthening from even last week. And the reader from the Suffolk poll, nearly half of the likely voters in Michigan surveyed said they were casting their ballot, quote, to change the direction President Trump is leading the nation. That's 48% dwarfing the 20% who want to support Trump and 28% who said their vote didn't have much to do with him. And wait, there's more. Let's go to Iowa, where Ashley Hinson is getting clocked in the Iowa Senate race. I'll just say that again. That's a Republican Senate candidate getting clocked by the Democrat in Iowa. Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn't have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. Who said that? The Democrat? Ah, Ashley Hinson, Republican nominee. Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn't have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. Boo Trump, she might as well have said. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices. Bye, Felicia Trump. Again, She is performing safe repudiation of Trump's war, diesel rebates, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there was audio of her at a private political event in June with fundraisers, with donors, saying if the war was not over in Iran in a few weeks, it could become, quote, a political liability. You think? How are the polls in Iowa? Josh Turek, the Democrat, leads Hinson 50 to 42. Doing better than Is Al Syed in Michigan. Brainwashing is still ahead, though, in a curious development which I think fits the whole idea of the Trump House of Cards finally collapsing and suddenly in the polling that shows the Democrat up by eight points. Turek voters, the Democratic voters, Hinson voters, the Republican voters alike, think that Hinson will still come back to defeat Turek, and they believe that by about 60%. However... The poll on the ground shows Hinson behind by 8%. It continues nationally and in all kinds of other ways. In the Maine House, the ex-governor, the weirdo and rabid right-winger Paul LePage may, in fact, prevail running for the House second seat. He has now, however, revealed something that at least damages Trump nationally because it's being picked up out of a tiny house race in Maine. He revealed his son's father-in-law. So the father of the woman Paul LePage's son is married to has been seized and deported by ICE. He has a work permit, a valid work permit, according to the former governor, but they found an excuse to deport him anyway, so he is off to, although the governor did not say where, we believe Somalia or Haiti. LePage said they got him because they don't like the country he's from. That's a Republican running for a Republican seat in a largely Republican district, trashing Trump, although not by name. And then there is the New York Times average of polls nationally. There's another dramatic swing. In the last demographics of the 2024 presidential election, Trump trailed Kamala Harris by just seven points among Hispanic voters. He was within seven of her on the Hispanic vote. Today, Republicans nationally trail Democrats among Hispanic likely voters by 35. Trump has lost, and the Republican Party has thus lost 28 points among Hispanic voters since November 2024. And it's not just the Senate or the House. In Florida, the Trump stooge, Byron Donalds, one of the most foolish and loyal Trump supporters in the country, the guy who would do anything and say anything for his God. was ahead in all theoretical races for governor to succeed Ron DeSantis all the way through the primaries, every potential matchup with any Democrat. Byron Daniels was ahead by 6%, by 7%, by 8%. When it finally was clear David Jolly was going to be the Democratic nominee, it remained 6% or 7%. Starting last month, the D-Donald-ization, collapse, St. Pete polls, and this is a week old, so we don't have any fresh info. Listen to this. This is the poll for governor of Florida after DeSantis. Byron Donald's Republican 43.5, David Jolly Democrat 43.4. But of course, it's far closer than the score would indicate. By one-tenth of one point, the Republican is ahead in the race for governor of Florida among African-American voters. Jolly is leading Donald 68 to 14. The response? Donald has scrubbed Donald Trump from his website. I'll just say that again. Donald's has scrubbed Trump from his website. There is no mention of Donald Trump on the cover or anywhere else that we can find on the official campaign website for Byron Donald's for governor of Florida. Let me just quote from the Miami Herald for a paragraph, if you'll permit me. Donald's campaign website was previously dominated by references to his Trump endorsement. A button to chip in to support Trump endorsed Byron Donald's was at the top of the homepage. Trump endorsed proven conservative fighter Byron Donalds was the page's main text. A yellow banner, according to the Miami Herald, reading endorsed by President Trump, exclamation point, marked the middle of the homepage and a prominent section quoting Trump's 2025 endorsement said, run, Byron, run. All of those mentions were stripped away from his updated website. His campaign also removed a photo of Donalds and wife Erica Donalds posing with Trump. Trump? Trump who? This is not it, not yet. But between these races, Donald's scrubbing Trump's name and polling showing Republicans going from loyalty to Trump 59-36 to party over Trump 56-34, like Ernie says in It's a Wonderful Life, I've never really seen one before, but that's got all the earmarks of being a run on the bank. And we haven't gotten even to the main polls yet. This is not a drill. Some headlines. We mentioned American research in the episode Monday. Trump approval there at 29%. That is the low watermark for all major polls. The deep dive is coming in, speaking of low watermarks, on strength in numbers Verisight. But CNN put out a poll number yesterday, and I thought the anchor was going to pass out on the air. Trump approval among what they call pure independents. Those are independents who are not leaning to the right or the