A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump is in essence paying to provide Iran with the location of our forces in the Middle East. Our ships, jets, troops.

Trump has just waived part of the embargo against Russian oil. So Iran’s ally Russia can sell MORE oil to India to get more money. Thus Russia can spend that money to gather more  information on where American forces are IN the war. So Russia can give that information TO IRAN, and reportedly is, AND nobody in the Trump Rogue Government is denying it.

Trump is in effect paying Russia, to help Iran attack Americans in this war. And in case you had doubts over Russia's loyalty, its minister to Britain just repeated on television there that it is not neutral in this war, that it is siding with Iran and will help it.,

So, what’s that called again? When you’re fighting a war, and people in your government help a country that’s helping the country you’re fighting the war AGAINST? What’s that called again? Tree Surgery? Trea-Ting? Trea...

Never mind the other problems: we a) have no business being there; b) we are not winning; c) we are going to be there for years or d) Trump is going to have to cut and run or e) Trump's setting us up for an Iranian revenge terror attack here.

And just to follow up on the End-Of-The-World Rapture religious crap motivating dozens of US military commanders, one Senator has actually joined the hallelujah chorus: Senator Cramer of North Dakota says we are there because of a BIBLICAL COMMITMENT to Israel.

Iran: it is far worse than you think.

B-Block (38:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: It's a full scale pie fight over in Fascist Media. Megyn Kelly, Bill Ackman, Nepobaby Tucker Carlson, Grand-Nepobaby Buckley Carlson, and others all attacking each other - it's delightful. Then there's US Weekly's disastrous post about the passing of a celebrity-adjacent figure. And if you haven't heard this you won't believe it. They've managed to position the "White House" sign perfectly behind Karoline Leavitt in just the perfect place so when she stands all the way to her left, it reads behind her... Well, no, I'm going to make you listen to find out.

C-Block (49:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I told somebody this story the other day so now I'll tell you. If you can envision me, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Lester Holt, and Jesse Ventura inside an MSNBC men's room talking about inches - this story is for you. Happily it was about our new president and how he was the tallest man any of us had ever met who was clearly lying about his own height.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: It's literally a disaster of BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS.

Some of Trump’s Troops are being told that it isn't 'war with Iran' - it's a war to start a Biblical Armageddon: “Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth” says one whistle-blower NCO about his commanding officer.

You heard it: a non-zero number of Trump Commanders aren't just fighting an illegal, ill-prepared, ill-fated war against an Iran that posed no realistic threat. To them it's a literal Holy War, start the apocalypse, end times, and then they all get raptured. More than 200 reports of such religious insanity, to a group called MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) and reported by one of my former MSNBC Coordinating Producers, Jonathan Larsen. MRRF is pushing back against us doing the whole Book of Revelations Crusades thing - and the newest development: the religious nuts in the military are holding emergency bible classes for those who may be deployed.

Maybe not Apocalypse Now but Apocalypse SOON. The religious nut jobs are in charge, Hegseth may be in on the delusion, and so: no sign of bad luck in Rapture.

B-Block (35:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The right wing allegation that MAGA Twitter twerp "Gunther Eagleman" only retweets if you pay him; Markwayne Mullin mistakes the smell of plumbing for the smell of war and keeps referring to "President Hegseth", and Weijia Jiang, CBS News reporter and president of the White House Correspondents Association. She and they not only actually insulted every journalist ever by inviting Trump to the Correspondents' Dinner - but he accepted and thinks he's getting an award. Trump is a man who has literally tried to get reporters killed for a decade, and they're going to sit in the same room with him. I guess because Goebbels is dead and is unavailable. I don't usually say 'I really went off on these idiots' but - I really went off on these WHCA idiots.

C-Block (50:00) THURBER'S VERSION OF THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: His magazine-length version of his only non-fiction book, "The Years With Ross" about the founding of "The New Yorker" magazine (and its legendary, almost mythical founder, Harold Ross). It is as hysterical - and sometimes nearly as impossible to believe - as the best of his fiction.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: We rejoin your regularly scheduled Trump-Epstein Cover-up Scandal Show, already in progress! Trump’s disastrous attack on Iran – approved by only 27% of America and barely HALF OF REPUBLICANS, so DIDN'T move the needle that Trumpstein has erupted anew in New Mexico:

The former Attorney General essentially accuses the Trump Department of Justice of SABOTAGING his investigation of Epstein’s Zorro Sex Trafficking Ranch in 2019; of telling him ‘we’ll just take it from here’ and instead burying it. They took all the evidence and simply did nothing. When New Mexico went back a year later and said 'seize the ranch, preserve the evidence' they were again ignored. And after a New York Times deep dive on all the non-sex allegations and involvements, an entire new Epstein realm has opened up: what about the thousands of Epstein's non-sex crimes and co-conspirators? Why hasn't Trump prosecuted them?

Plus, all the attack on Iran did was remind the world that if WE can try REGIME CHANGE in other countries, what’s to stop OTHER COUNTRIES from trying REGIME CHANGE? And I’ll say it again: They called it ‘Operation Epic Fury’ because ‘Operation Epstein Diversion’ didn’t sound War-fightery enough.

And media fails us yet again: CNN will now go the same Bari Weiss Way of CBS. Then again it was three-quarters dead already, and the real crisis is MS-NOW's president thought the future of her network (basically unchanged since we spun off my guest hosts Maddow, O'Donnell and Hayes to give them new shows in 2010) was...Anderson Cooper LOL.

B-Block (43:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Postscripts to the US Olympic Hockey disaster include cheap jokes about Auston Matthews' hairline. Trump flunky Alina Habba retweets a call for violence against a judge. And the Worst Persons GOAT Bill O'Reilly is back from purgatory to win for the first time in years! Right you are, Mr. Mehoffer!

C-Block (58:30) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I told a friend the story of the day I met the incomparable actor and character Walter Matthau and how he used to do impressions of sportscasters - so I'll tell you.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(2:30) BULLETIN: While you were sleeping Trump illegally and unconstitutionally declared war on Iran, began to bomb its cities including Teheran and its parliament and its security council and its military targets and its schools and its ordinary people – and its militia allies in neighboring Iraq. Israel has joined in the assault. To quote Marty Sheen as the president in The Dead Zone: the missiles are flying, hallelujah hallelujah. To quote Trump to President Zelensky: you are playing with World War 3.