left, insist they are independent independents. The people that CNN's new bosses will soon becoming pure communists. In the 2024 election, Trump among pure independents was plus 15%. Are you sitting down? Now, Trump among pure independents in the two polls average is not just CNN. Pew is involved in this as well. It was plus 15 Trump in 2024. Right now, it's minus 71. Trump is 71 points underwater with pure independents. He has lost 86 points since January, excuse me, since November of 2024. Do you know how hard it would be to do that in, say, three lifetimes, let alone since November of 2024? He's now at minus 71. How could you possibly do that? Oh, wait, he outdid that on the economy. He went from plus 22 to minus 77. That's a 99-point swing against Donald Trump since the presidential election. This is like Trump math. Support for him is down 11 billion percent. He's reduced his own popularity by 11 billion percent, along with the price of unguentine. Scrub him from Donald's website. Scrub him from the Republican Party. It's not just a disaster. They would literally, at this point, be better off digging up Richard Nixon and making him the face of the 2026 Republican Party. That is how statistically bad it is all of a sudden. The great day is nigh. And as I said, strength in numbers and verisight. G. Eliot Morris, he used to run 538. He did a national poll released yesterday. It concludes Monday. The House generic ballot is Democrats by 52-42. And again, he is the one proposing, G. Eliot Morris is proposing that the undercounted voter this year is in fact the Trump voter, the past Trump voter who's going Democratic in the midterms. Now, listen to this, the biggest problem found by this poll. You were asked to give three biggest problems. 59% of Americans said their biggest problem, prices and inflation. Jobs and the economy, 38%. Kind of the same thing. Healthcare, 34%. Elections and democracy, 23%. Immigration. All that Trump has left in positive numbers for his own performance, and the only thing the Republicans still get high marks on... is only important to 17% of voters. It's unbelievable. Which party do you trust on these issues? The GOP leads by five on crime and public safety, by 11 on border security. They are underwater on everything else. Gurgle, gurgle. Healthcare, they are minus 25. Government funding, social programs, minus 21. Education, minus 17. Prices, inflation, minus 14. Elections and bureaucracy, minus 13. Trade with other countries, minus 12. Jobs and the economy, minus 11. Foreign policy, minus 8. Artificial intelligence, super intelligence, as Trump would call it, because of course he has more than all the artificial intelligence in the world combined. They're at minus seven under that. Immigration. Who do you favor on immigration? Democrats, 42. Republicans, 41. According to their poll, the Trump approval is at 33% on the issues. The approval for Trump on prices and inflation is 21%. He's 54 points underwater. He's 33 points underwater on healthcare. He's 28 points underwater on jobs and the economy. He's 27 under trade with countries and government funding and social programs and artificial intelligence. He's 27 points underwater for AI. Foreign policy, he's 26 points underwater. His approval is 33% there. Elections and democracy, obviously. Education, obviously. 20 points each. Deportations, he's underwater on deportations by 15 points. Crime and public safety, approval is 42%. Disapproval is 52%. And on border security, Trump's approval number is now three points underwater. Can't imagine why anybody has this sense that the wheels are coming off Donald Trump finally. Did you see the speech at the UN the other day? I'm not mentioning the part where he asked the United Nations, the United Nations, which no matter what else you think of it, is the United Nations. You don't go in there and propose... absolute flat out genocide and the use of nuclear weapons on another country much smaller than yourself. And not the part about him asking whether or not he has a big decision to make, whether or not I can obliterate Iran. That's about average insanity for him, not that part. This was the part in which he insisted to try to convince the people of Iran, the delegation for Iran, which had already walked out by that point, that they're not going to get a better deal after the midterms. Because he then insisted to them that he is not on the ballot in November. He is not part of the midterms, which is insanity even just within the small world of Donald Trump's lice-ridden brains. The entire point of that Nuremberg rally he held in Texas a week and a half, two weeks ago now, was to convince Republicans that they have to vote in the midterms because he is on the ballot. They should be voting on him. It's a referendum on him. So he is literally contradicting himself in public forum, one to Republicans, one to the world, saying exactly the opposite thing— There is no nuance, subtlety. There is nothing to parse here. He's saying utterly contradictory things. Everything's fine. Don't worry. I want to take a moment right here before I get back to what's happening, because there's one punchline to the madness of King Donald that must be mentioned here. It's about Ford's Theater in Washington. Again, if you're not sitting down, if you are sitting down, please stand up and then sit down again in preparation for the Ford's Theater thing. But I want to take a moment for a quick apology, please, to the world on behalf of us, the actual Americans. who are not part of this conspiracy to pretend that Trump is not a psychopath, who has lost his mind and is lost impenetrably in the wilderness of his own delusions and his need for self glorification and self gratification. He should be in a rubber room, not insulting you anywhere else in the world and insulting reality. And yes, we are working on the problem. And just when you think you have reached the bottom of the problem, here it is. Did you read the story from MSN, now MS, whatever it is called, their website? Trump aides explore attaching president's name to to Ford's Theater. Quick history quiz, what happened at Ford's Theater? That's right, that's where President Lincoln was assassinated right after the end of the Civil War. It's a historical monument, not exactly as a landmark, a big upbeat place that you'd want to be associated with. Keith Olbermann stars in a live performance at Ford's Theater? I don't think so. Desperate for Trump's approval, according to the MSNOW story, White House staffers are proposing trying to rename any D.C. landmark that will hold still with putting Trump's name on it. The new football stadium in Washington, Dulles Airport. They're going a little further afield and saying Penn Station in New York should be Trump Penn Station. Actually, that fits, because you could call it then the Donald J. Trump underground rat maze labyrinth and in-hallway open bathroom station, Donald J. Trump proprietor. I like that. But Trump's Ford's theater? For this campaign, now hemorrhaging Trump all over the place, for this president who's made entirely out of lard— As the Republicans implode, as they scrub Trump from everywhere they can find him, as the de-Trumpification accelerates, the tragedy of our greatest president now brought to you by the world's worst president. Lincoln's dead, Trump's alive. Other than that, how did you enjoy the campaign, Mrs. Trump? Trump's Ford's Theater It's the craziest Wait a minute It's growing on me Actually, Mrs. Trump did say something yesterday, and it's even more hilarious than my hilarious joke there. Asked on Fox how she thinks her husband is doing as president, she answered, he's doing the best that he can. Well, in the entire world, he is the worst possible person to do this, so that tracks. No lies detected. To the White House correspondent's pool boycott, and a note that you may not have been told by anybody else, it was actually useful, but in a way that was not expected. In other words, this thing has been a success as a protest. in ways that were not anticipated. It's an accident. The networks thought it would punish Trump. In point of fact, it's actually punishing not Trump, but the Trump TV stooges. It will again later circle around and get Trump too, and he'll probably have to settle this quietly and quickly with some sort of climb down. And maybe he can get the Supreme Court to rule against him before the end of the week. Who knows? He may have fixed it by the time you see or hear this. But in the interim, the damage is not being done to the White House. It's being done to Newsmax, News Nation, all the Sinclair stations. The White House correspondent for News Nation was on the BBC the other day, seemingly on the verge of bursting into tears because her network, her show from Washington, her White House update, would not have any feeds of Trump in action doing everything. Every Republican paid podcaster and streamer who relies on free video of Trump doing anything and everything, they don't have a feed now. That's what's being killed off by the lack of a pool. So yes, now Trump, yes, he controls the video narrative. He established Trump TV, and I understand why. Fox and Newsmax and News Nation all called and threatened to sue him. We're Trump TV, but they don't have the brainware or the hardware. They don't know how to do TV. They have a camera. Now, if you want to do a podcast and you have a camera and maybe a microphone or maybe two microphones, you can get away with it. If I went out to try to cover the president 24 hours a day with this phone, that microphone, and that pod recording device, it wouldn't get very far. Nobody knows that better right now than the White House. They went with Trump TV to his beloved helipad, the opening ceremonies, the ribbon cutting at the helipad. It was televised, except they didn't know how to do anything with audio. They'd never heard of microphones before, never mind ambient noise. All you heard as Trump was flapping his lips there was helicopter sounds. It was terrific. Also, the best speech he's made in 27 years. Also, this may just abuse or disabuse ABC's and CBS and NBC and CNN of their panicky and longstanding obsessive belief, their false belief that they have to show the president of the United States live doing anything and everything, particularly this one. Oh, the president is farting. Let's go live to Joint Base Andrews. Let's get our 71 microphones out. Maybe we can catch the full resonance of the echo. News viewers tuned out Trump long ago. Even the people who like him and still support him will tend to watch him for less time now than they did last year, which was less than the year before, which was certainly less than 2016. They've seen all of it already. They don't need to see it again. Most of them are tuning out, and Fox usually cuts him off within 10 minutes of the start of a speech. But news bosses don't believe this, don't know this, don't want to know this, don't want to believe this for one reason so obvious that we don't even register it. Trump is cheap. Trump is free programming. Free programming hours at a clip. And the news networks have gradually, over the last 25 years, begun to think that they should have to cover everything. And this is not true just of Trump. It was true of Biden and Obama. It was true of Bush. It began to be true during the Clinton presidency. CNN is covering it. Well, we have to cover it. It's a kind of merger of networks here. It's a Wolf Blitzer, Katie Turr reaction. Let's go live. What is it? We don't care. It's live. We did it this way in 2002. We have to keep doing it this way. No Trump. No Trump. CNN and MSNOW ratings will go up. Meanwhile, the other TV story. I'd like to congratulate the state of California and its leaders for giving in to the fascists. Well done, Rob Bonta, attorney general of California, sold out the American public on the verge of victory in stopping the sky dance subsuming of CNN. Or he could have delayed it in court till at least the end of the Trump administration or at