Trump has called it a war, USED the term “war” repeatedly, and inanely told Iranians to stay in their homes, which this country is bombing. It is war, he is calling it war, and yet he has sought no congressional approval and Trump is thus acting as a dictator – a military dictator – at this moment. Israel has joined the military action, dubbed "Operation Epic Fury" - because "Operation Epstein Distraction" didn't sound poetic enough

And apparently the FIFA Peace Prize just doesn’t mean anything any more. 

Novel thought: You know what would be right and just? We should have our new war in Iran fought by our new patriotic triumphant flag-waving unbeatable brave American heroes who so inspired us at the State of the Union: The Olympic winning U.S. Hockey Team!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENTS: Trump should be in prison JUST for his new role in the new covering-up of the part of the Epstein files that are about him. Trump. The accusations are against Trump. The memos are about Trump. The investigations are OF Trump. They are missing.

There is a law saying Trump must produce them. He has not. That is, by definition, a cover-up. A conspiracy to BURY evidence. Even if somehow it CLEARED him.

SPECIAL COMMENT No. 2: As the Kash Patel Olympic Scandal expands exponentially, we have buried the lede.

Patel claims he was at the Olympics, working, running American security. Let's suspend our disbelief and say he's NOT lying. If he really was at the Olympics to run American security - WHY WAS HE DRINKING ON THE JOB? Why was he out-of-control drinking with the people he was there to protect?

The experts like my old MSNBC pal Juliette Kayyem are stunned: Security is not allowed to DRINK, during an event, during an Olympics. Not until the entire Olympics were over. ESPECIALLY if you are IN CHARGE of security! If you are hired for security, they put "no drinking" in your contract.

SPECIAL COMMENT No. 3: Why are the US Olympic men's hockey players not only still digging but digging new additional holes? Now it's not just drinking with Patel and laughing at terrible misogynistic jokes by Trump, but all but five of them were used as political props by Trump at the State of the Union, one (Tage Thompson) was photographed in a complete MAGA hat with the Press Secretary, the winning goal scorer is complaining everybody else made it political - and Auston Matthews (a Mexican-American who captains Canada's team and has thus had two of his three countries threatened by Trump) is standing there grinning behind Trump in the Oval Office, disgracing his team and its fans and his mother and his own relatives.

B-Block (47:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Fox's Jesse Watters doesn't want a president who struggles to read (prefers one who can't read at all). The popular internet delusion that the president the last time the Americans won Olympic hockey gold was Reagan (it wasn't). And MAGA internet disease victim Senator Mike Lee says ICE dresses like Mexican Cartels.

C-Block (58:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: As CBS continues to dissolve before our eyes, the sad truth that network news has been collapsing since at least the night in September 1997 when I was summoned by the president of NBC to have dinner with the chief of the MS part of MSNBC with instructions to humor and ignore him because all we wanted was his money.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: In case you somehow missed it, Kash Patel's enablers at the FBI (Fan Boys International) were busily denying he went to Italy for the Olympics just to see the hockey game and jock-sniff the victorious U.S. team when all sorts of video leaked out of the dressing room showing him doing exactly that - dancing, drinking, cringing. And then Patel himself couldn't resist Supposedly we sent 100 agents to help with security and he just had to be there. Guesstimated cost just for his latest stage of his perpetual vacation on our dime? $400,000.

It would be bad - a future administration will probably address it as misappropriation of funds. But what makes it worse is there's a piece by Patel from 2022 complaining about previous FBI directors wasting money on vacation, and a clip about his FBI predecessor Christopher Wray's vacation travel.

Simply impeaching him is insufficient. He needs to go to prison.

NOT THAT TRUMP WOULD DO THAT; THIS IS THE BEHAVIOR TRUMP TEACHES: Trump is a thief and he owes you and me at least 293 billion dollars - and we want it back.

The worst thief in American history - and 270 billion of that is in tariffs. Because on tariffs, the Supreme Court has given him his COMEUPPANCE. Well – it’s given him A comeuppance. Because his new argument for the new REPLACEMENT Monday tariffs was his old argument AGAINST overturning the old Friday tariffs.

But the key thing the Court actually did was give his cult a mortal shock. It is the first official body to give the Trump-Town Guyana Death Cult the message: that he is making this crap up, as he goes ALONG.

--

Plus: an actual good idea from Boris Johnson: to send peacekeepers to Ukraine – NOW. And I’M the guy who thinks the Hockey Gold Medal is a BAD THING. And no, the John Barron who called into C-SPAN wasn’t Trump – he was too coherent.

B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mark Zuckerberg manages to lose a lawsuit before the trial starts, Kid Rock proves he's not charging $5000 for front row tickets by confessing he IS charging $5000 for front row tickets, and Stephen Miller's wife has another one of those Freudian slips that may be desperate pleas for help from inside a bad situation.

C-Block (50:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Baseball has already started so time for my annual explanation: why I don't work for baseball's TV network even though they offered me my own show and I accepted it. It has to do with a big league club threatening them if they didn't renege.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETIN: On his 66th birthday, British police arrest the former Prince Andrew (now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor) on suspicion of supplying confidential government financial information to Jeffrey Epstein. They have 96 hours to decide whether to formally charge him for that or anything else.

And we prosecute no one - least of all our parallel, Trump.

HOURS EARLIER a South Korean court did not sentence insurrectionist former President Yoon Suk Yeol to death, as prosecutors had demanded. He tried to impose martial law on his nation in 2024 in a plot to use spurious charges of election fraud to justify ending democracy there. He gets life in prison.

And we prosecute no one - least of all our parallel, Trump.

AND JUST TO ROUND IT OUT: Overnight, President Zelensky of Ukraine snapped - to some degree, throwing an S-bomb at the Russians after the latest round of Trump-led stalling-tactic phony "peace talks" broke out with no result (or more correctly the result Putin wanted Trump to achieve: delay it all further).

And we did nothing.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Arizona Senate Republicans just introduced a measure to make ICE MANDATORY at polling places this November.

Mandatory. At voting booths.

This November.

No - It won’t pass. This time. 

But this does dispel any MAGA crap that this isn't the goal, that rounding up immigrants isn't just practice. Happily, DHS and MAGA are too busy purging themselves.

Maybe just as importantly: Does Trump look drawn and unnaturally thin in the face? Like, lost a lot of girth in the face - the kind of thing where people who don’t know say “you’ve lost a lot of weight, you look great” – except you don’t? Also he has just confused Harmeet Dhillon for Phyllis Diller.

Standard stuff. But he made a different gaffe that you just can’t write off because it’s new. It’s not something stupid – it’s something he’s misplaced, mentally. The one Trump blunder that suggests he’s getting WORSE: The Penn Station post.

AND HOW THE DEATH OF ROBERT DUVALL mainlines into the death of CBS News and the prophesy of Duvall's most important film: Network. Which you should go watch, today.

B-Block (50:00) PART TWO of my list of the nearly two dozen destructive changes we are now suffering from, in television news and media in general, that we were warned by, by Paddy Chayefsky, by Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and director Sidney Lumet.

C-Block (1:10:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A little out of order, but still really good. Tom Emmer, Minnesota moron. Peter Navarro, economic consultant who doesn't know the Dow Jones number isn't in dollars. And the joy of Candace Owens, so lost she can't pronounce ordinary American English words like "Bureau" and "Grandiose" and as chronicled by one of the best of all Twitter-X follows: @CandaceReading1

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Just because we're paranoid, that doesn't mean Trump isn't out to get us.

Trump has just accidentally revealed crucial details of his conspiracy to steal the midterms. It starts with the cadaver-in-chief, demanding of active troops at Fort Bragg – “you have to vote for us” – that’s in case the Generals or even the Joint Chiefs realize Mark Kelly is right: they HAVE to disobey illegal orders, ESPECIALLY Trump’s illegal orders. If it came to that, Trump would have the raw troops overthrow the generals

And then Trump succubus Kristi Noem vowed to make sure Trump only lets the RIGHT people voting, electing the RIGHT leaders. And he’s already had ICE PRACTICE voter suppression – murder of civilians – in Minnesota.

How do we stop Trump? Talk about it endlessly. Talk about his attempt to make the troops loyal to HIM and not the constitution. Talk about his attempts to seize ballots. Talk about his attempt to use ICE to intimidate voters. Talk about it, now, now, now. Trump is plotting to steal the midterms. We not only CAN stop him -  we have to.

MEANWHILE, HOW MUCH MORE CAN THE MEDIA BETRAY US? Jake Tapper - as guilty as anybody in the business of putting his salary ahead of all journalism - tells us to hang in there? An old boss of mine says something stupid. CBS decides to platform Stephen A. Smith, the Jill Stein of 2026. 

B-Block (55:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: What happened to Congressman Randy Fine demanding the arrest of everybody who enjoyed Bad Bunny's Swear-filled Super Bowl Show? The White House doesn't know how to spell "cue." And enjoying the Olympics? It's all crap - especially what it did to the history of the Olympics and the National Hockey League.

C-Block (1:25:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: More media criticism. This disaster didn't start yesterday. By 2004, when an anchor on MSNBC told one of his viewers - live on the air - to "get AIDS and die" - and his boss said he had to be fired for that, his boss's boss (THE PRESIDENT OF NBC) tried to intervene to save his job.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump has attempted another coup. You may have missed it.

Trump and Jeanine Pirro with the acquiescence of the hapless Speaker of the House and Porn Monitor attempted another coup: Attempted to get Senators Mark Kelly and Elise Slotkin and four members of the House INDICTED for obstructing Trump’s dictatorship. Tried to convict, tried to jail, for imaginary crimes of disloyalty to him that Trump bleated are quote “punishable by death” six military veterans because they told other Americans to follow the law. For expressing fealty to the Constitution, for publicly reminding service members that THEIR allegiance is to the constitution and not some rapidly deteriorating psychopathic despot.

And ordinary Americans in a Grand Jury stopped Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.

For. Now.

Which means the lesson Trump and Pirro and Johnson and the other deputy despots will take away is: next time don’t bother with Grand Juries, just have ICE blast them in the head. What to do to STOP “next time”- what to do RIGHT NOW in the Senate Continuing Funding Resolution - what to do in state houses before the midterms.

PLUS: Trump's either-or: either he Narc'd on Epstein or knew nothing about his crimes. Either way, Trump is now the CEO of the Epstein Cover-up. And maybe even more disturbing, he is actually, seriously, hallucinating. Full-on crazy talk. Not his normal delusions: this is A Chinese plot to destroy the National Hockey League. He thinks this is really happening.

B-Block (37:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: He won Olympic Bronze but was disqualified in the game of life. The three weird sisters are still whining about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl: Megyn Kelly, Sage Steele, Michele Tafoya - the latter of two using language that matches almost word-for-word what was said by racists and sexists who called the ESPN complaint voicemail line to try to get THEM fired. And then there's the Twitter Rando whose 'egg corn' is as delightful as any I can remember. He's complaining about solitaire confinement!

C-Block (50:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In the old days baseball spring training wasn't already unofficial underway as of... last week. It was limited and exciting and one of my joys was going to it and reporting from it. So it's time to try to recreate some of that, because naturally I still have the tape of my 1978 Spring Training reports from Florida!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: When they insist Trump's Thursday night racist video depicting the Obamas as apes wasn’t posted by Trump but by somebody else in the White House – and then he undermines the lie they spread on his behalf by saying he selected the video and had them post it but he just didn’t see the whole thing but so what it wasn’t a mistake they just deleted it – I think each part of that is a lie.

It was a set-up. I conclude that this is not just blatant, human garbage racism, inherited Trump Family Branded racism, but I conclude the entire thing was designed – to whatever degree anything Trump and these scumbags do is DESIGNED – it was DESIGNED to turn out this way. Event happens, justifiable backlash, unrighteous indignation from press secretary Eva Braun, oops it wasn’t supposed to be posted, oops bad staffer, oops Trump comes out at the end of the day and… endorses the original racism anyway, quote, “I didn’t make a mistake.”

And he did it this circuitous way, the way he expresses ALL his racism against BLACK people, because he can’t send ICE after them.

But the point of the video was he was reminding his putrid, hate-driven base that he can't send ICE after them...FOR THE MOMENT.

B-Block (33:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There are actually people in politics and media who for some reason don't see that Jeff Bezos hired Will Allen to slowly destroy The Washington Post (to please Trump) and think this was all some sort of mismanagement, rather than a well-executed plan. Unfortunately at least two of them wrote it on their sites: Jim Vandehei and Dylan Byers. Sage Steele is back with not only anti-athlete, anti-freedom of speech conservative swill, but stuff that is almost a word-for-word duplication of what Laura Ingraham wrote 20 years ago. And incredibly, in Year 11 of the Trump Scam, there's still a guy on CNN thinks Trump just changed his tone.