least punish the fascists in some way by pushing them past Congress. the date at which Paramount and Skydance would have been owed billions of dollars in penalty fees, or they would have owed billions of dollars in penalty fees to the owners and stockholders. No, he didn't do it. He's Solbanta sold out. He'll get reelected as attorney general. He's dead to me. He's useless. He's a sellout. He's coward. Hope you have other career plans, bub. And Axios is reporting that Gavin Newsom helped broker the deal. to keep some jobs in California. I don't think he ever had a real shot at the presidential nomination. He might have been a vice presidential candidate. He'd look good on a podium. There's not much to him. He clearly changes opinions every six months, but he's done two. He and Bonta, Newsom and Bonta, are finished politically, nationally. They are done. Goodbye. Good luck in the rest of your careers. Also, if you think that the Ellisons, having now steamrolled the attorney general and probably the governor of California, are now going to be slowed down by a board of supervisors that will make sure CNN is just fine, when it wasn't just fine anyway, having already been destroyed by David Zalsnick or whatever his name was. from the Warner Bros. discovery, having already been slowed down by that operation, they're now going to be stopped by a phony baloney board of supervisors appointed by the new owners of CNN to overlook CNN. If you think that's going to work, Rob Bonta, you're a moron. A moron like Gavin Newsom. F you, Rob. F you, Gavin. Because this is the side that Bonta and Newsom wound up on, ultimately. On Sean Hannity's Fox show, which I believe is titled Whiskey-A-Go-Go, Caroline Levitt, who at one point thought the name was Hilter, said that letting networks, quote, making the editorial decisions themselves about whether or not they should carry Trump's speeches live, that was, quote, scary. She was proposing, in the kind of backwards, stupid way that she speaks, that there not be any room for the networks to decide what to put on the networks if the president is speaking. It should be Trump in charge of the TV networks, at least as it relates to how often Trump wanted to speak on TV, which, as we know, is all the effing time. This woman is full-scale authoritarian propagandist slime. And now the attorney general of California and the governor of California have gotten into bed with her. And I will just make this clear. I only mean that metaphorically. I don't hate Rob Bonta and Gavin Newsom that much. Okay, it's been a busy show so far, and there's more to come. The Worst Persons is delightful. There's a Stephen A. Smith reference in there I'm looking forward to reading to you, but I have to do one sports headline, please. Just let me do this. Just let me get it out of my system in my one venue. When former National League RBI champion Pete Alonzo, formerly of the New York Mets, a completes his barrel roll towards becoming the American League RBI champion with the Baltimore Orioles this year. The reports are beginning to come in. The first version of it was no one in baseball history has in separate seasons ever led the National League and then the American League in runs batted in. Wrong. Absolutely 100% inaccurate, not truthful. Well, then they revised it. Well, since RBI became an official statistic in 1920, he'll be the first to ever lead each of the leagues in RBI. And my response to that and the only response to that is, so what? What does 1920 have to do with it? In the 19th century, baseball teams were looking for baseball players who could bring in runs. There were lists of who had batted in the most runs. That's where the idea came from. By 1907, one of the early great baseball statisticians— he was an advanced stat man in 1907—Ernie Lanigan— began to start to compile and publish a stat he called runs batted in. It took him 13 years to get them to make it an official statistic in 1920, which is where we get this nonsense about who's the first player to do this RBI number since 1920. It is an utterly arbitrary and meaningless date. All the pre-1920 runs batted in have been calculated and had been calculated by 1920 and retroactively compiled, and they all count towards players' career records, and they're all in the record books, and they're all official now, and they're all among baseball's all-time leaders. If they didn't count the RBI before 1920, Babe Ruth's RBI total from 1914 through 1919 would be zero. It's not zero. All his RBI were counted, and they count. 1920 is an artificial deadline. The Pete Alonzo thing means nothing. And I want to make it a little bit more visceral while I still have a little time on this. One of the touchstones of baseball today is on-base percentage or on-base average. From the 50s on, this has been a critical number. It basically means how many times you come up to the plate and you get to first base or one of the other bases. That's it. You do it 40% of the time, you're a superstar. In 1984... The year I formally joined the Society for American Baseball Research, now 42 years ago, 1984, baseball proudly announced it was adding a new avant-garde statistic called on-base percentage. It took them till 1984 to make that official. So what are you saying here? Every on-base average before 1984, every record doesn't count? What about OPS, on-base average plus slugging percentage? That doesn't count before 1984? Of course not. It's nonsense. You just go back and look up the records and compile the numbers. We have calculators now. You could have done it on an abacus. I think Ernie Lanigan did do it on an abacus. If they make any of the sabermetric stats, the advanced stats of today, of this century, if they ever make them official, like BABIP or Wins Above Replacement, WAR, say they make WAR an official baseball stat in the year 2070, will that mean that all of today's players don't count? I mean, if there are new statistics in the future, does that mean that, say, Shohei Otani... Or the Miz don't count because