C-Block (45:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Not to say I've had a lot of jobs but I just remembered one that I had FORGOTTEN: my two weeks as the entire sports department on a New York City newspaper that went daily, while the big papers were out on strike in 1978!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: In destroying The Washington Post yesterday, Trump-fluffer Jeff Bezos has gone far enough. Democratic leaders must commit to using anti-trust laws to destroy Amazon, Prime, Blue Origin - and Bezos, financially. Every would-be president, senator, representative must vow to break the oligarchs - Bezos, Musk, Trump, and all the rest.

Bezos first hollowed out the Post to make it servile to Trump and his gang. Now he's destroyed its foreign and sports desks, and its viability as a counterweight to the anti-democracy forces abroad in the land. All so he could spend $75,000,000 or more on a vanity project designed to tell Trump a life: that his wife is an attractive "movie star."

We are not going back to the America of 1885. We must bankrupt Jeff Bezos.

(And I apologize for the slipshod nature of this episode. I'm under the weather, throat bad, was planning to postpone this episode but this could not wait. Please forgive for the extemporaneous nature of the commentary; the rest of the show is interesting but not new)

B-Block (30:00) OLYMPICS TIME: As the 2026 games begin in Italy let me take you back to the most famous winter games yet: the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, which I covered as a 21-year old rookie with United Press International (while my bosses tried to teach me how to work and drink at the same time).

C-Block (42:00) MORE WITH JAMES THURBER: Continuing the broadcasting theme, his first person story of the timelessness of on-air nerves and the labyrinth that is radio, TV, streaming or any other medium in any century: "How To Relax While Broadcasting."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: So would you like to collapse the Trump Regime? Today? Peacefully? Legally? 

You - the White House press corps. It only takes one of you.

You go into the next Oval Office Scrum, and you ask him politely for his explanation of something released by his administration, by Pam Bondi’s office, on the government website, and you read – quoting this FBI 302 interview file: “Maxwell presented (her) to Trump…by the things Maxwell said, it was clear that (she) was available…”And don’t stop reading and don’t make eye contact. THEN from the sworn affidavit, reed, quote: “I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling the plaintiff that she couldn’t ever say anything, if she didn’t want to disappear like the 12-year old female (redacted) and that he was capable of having her whole family killed…” Quote: “the physical and sexual abuse that I personally witnessed of minor females at the hands of Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein... under penalty of perjury even though I fully understand that the life of myself and my family is now in grave danger” unquote, what SIR is your explanation SIR about when you threatened this girl’s life, sir.

Just keep asking. Don't make eye contact, don't stop, don't stop talking when he starts talking. Just reel off those quotes. And the one about becoming fertilizer. And the "Calendar Girls" story (as nonsensical as that probably is). And all the others. Because we don't always see the escape hatch when it appears before us, and it just appeared.

Because the Epstein Files are part of an official Department of Justice Document Dump. Their contents are Pam Bondi's problem, not you or your lawyer's. And if you don't bear down and do this job as it was designed by the Founding Fathers, you will sooner or later face one of these outcomes: you'll be arrested, you'll be replaced by some automaton Bari Weiss likes, or the country will survive and the next people running media will never consider you for work because you were cowardly when we needed your courage.

Oh and you can peacefully, legally end the careers of Elon Musk and Marco Rubio and Bari Weiss and lots of others. The material is all in front of you. Just have the courage to pick it up and fling it, like he'd fling his poo at you.

ALSO: Don Lemon was arrested not because Jesus but because Trump has always hated him. And if you've forgotten, I explained two weeks ago why Trump was trying to restart the 2020 crap, now sending Tulsi Gabbard to Georgia. They're sitting up not a claim that the election was fixed, but that the election was fixed by another country (hey, Nicolas Maduro, you mind taking the rap, in exchange for a pardon?) and there is no statute of limitations on THAT.

B-Block (34:55) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Harriet Hageman, the blob they elected to the House from Wyoming to replace Liz Cheney, is now running for Senate. Emphasize "running": she has fled a town hill. The Bill Maher Pretzel Logic: Celebrities should shut up, voters don't listen to TV and movie stars. But Bill, you expect them to listen to you. So you're saying you're not a star? And the latest Bari Weiss firing target is supposedly Face The Nation host Margaret Brennan and one of the names being thrown around (probably nonsensically) is Matt Lauer.

C-Block (54:00) MONDAYS WITH THURBER: We need a doubleheader. I heard an audio book with a famous actor doing Thurber's tribute to what would be called Dunning-Kruger Syndrome: "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" and it was one of those rare times when I actually said "No - I did this better." So I bring it to you, and as a bonus, a second great unheralded Thurber story: "Meet Birdey Doggett." Enjoy them at your leisure.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: At this moment, the biggest threat to the future of democracy at this minute is Chuck Schumer.

He and the other members of the milquetoast caucus of Senate Democrats are ready to give away their chance to turn MAGA's panic over the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (and Keith Porter Jr) into a forced re-structure of the entire damnable structure. Instead of demanding a new organization with bipartisan control and a blanket ban on any activity near polling places or in fact in the week before an election, Schumer is willing to sell that for four trivial concessions.

He's willing to forfeit the last chance to get these death squads off our streets in exchange for a "uniform code of conduct," the end of "roving patrols," the discontinuation of masks, and the use of body cameras. Because obviously the threat that ICE's next slaughter of an innocent bystander will be captured on video completely kept these Trump Death Squads from killing Alex Pretti. 

It's beyond Schumer's usual naiveté. It's criminally negligent. He shouldn't just be ousted as Minority Leader, he should be expelled from the Senate. Trump blames Bovino. Bovino blames Noem. Noem blames Miller. Miller blames Border Patrol. Roger Stone blames Lewandowski. Trump blames the 2nd Amendment. They're imploding, Chuck. Get out of their way, you moron.

ROBERT FICO: Slovakia’s pro-Trump prime minister who last year spoke at CPAC (it's pronounced Fitso) was quoted by five Politico sources as having been shaken after a meeting with Trump on the 17th, alarmed by Trump's "psychological state" and convinced Trump was "out of his mind." Denials all around. 