new stats have been added? No, of course not. That's nonsense. Nap Lajue of the Phillies had 127 RBI in 1898 and led the National League. Then he had 125 RBI in 1901 with the Athletics to lead the American League. Then 102 RBI in 1904 to lead the American League again. If Pete Alonso leads the American League in RBI this year, he will be the first to do it since 1904. The A-L-N-L combo. Boy, that's good enough. You don't have to make up a phony baloney statistic relative to 1920. And you want a phony baloney statistic? No German Kaiser has bowled a perfect game left-handed since 1920. Also of interest here, what careers will Bonta and Newsom pursue now that they have sold democracy down the river? Worst persons in the world pursues them and you. And the story of the late Elizabeth Edwards, my friend. That's next. This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Believe it or not, there's still more new idiots to talk about. The roundup of the miscreants, morons, and Dunning-Kruger effect specimens who constitute today's other worst persons in the world. LeBron's good old international punching bag and easy mark, Stephen A. Smith. However, he's not only absolutely clueless, he's absolutely clueless that he is absolutely clueless. He's also bordering on racism and anti-Semitism now. Smith has declared his choice for the Democratic nomination for 2028, and stunningly, it's not himself. In fact, it's worse. And he's also declared who he thinks is the current favorite. These are two different people. His choice, quote, my favorite, in terms of who I think is the most qualified for the job based on their record, is Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro is still governor of Pennsylvania? Did not know that. Smart as a whip, absolutely successful at his job, very popular elected official governing the state of Pennsylvania, works with a Republican legislature and gets the damn job done. This again would be an amateur's view of politics. It's very important to work with the Republicans. who are trying to destroy the Democratic Party and democracy in America, Steve. You don't get the point. It's no longer some question of bipartisanship. Not only is bipartisanship a total lie, but nobody in the Democratic Party, no Democratic voter, wants bipartisanship. You sound like Chuck Schumer. That is perhaps the worst insult I can give to you. But wait, there's more. To quote again, his Shapiro's problem is very simple. Smith says, I do not believe the American people will vote for a Jewish individual and put them in office for the presidency of the United States of America in a general election. Never mind that he's opposed to Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Never mind that he's for a two-state solution. Never mind that he has spoken out against these issues. Although he supports Israel, I don't think America will put a Jewish individual in office. Hereby, Smith is conflating once again somebody being Jewish with support for Israel. Stephen A. Smith is, in many respects, Donald Trump with less hair. And it gets dumber than this. As I said, he also mentioned who he thinks has the momentum. Shapiro, according to Smith, will have to overcome the candidate who's currently running away with the field. According to Stephen A. Smith, super genius. And that individual, the one he says has the most, quote, momentum is Kamala Harris. Oh my God, I haven't heard her name in like two years. Stephen just has his pulse, his fingers on the pulse of the American political system as of July 15th, 2024. Way to go. Smith also said, A, that Gavin Newsom should be called out for saying he would not run for office if Harris does run for the presidency. So Smith's solution to Newsom saying he might not run is to disallow him from running. He says Newsom should be disqualified for saying he wouldn't run. Think about this for a second. Stephen A. Smith believes that a at least viable, theoretical 8% candidate for president of the United States... should not say he's not going to run under certain circumstances, and if he does say he's not going to run, he shouldn't be allowed to run. Which is the same thing, Stephen. Smith also said, B, liberals are afraid to go on his podcast. Yes, we're afraid we will laugh too hard. The runner-up, Congressman Jared Golden, lame duck Democrat, at least that's what's stitched into his granimals. Congressman Mike Lawler of New York State is that worst kind of Trump whore. He is the Trump whore who always votes with Trump, and yet... He wrote an opinion piece endorsing a Republican for USA Today. Wait, there's still a USA Today? There is a blue wave forming, at least relative to the House. That last number quoted was 97% chance of the Democrats taking the House. And this idiot, a Democrat, at least that's what it says in his collar, is endorsing a Republican because, wait for this, because Golden worked together with Mike Lawler to advance the Northeast Lobstermen Protection Act. I like lobsters, and I hope to protect lobster men. I'm sorry. I like lobster men. They are a disaffected minority who are often prejudiced again because they're, I'm assuming, half lobster and half men, hence the name lobster. Oh, no, they're guys who go out and fish the lobsters. Well, that's the most important issue facing America today. I mean, seriously, you're going to protect the lobstermen while democracy is eaten by giant, irradiated, 700-foot-tall lobsters working for Trump and AI. Good idea. A little background on Jared Golden of Maine. He tried to tie support for Ukraine to more deportations of immigrants in this country. He voted against legal paths to citizenship there. for immigrants. He supported Trump's tariffs. In fact, he introduced legislation that would put a universal 10% tariff on all imports into the U.S. After the tariff stock crash, he dismissed it by saying, quote, the vast majority of Americans have no stocks because that's the only effect that has on the economy, boy. Nice work. And he and Gleisenkamp voted against