(33:00) BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: If you didn't know, Saturday he wrote an ICE protest song. Uploaded it to social media yesterday. Calls 'em all out by name, including "King Trump." Chills. With Bruce's kind permission, we're playing it in the podcast. Superb stuff. I wish Bruce were Senate minority leader.

B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A News Nation moron reduces the death of Alex Pretti to a "scrum." Melania doesn't know her icons from her iconoclasts. And Katie Miller insists all Conservative women are far more attractive than all Liberal women. You have to give her credit: who knew she had gotten this far with such devastatingly impaired vision?

C-Block (50:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Just past the anniversary, now 45 years, since a famed New York morning disc jockey responded to something I said on the air one hour by threatening to kill me, and then responded to something I said on the air the next hour by trying to hire me full-time on his station. The Ted Brown Saga - revisited.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Alex Pretti may not have been murdered by Trump's Paramilitary Death Squad AS a warning to American governors and mayors and citizens, but the Trump Dictatorship is exploiting the state-sponsored terrorism against a VA Nurse to issue that warning anyway: You "better support President Trump," said Attorney General Bondi. The implied threat that followed was easy to decipher: if you don't, ICE won't leave your city alone and it won't leave you ALIVE.

Bondi's comment came as she explained her (extortion) letter to Governor Walz, offering to remove ICE and Border Patrol from Minnesota providing Walz gives the DOJ records and data and especially his voter rolls. Because it's easier to fix elections if you have the voter rolls. But behind it was the bigger picture: “We sent Governor Walz a very strong letter today. We got it out saying that he BETTER SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP. He better support the men and women in law enforcement because if he doesn’t, we are, and that’s what we’re doing right now.”

The United States of America is at this moment without a functioning government. In place of a government, it has a Trump terrorist organization, enforced by a paramilitary death squad, Proud ICE Boys, masked gunmen, street gangs in Nazi leather trenchcoats. We are without a government and we are without a functioning Constitution and we are without a functioning president. We are destabilized – from within – by state sponsored terrorism. Our OWN state. With our OWN terrorist – the worst terrorist this nation has ever faced: Donald John Trump.

What to do about it? It starts with the Democrats in the Senate not just attacking ICE funding but shutting all funding down, indefinitely. This Trump junta must be broken.

B-Block (35:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: We could devote the segment just to those idiots who defended ICE after the Renee Good murder and are now done, professionally. But we'll limit it to three medalists and some runners-up: two New York Post writers, Tony Dokoupil, Senator Fetterman, Clay Travis, Scott Jennings, Stephen A. Smith

C-Block (47:00) COMIC RELIEF: THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: New year, new round-numbered anniversaries. 30 years ago I was wined and dined by a Chicago radio station that was willing to double my salary and build their franchise around me if I quit SportsCenter. And they convinced me to do it. And then half an hour before I was going to say 'let's make it happen' they... took the station off the air.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: It's the Big Lie Redux. Trump appears to be planning some kind of SHOW TRIALS over the 2020 Election - and Nicolas Maduro might be his key “witness."

He let it slip at the World Economic Forum yesterday. He told the audience in Davos that he will be prosecuting people over the 2020 Election. Never mind that there's nothing to prosecute anybody for; never mind that he lost; never mind that this has already been through the courts: "It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That's probably breaking news." In the last week, he has twice insisted Joe Biden and his administration ‘should be arrested’ and he has now said "we caught 'em." In his fugue state News Conference Tuesday, Trump had a question planted about ‘finding things out’ from Maduro about 2020. And Maduro's role in some nonsensical conspiracy theory may be the real reason Trump had Maduro renditioned from Venezuela – not drugs.

Regardless: all the tea leaves suggest Trump is going to roll out the Big Lie again, this time perhaps with a phony confession from Maduro in exchange for a pardon or something. Trump is insane and desperate, so now he will actually try to focus the Department of Justice and all elected Republicans on prosecuting Biden and others.

You think his Greenland Clown Show is crazy? You think his terrorism in Minnesota is crazy? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

And god help us if it gets any traction. If media pushback were insufficient to counter the tsunami of propaganda Trump and his criminal gangs could generate, he might try to use the subsequent unrest as an excuse to interfere with the midterms or even rationalize violating the constitution and seeking another term.

B-Block (32:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anchors Aweight, Buffalo Bills' owner Terry Pegula, who has fired his coach even though he thinks Sean McDermott did an "admiral" job. Then there's Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer and the accusations of an affair with a staffer on the public dime. She's chosen to be represented by a lawyer named Dr. Nick. And then there are America's two most overrated journalists Jim "What Is A Woman?" VandeHei, and Anderson "You Really Think Trump Is Insane?" Cooper and yes they each actually asked those questions this week.

C-Block (45:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: How different was flying nearly half a century ago? There we were, the president of Cornell University and I, waiting to board a plane from New York to Ithaca and there they were, two airline employees, trying to fix a problem in the undercarriage by stuffing paper towels up into it. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: In Trump’s War against the United States of America, as he readies 1500 members of the 11th Airborne in Alaska to parachute into Minnesota in a bid to provoke Civil War, as he threatens conflict with NATO while being unable to remember America is IN Nato, is the dictator’s next step an attempt to arrest Joe Biden? To indict Kamala Harris? To convene grand juries to pursue the former First Lady and Jen Psaki and Kareen Jean-Pierre and god knows who else?

“Everyone is asking about the Autopen (question mark)” because he’s nearly 80 and he still doesn’t know how to use punctuation marks. It starts with usual Trumpian stupidity and then turns very dark very fast. Quote: “it was an absolutely illegal act perpetrated by the Radical Left Insurrectionists who illegally ran the Biden Administration. Every one of them should be arrested for what they have done… the whole thing was rigged, there must be a price to pay, and it has got to be a big one,” end quote.

This is no longer one of those 'signs of his mental illness' from the 1st administration; this is something one of his whores at the Department of Justice will act upon because a) they ARE whores and b) because they are soft and frankly getting an indictment against Joe Biden for something that amounts to “Being President Without Trump’s Permission” is just easier than confronting the whining pants-soiling Jabba the Hutt with bronzer currently occupying the White House – until the floor beneath him collapses. Possibly – given Trump’s weight – LITERALLY.

MEANWHILE: We are blackmailing NATO and the EU over Greenland, and he is trying to start a civil war in Minnesota. And his minion is caught on tape ordering CBS to run an interview unedited and this clown Bari Weiss is caught complying. 

B-Block (30:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: It HAD to happen some day - and this is the day. All three medal winners are either my exes, or connected to my exes. Katy Tur, Megyn Kelly (God no), Laura Ingraham, Kyrsten Sinema. Lawsuits, journalistic disasters, self-contradictions, and me actually defending Katy's husband.

C-Block (43:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Just passed the anniversary: the day I met the great '60s-'70s-'80s American actress, star of "Bewitched," portrayer of Lizzie Borden, and instant friend for life, Elizabeth Montgomery.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: The newest crimes this week mean he's now committed 32 of the 40 "sins" Thomas Jefferson accused King George III of in The Declaration of Independence:

He's telling those protesting the dead on the streets of Iran that he'll defend them while telling those protesting the dead on the streets of Minneapolis that his 'government' was right to kill them.

He's raided the home of a journalist, trampling the 1st Amendment

He's threatened taxation without representation over sanctuary cities

He's unilaterally cut off visas from 75 countries (including thirteen countries headed here in June for soccer's World Cup) 

Trump has now lost any remaining moral authority to continue as president of this country.  We must peacefully counteract his increasingly repressive and immoral and violent actions and threats and what looks like only two options regarding the midterms and 2028: he wants to either fix the elections for Trumpists or eliminate them outright. Object? He’ll buy you or blackmail you or hire somebody to KILL you. I mean, what are ICE agents if not private paramilitary gangsters, hired by Trump, to kill you? On what Trump promises is “the day of reckoning and retribution” against Minnesota. 

What do we do next?

B-Block (30:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Bill Maher bristles at a joke (well, when was the last time he actually made, or heard, a joke?) There's another new idiot Congresswoman who wants Tim Walz arrested over the murder of Renee Good. And the Fox News writer who believes we are under attack by gangs of ANTIFA WINE MOMS.

C-Block (41:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The "Ford Finger" incident with Trump reminded me of the day the right wing tried to bury Tom Hanks over what they thought was disrespect to staffers at a movie event.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: BREAK the cover-up of the ICE murder of Renee Good:

1) INVESTIGATE regardless -on the state and county levels. 2) INDICT and ARREST the ICE shooter, Jonathan Ross (and the Trump militia members who were with him as accessories). 3) IMPEACH Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem, Ice Director Todd Lyons (and Border Czar Tom Homan. Representative Angie Craig says now the Noem impeachment will proceed). 4) Iif Noem or any other ICE or DHS official continues to stonewall local investigators seeking justice for the murdered women, indict and arrest them for OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. 5) When the Senate takes up the resolution to fund the government past January 30, all Democrats must refuse to vote yes unless ICE is neutered (and Trump's magic war wand as well).

This is a pivotal moment in American history. ICE's reaction to its crimes has been to double down. It is now hiding behind this empty, corrupt demand that we all need to improve the “tone” and when they say “we” they mean “you” and when they say “tone” they mean “any criticism at all.” Tom Homan went on Fox and actually added to this bankrupt bromide, NEW threats. "There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.” Translation: if you keep criticizing us, we will keep shooting you. The acting ICE chief, Lyons, may be even worse. He is daring Minnesota to enforce its laws. “My message to the sheriff is: try and arrest my folks, let’s see what happens.”

What should happen is the sheriff serving warrants to Ross, Noem, Lyons and the rest of their ICE street gang - with the Minnesota National Guard standing behind the sheriff.

ALSO: Why are these fascists so obsessed with killing Americans? It may be the guns. Not the access to them: the physical impact on a shooter's brain by firing a weapon, as established by new tests. Plus updates on Trump doubling down on his Epstein Cover-up, Jim Jordan's moronic decision to let Jack Smith testify in public, and some Trump madness we should encourage. He wants to repel from a helicopter like Navy Seals. Yes please! Do it!

B-Block (32:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: How Will Chamberlain, Laura Loomer, Matt Walsh and the philosopher of MAGA, Catturd, 180'd on action in places like Venezuela once they realized Trump had 540'd. The headline says 'Visas for Only Fans Models' but the article does not. And the only person who thinks Stephen A. Smith is a Democrat or a viable presidential candidate is Stephen A. Smith. Up to now it's been funny and a little sad. But now that he has defended the murder of Renee Good and sucked up to Trump and MAGA, it has to be said: to save the brand that they and a lot of people worked their lives to build, Disney chief Bob Iger and ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro have to fire Smith. Oh and - accordingly - I've re-named Stephen.

C-Block (45:00) MONDAYS WITH THURBER: Only fitting. Next month it will have been a startling 95 years since James Thurber prophesied the advent of Trump. What would happen when America finally lionized its Worst? "The Greatest Man In The World."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: This is Trump’s terrorism; this is the Kent State of our time.

A peaceful, unarmed protestor, murdered by Trump’s ICE, while Trump’s Lie Factory and Trump personally smeared her, blamed her, made up a story of threat where there was no threat, altered images, lied about her, lied about what the Gestapo they sent to kill Americans in American cities did to her.

Two weeks from Saturday, it will be ten years since he said it. January 24, 2016: I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” And once again his stochastic terrorist murderous wish has come true. Only it was on East 34th Street in Minneapolis. One of his Border-Patrol-ICE militia shot and killed Renee Macklin Good. ICE killed her, and then they slandered her.

Trump has his wish. The Trump Administration has begun its shooting war, its reign of terror, against the peaceful and unarmed citizens of the United States. It can be disputed whether Renee Macklin Good was the first. It cannot be disputed that unless Trump is legally restrained, she will not be the last.

And later, the ICE/Border Control militia attacked a Minneapolis high school.

And Trump chose the day of his crime-by-proxy, after the murder, to insist that he has quote “determined” that the military budget for 2027 needs to be increased from the obscene level of one trillion dollars… by FIFTY PERCENT to a trillion and a half. That is the military he wants to use against American civilians on American streets. That is the military he JUST used against American civilians on American streets in Minneapolis.

ALSO: I DON'T MAKE THE RULES. Trump's renditioning of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela means, simply, that any country that would like to send a squad to this country to abduct one of our leaders needs only to have first indicted Trump in their own country - and cut a deal with JD Vance to take over as presidency and swear fealty to their country.