the Biden College debt waiver. He said it added to the debt. Yeah, because we're really going to knock down the debt by not helping Americans to get out of debt, you moron. And stop calling these people like Jared Golden blue dogs. That is literally an insult to blue dogs. Have you ever seen a blue dog like an Australian heeler? They're beautiful. Jared Golden is not beautiful. Jared Golden is a conservative who used liberal platforms and the Democratic brand name to get his ass into office. F them and F Jared Golden. He excuses hypocrisy and unreliability and intellectual laziness as being, quote, a progressive conservative. I mean, what the F is a progressive conservative? That's like saying you're a very alive dead guy endorsing law. Or why not just endorse Trump for a third term? You're just Fetterman with hair, you clown. Happily, there is one silver lining here. Nobody listens to Jared F. and Golden in Maine, let alone in New York. That is why Jared Golden is being forcibly retired from the house. Just a Fetterman with more hair. GTFO, pal. But the winner, we go far afield for the winner. It's Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany, or at least he still was when I sat down to record this. Friedrich is here? Friedrich isn't here. Friedrich is here. His party lost regional elections in states early this month, I guess it was, or perhaps late in August. States that don't like his center-right party, historically parts of the old East Germany, so, you know, still loyal to Lenin, to the foreign-funded, anti-democracy Nazis in fascist clothing that call themselves the AFD, the Alternative for Germany. And then over the weekend... Merz's party lost more local elections in states in which his party was a little bit more popular, and in one, it failed to get the 5% vote threshold that is required, and now none of its members will be allowed to serve in the German parliament, the Bundestag, or the Bundesliga, or the Bundesadler, or whatever they call it these days. Merz has been in office. He's been chancellor, the leader of Germany for a year. He's been pretty solid internationally at home. He has no future at home. And the sooner that his party gets somebody else in there, the better for the world because we kind of need a free Germany because otherwise we know what happens in Germany. He is the second leader to try to and to fail to succeed Angela Merkel. who of course was the chancellor. She wasn't exactly AOC in the job, but she had a lot of liberal attitudes. She was smart as could be. She had another profession. So she actually lived in the real world and just wasn't a professional politician. And basically she retired for age reasons. It's now, I don't know, six years ago, seven years ago. Angela Merkel is now 72 years old. In November, Chancellor Merz is 71 years old. Nobody in his party, even though this is the most politically vulnerable leader in the world at the moment, nobody in his party has stepped up to simply say, I'll do it, at which point the entire party would abandon Merritt's, he'd have to resign, and somebody new would become the leader and perhaps the new chancellor, but certainly would become the new leader of his party. Nobody has done this. Nobody in that center-right party wants this. Now, there's a couple of possible explanations for this, one of which is the other parties are hoping they will gain major control or the leadership in a coalition. And the other possibility that it occurs to me is it makes me wonder, and I'm just speculating, nobody said this, are they asking Merkel to come back? Are they trying to convince her to come out of retirement? Because obviously she's so old, being 18 months older than the current who has aged about 70 years in his one year in office, which reminds me also that Obama is 65 now. He's still an entire teenager's life younger than Trump. As to Merz... Gee whiz, this is such a shock. A political leader having trouble fending off fascists who are intent on ethnic cleansing in Germany. Come on. Vi, that's impossible. Actually, Vi Mar, that's impossible. Am I right? Friedrich Merz, the Chancellor of Germany. Friedrich is here? Friedrich isn't here. Friedrich is here. Friedrich Merz might as well be Ethel Merz, today's other worst person in the world! The End To the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell, and I thought recently of my friend Norman Lloyd. Norman Lloyd was an actor associated largely with Alfred Hitchcock. He played the saboteur in Hitchcock's Saboteur in 1941. He was Dr. Auschlander in St. Elsewhere in the 1980s, and he appeared in movies as late as 2009. Norman lived to be 106 years old. He went to a World Series game in 1926 and another in 2017, and he remained as sharp as a tack to the end. He could speak with equal fluency about Babe Ruth and seeing him play and about seeing Shohei Otani debut for the Angels. That's how sharp Norman was. Norman said there was a price for long age, and that was to see people younger than you die. He was very practical about this. He was, I think, a little cynical and yet at the same time life-affirming. Norman pointed out that if you were allowed to leave a funeral at its end, that was a good funeral. If you want to be a little bit selfish on that topic, life or death, you're allowed to be. But one thing Norman did not mention about growing old or older, at least, the number of friends who died young and you have succeeded to stay alive and pass their age or sometimes double their age. This is a shock I have yet to adjust to. I have a friend, Glenn Cornelius. I have mentioned him here on the show many times. He was my frenemy before the word was invented at the college radio station. And I named it in part after him when I built them a new one at Cornell at WVR in the previous decade. And Glenn died in 1996. And it's impossible for me to do the math on that. It is impossible for me to think that it's that long ago. And yet it is. And I am now approaching twice Glenn's age. Another friend who died young, not nearly as long ago, and not frankly as young, but who died long ago now, came to mind recently. You may know this name. If not, you should. She was perhaps the most remarkable woman I ever met. Her name was Elizabeth Edwards. She was the wife of the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, Senator John Edwards, who challenged for and did not get the Democratic nomination in 2008, largely on a universal health care program and a bid and a platform for that. In 2004, when he ran for the vice presidency... We could not at MSNBC get an interview with him. We certainly could not get an interview with John Kerry, the presidential nominee. In fact, we could not have gotten an interview with the person at the Kerry-Edwards campaign who would have told us, no, you can't have an interview with either one of them. That's how small we were. MSNBC was the national media joke. and particularly the national political media joke, because year after year, the only thing we had in large volume was new shows. MSNBC specialized in canceling programs, sometimes after one or two episodes. I'll go through the list one day, and you'll see that I'm not being hyperbolic in the slightest. But in the middle of this presidential campaign, where we might have been all the We got an odd request. One day, the executive producer came into me and said, Elizabeth Edwards would like to do an interview with you. She wants to talk about the campaign and then something else she'd like to reserve for the interview itself. And I went, uh-oh, what did I say now? And it was revealed to me at that point that, no, it wasn't like that. It was something positive. So she asked to do an interview and she asked that I be told that it'd be a positive thing, that I shouldn't feel like she was trying to set me up for some criticism or a gotcha moment, which, by the way, I think politicians and political figures ought to do more often with the media. Regardless. Comes the day to tape the interview. We talk about her husband's campaign. I know of her that she is an intelligent and thoughtful woman with a lovely voice and a tragic loss of her son at the age of 16 in a car accident about 10 years prior, I guess. And the fact that she had responded to his loss by taking the necessary precautions and procedures to regain fertility. She was at this point older. Her son had been 16. And this changed her appearance and to some degree changed her appearance, probably not positively, but she didn't care. She wanted another child with her husband, John, because she missed her son that much. Anyway, that's what I knew about her. And we sat down. and did this interview remotely, and we got our part done. And she said, okay, have you got your questions done? And I said, I do. She said, because I have a story to tell you. And the story she told me was about her son, Wade. Wade died in a car accident driving home one day. He just lost control of the car. I don't know if it was because he was a 16-year-old driver. There was no impairment. No one else was injured. He simply drove off the road and his life ended. And that was the whole story. Actually, that wasn't the whole story. Elizabeth Edwards explained that as Wade got closer towards his middle teens, unsurprisingly, he and his mother kind of went their separate ways. It happens to all of us. It happens to the best of us. There was no day-to-day connection as a mother has with her nine-year-old or 10-year-old, and then suddenly it's not there and she doesn't know what to do about it. Somewhere, she said, about 14 or 15, She was sitting at home as a great sports fan would, watching the 11 p.m. SportsCenter on ESPN, me, Dan Patrick, and more importantly, the highlights, when her son came home, walked past her with a grunt, and then turned around and go, can I sit with you? I want to watch that. The next thing she knew, she said, she and Wade were watching SportsCenter every night and laughing at my jokes and appreciating my point of view. And she said, you brought Wade and me back together. And then she told me about his death. And then I thought, well, this is a sad story after all. And she said, no, it's not. Because every time I see you, I think of him. might be the nicest thing that ever happened as a result of something in my career. If not that, there was a story I think I've told before about the father of an autistic boy whose first spoken words came at a ball game when he recited every one of my baseball catchphrases because something about the tone of my voice registered with him he had never spoken before. And like he was fulfilling the old joke, he was In fact, he just never had anything to say before. And suddenly he had all of my he hit the ball real hard catchphrases that he used as his younger brother played Little League ball. That one was pretty good. But I didn't know that family. I came to know Elizabeth Edwards and her story of always being reminded of her son when she saw me and reminded positively has stayed with me ever since. I met her, as I said, only once at the Republican of all things debate one year. I believe it was in the Carolinas. I don't remember where, and I'm not sure why she was there, but she was there. And we sat and talked in the makeup room for about half an hour. And then we got on the phone once later on to talk about her husband's candidacy and the rumors about him and an off-the-record conversation about what the hell's going on. And she said, I don't know what the hell's going on. I know that what is happening with him and what he represents. It is important for him to stay in this race. And I am concerned about health care. And I am concerned about rights for everyone to marry. And I am concerned about the future of the atmosphere. And I am concerned about the future of people who are perceived as minorities in the country. And I am most concerned about the disparate nature of wealth and money in this country as it grows and gets worse. and I am concerned about the rise of fascism in this country. This is in 