B-Block (29:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Earlier this week seemed to have been dedicated to Trump's most concentrated revelation of his insanity. Tuesday, at a Republican retreat, he hit all the notes, and pretty much cemented the idea that he indeed suffers from anosognosia (an inability to perceive an illness, especially a dementia-related one).

C-Block (37:00) DEATH BY MEDIA: This is just day six of the Tony Dokoupil debacle but if you don't think CBS could bail out of this fast, I was a witness when they took their third most profitable news property - the local CBS News in Los Angeles - and invented a new format called "The News Wheel." It went over so poorly it was cancelled after a month and a day. And since Bari Weiss skipped right past trying to emulate Fox News and went directly to Alex Jones News, they may have to bail out. But there's a whole back story you may not know about. WHY Weiss personally selected Dokoupil to helm this disaster, and why Katy Tur married him.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Trump Administration has begun its shooting war, its reign of terror, against the peaceful and unarmed citizens of the United States. A woman is dead in Minneapolis, killed by ICE, reportedly a legal observer during a raid in a local neighborhood. 

In one statement, ICE claimed the victim was trying to run over an agent; in another it claimed an agent HAD been run over. Neither claim is true. Multiple videos show without a shadow of a doubt that this is a lie. As a car – which was not even blocking a street - moves out of the way of an ICE vehicle, a militia member exits HIS car, approaches the victim’s car from the back and the side, and shoots the driver three times through the driver's window. Reportedly in the face. The shooter is clear of the vehicle. 

Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis has told ICE to "get the f***" out of Minneapolis. Minnesota governor Tim Walz has taken a preliminary step towards mobilizing his national guard, issued a so-called “warning order” to the Minnesota National Guard – as he termed it, a “heads up” to its members that he may call up the Guard.

A full Countdown podcast will follow at Midnight.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well, that's it in sum, isn't it? He's "El Presidente" now, isn't he? Military Dictator. Succeeding Maduro. Until he finds somebody else to “run” it. Not the elected Vice President. Not the actual winner of the last election. Not the U-N. Maybe somebody he, in his dysfunctional haze, somebody he can trust. Maybe an oil executive. Or Elon Musk. Or Catturd. 

The invasion was illegal there, and illegal here. The kidnapping was illegal. Declaring we would run it is illegal. Naming a proxy dictator is illegal. As was his threat yesterday to the acting president that quote “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” and calling for her belief that her country shouldn’t be invaded by another country breaking its own laws is quote “defiant rejection.” THAT’S illegal. It’s all illegal. That’s a lot of illegal – even for Trump. And I say this, hating Maduro completely.

So he needs to be impeached, if not now then a year from now. Rubio can be impeached now for deceiving Congress about its approval. And both of them turned over to the World Court. And the ramifications are almost uncountable, including emboldening them to consider this in Cuba, Greenland, Iran. The poll numbers are terrible, and the risk to Americans of terrorism and violence are just as terrible. And maybe worst of all the evidence of linkage between Putin's strange silence about his ally Maduro, and Trump's dithering about Ukraine, is terrible too. 

But at least it produced a pretty good Olivia Nuzzi joke.

ALSO: WHY DID THEY CHANGE THE TRUMP HEALTH COVER-UP STORY AGAIN? Five significant changes, about his MRI/CT, his cardiovascular health, and now the total of Cognitive tests he's gotten in just the last nine months. Three? Not two? He's really needed three tests in nine months? To repeat the insightful question from his niece Mary Trump: Why do they have to keep giving him cognitive tests?

B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There's begging the new boss to let you keep your current job, then there's what CBS Legal Analyst Jan Crawford is doing for Bari Weiss to try to keep hers. Chuck Schumer comes out firing on Venezuela: with one-millionth of one barrel blazing. And just when you think Cheryl Hines can't get any dumber, Tucker Carlson tries to talk to her about vaccines.

C-Block (50:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Will Ferrell did a great comedy bit at the L.A. Kings hockey game on New Year's Day and he did it for the pure joy of it. Which reminded me of the difference between amateurs and pros, and of the days when "Anchorman" was new and Will and I ad libbed a pretty good comedy bit that he said he really loved doing. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two months ago, in an interview, Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles "conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. Quote: "If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.'"

She was entirely right. Yet overnight Trump invaded Venezuela and seized its leader Nicolas Maduro. To paraphrase his own chief of staff he DID authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.'" AND TRUMP BROKE THE LAW AND BREACHED THE CONSTITUTION. 

And this morning he and his hapless Vice President JD Vance confirmed this is as much about seizing oil - as much about increasing the profits of American corporations - as any supposed "narco-terrorism."

Without any Congressional consent, Trump did this - anyway - from inside his madness, from within his monomaniacal delusional fog - without any legal right to do so - without any legal right THERE and without any legal right HERE. On his own. Without congressional approval. Without the nation's approval. Without even the flimsiest of the fig leaves of democracy. Without any international consensus. Without any concern for the consequences. Without any consideration of the precedent he provides China in Taiwan and Russia in Poland and any other tyrannical bandit nation anywhere in this world.

And we, thanks to Trump, we - the United States of America - are now that tyrannical bandit nation.

It is important to note that on the simple, theoretical scale of who should remain as the leader of a failed rogue state, there is no defense for Nicolas Maduro. There is overwhelming evidence that he fabricated his latest quote “re-election” after first denuding the opposition and the law within his country. Again, by those tokens Trump has just put us on that identical path. And the idea that a country is suffering under a dictator who has no moral right to continue can be said even more easily of Putin. And of Xi in China. And dozens of others, many of whom Trump considers friends, about whom he makes no distinction. Maduro has no moral right to continue as president of Venezuela, and Trump has no moral right to act upon that by himself. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Why isn’t Trump bombing RUSSIAN terrorist scum who have been targeting and viciously killing innocent Christians in UKRAINE?

I mean now that our White Supremacist Theocratic Bandit government has gone into the Crusades business; now that per Trump we’re bombing to kill ISIS terrorist scum “who have been targeting and viciously killing...innocent Christians” in NIGERIA, shouldn't yesterday's meeting with Zelensky have been about how Trump is going to protect the Christians in Ukraine - and Ukraine is an 85% Christian country - by bombing the Russian terrorist scum who have been targeting and viciously killing innocent Christians IN Ukraine?

I'm not holding my breath. But since it's obvious that yesterday all Trump did was stall, just as all he's been doing since he again seized power is stalling on Putin's behalf (he even took a call from Putin 72 minutes before the Zelensky meeting began), isn't this tack supporters of Ukraine and Europe and world freedom who aren't morons like Trump or Rubio who think 'it's not our war because OCEANS' (a logical argument as long as this is the year 1909) should now take?