2007. Elizabeth Edwards called me one day after her husband's presidential candidacy, and in fact his time in politics blew up when the rumors about his infidelity turned out not to be rumors, and the fact that there was a child involved, the child of his loins and somebody else's womb, That turned out to be a fact and all of the stories were true. And Elizabeth Edwards had, with the whole of her heart and all of her sincerity, backed this man. The phone rang. Keith, it's Elizabeth Edwards. I was concerned about her and how she was doing because as far as I was concerned, her husband could jump off a bridge and I probably wouldn't go in after him. I might even stand there and applaud, at least until they fished him out alive, I hope. maybe I hope. And she said, I'm calling a few people. And this is within days of the confirmation that her marriage had been a trick pulled on her by this scumbag, John Edwards. And she called and she said, I'm calling a few friends to explain. And I said, I think as you might explain what she said, why I did what I did. I feel as if I had deceived you and other friends. And I said, are you serious? You were the one deceived. No, no, no. I deceived myself to some degree. It was important to me. He represented and believed in the things that I did. And I could not be a candidate. I did not have the presidential timber that was involved. And I wanted to argue the point with her. She would have made a superb president. She would have made a better president than her husband could have in 15 lifetimes. She would have made a better senator than he did. That's for sure. But she went on and sincerely apologized. And that's when I found out that not only had she made these calls, which are just extraordinary, who else would do this? And apparently there were a couple of dozen of them. And who else would call a member of the media who she'd only known a couple of times? But then again, I had this larger than expected role in her life as a reminder of her son, Wade. So I took the call as the honor that it represented. And then just to make sure that I would always remember her as a fine, honorable, dignified woman who also used a shiv when necessary. She said something off mic, off the telephone, that indicated that her husband was in the room with her as she made these calls. She made him sit there and listen to her apologize for defending him. And I know that with the forcefulness of her personality and her trained lawyer expertise, and she gave up her career for him to support his both as an attorney and as a candidate and as a politician and as a senator, all of that with the expertise that she had and did not use professionally she could rivet him to his seat with one look. And he sat there in his own little preview of hell and listened to his wife apologize to her friends and in many cases their friends because she believed in him and he was not worth believing in. One of the more extraordinary things and one of the more both effective and ethical means of revenge for anybody wronged in a private relationship that I've ever heard of. An extraordinary thing. I don't know who else would have done it, and I don't know how somebody else could have done something like it, but Elizabeth Edwards could. As I said, she would have made a great president. At some point, and I'm not exactly sure when, Elizabeth revealed that she was battling cancer, breast cancer, and had been, I guess, since 2004, maybe even 2003. It had been under control and then in remission and then without symptoms. And then, sadly, it came roaring back. So all that she did on his behalf while he cheated on her, All that she did was while she was sick and managing and fighting and fighting tooth and nail to stay alive for her kids, including the one that she had to succeed weighed in her family, an extraordinary person. And then as it almost always does time and cancer win on December 6th, 2010, Elizabeth Edwards announced she was ending treatment for cancer because the doctors, the oncologists had told her that it would not do any more good. And she put a statement out on social media that I would read to you now. It's only two paragraphs, two of the greatest paragraphs ever written to my mind. December 6th, 2010. You all know, she wrote, that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces. my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times, and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives for all of us are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that, I am grateful. It is impossible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you, I simply say, you know. Elizabeth Edwards, December 6th, 2010. Elizabeth Edwards died December 7th, 2010. And I miss her still. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Our musical directors of Countdown are John Philip Chanel on keyboards and handling the orchestration. Brian Ray on guitars, bass, and drums. Their work is produced by TKO Brothers. Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, is responsible for the satirical and pithy musical comments. When we use the sports music, it's from the Old Olbermann Show from ESPN2, hosted by Old Olbermann, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc., other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today was my friend John Dean. This program was produced by Stevie, Rose, Kit, and Ted, and everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today, day 613. America held hostage again exactly 850 days until the scheduled end of his lame-duck and lame-brained term, unless it ends early due to the unexpected rise of a new political party called Byron Donald Scrubs You From Ford's Theater. If you're listening, remember you can see the whole thing now on YouTube. If you're watching, remember you can just listen to the whole thing wherever you podcast. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Bulletin's as the news merits. Until the next one, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