ALSO: THE TRUMP PARDON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? It seems brand new. In fact there was a lawsuit alleging Rudy Giuliani told his girlfriend he and Trump were selling pardons for $2,000,000 apiece as long ago as 2019. And we check in MAGA stupidity, how even Brian Krassenstein trolled them, and why on earth Stephen Miller would think the term "sexual matador" is a compliment given how much he hates Mexicans and Spanish-speaking people like, you know, Matadors.

B-Block (33:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Somebody actually tries to insult the Pope by calling him "Holier Than Thou"; WSJ has a piece blasting Jack Smith written by the first lawyer Trump hired to defend himself against Jack Smith, the ironically named "James Trusty"; Trump is finally hoisted on his lawsuit petard. If we damaged you financially or emotionally, says the Pulitzer Prize Board, we're going to know by how much so we'll need all your fiancial and emotional health records.

C-Block (46:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: What did you get for Christmas? I got a Baseball Cap! From Ted Turner! Of course, this is Christmas 1982 I'm talking about. The saga of Ted, my first tv job, and what might have been my last tv job after he and I argued in public. But it ended happily - with baseball caps for Christmas.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: TRUMP BLOWS UP THE EPSTEIN DEAD WHALE - AND WHY DID HE NAME IT TRUMP MEMORIAL?

Remember when they blew up the eight-ton beached whale carcass in Oregon in 1970? Tons of dynamite, they figured it would vaporize the poor dead creature and any pieces left over would be devoured by birds? And instead they sent chunks of hard blubber a hundred feet in the air and actually crushed a car and left debris everywhere?

That's what Trump just did to the Epstein Scandal. Trump doxed victims. Published and then deleted photos of himself. Planted photos of Bill Clinton and got caught. It’s raining chunks of Epstein dead whale blubber on the White House AND TRUMP. 

And I know this is semantics. But why did Trump re-name it ““The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy MEMORIAL Center for the Performing Arts”  That means it’s the Donald J. Trump Memorial Center. Why did he name it TRUMP MEMORIAL? Did I miss a bulletin or something?

AND IN MEMORY OF PETER ARNETT: A colleague of mine the day I started full time in television at CNN in 1982 and the day I started full time in news in 2003, he was a great reporter because he could tell the truth about Vietnam, sneak into Afghanistan, cheat death, and then when nothing big was happening would go cover a snowstorm in Manhattan or counsel a rookie sportscaster who needed advice. 

B-Block (28:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Mehmet Oz has an update on the great challenge of inflation in the penis market, Riley Gaines (America's favorite 85th Place Finisher) has podcast news, and Lindsey Halligan misspells "Virginia." At least we THINK she meant Virginia.

C-Block (36:00) CHRISTMAS WITH THURBER: Haven't done any lately and there is a holiday coming so here goes. My favorite - and the first Thurber story I ever read aloud ("A Box To Hide In"). His best known ("The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty") and the one that inadvertently brought me into the 'official' Thurber fold ("The Peacelike Mongoose").

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump is drowning.

Trump’s presidency is DROWNING.

Yesterday, it was Republicans forcing a vote to extend Obamacare subsidies. Yesterday, 38 PERCENT approval in the Marist poll. Monday, his Rob Reiner tweet that appalled even the worst of MAGA. Tuesday, Susie Wiles. Friday, the Epstein Files, proving: no, history doesn’t repeat itself but yes, sometimes it LITERALLY rhymes.

The Venezuela Wag-The-Dog episode collapsed before it started. It's about Narco-terrorism, whatever the eff that is? Oil? Stuff they stole? Nuh uh. For the first but not the last time we turn to Susie Wiles for the, uh, well, it’s a strange word to use about the Trump administration but here it is: TRUTH. "He wants to keep on blowing boats up until [president Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will." She also single-handedly ended the just-forming prosecution of Jack Smith, and the vowed prosecution of Anthony Fauci, and the already-moribund prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James and Adam Schiff and and and…All those cases will be thrown out of court. All of them. Because Susie Wiles is on tape saying quote “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution but when there’s an opportunity he will go for it.” About Comey, quote: “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Trump’s chief of staff. Confirming it’s retribution. And retribution means selective prosecution and selective prosecution is illegal and you not only get the case thrown out, if you’ve had to defend yourself or your reputation has been hurt, you can sue the government. And it’s on TAPE.

So why did she say it? Why did she think she could get away with it? Because inside the White House even the Chief of Staff knows Trump is drowning. And they are beginning to distance themselves from him.

B-Block (27:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Laura Ingraham doesn't know Niagara Falls is in Ontario or Ontario is in Canada or that Premier Doug Ford isn't an American. I make bad choices in Exes. And these MAGA idiots just cannot see anything in the world any more without trying to force it into their brain-dead templates: it MUST be political and it MUST be an attack on Trump. New York City councilwoman Vickie Paladino "knows" the terrible shooting was an attack on Republicans at Brown University, and the moronic troll "Cat Turd" is sure they're wiping the shooter's social media history clean (which is an idea he should execute).

C-Block (37:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I'm off by only four days from the exact anniversary, but it is now 42 years since I first met and interviewed Trump and I know most of us who knew him before knew he was nuts, but I must give myself credit. An hour after that meeting I was asking a colleague "what the eff is wrong with THAT guy?"

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The president of the United States is celebrating the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. It is at first impossible to believe that what follows isn’t satire. Then it becomes heart-breaking that it isn’t satire. Then it becomes infuriating. Finally it becomes more evidence that every minute this man is permitted to REMAIN president – the rest of us – the rest of us in the WORLD – are in mortal danger.

Trump really believes that Rob Reiner “passed away… due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with… Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump’s ability to make everything about HIM – his need to be, as the old dark joke goes, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral – is not some kind of act. You will recall his reaction to 9/11 – that it made HIM the owner of the SECOND tallest building in downtown Manhattan, not just the third. It crested when he publicly speculated that a baseball player broke his ankle because he sold his apartment in a Trump building.

It is called Shallow Affect and it means in essence that you do not KNOW how actual normal humans interact nor what causes the events in THEIR lives. You cannot CONCEIVE of their lives. You look at a picture of the world and you see only you. You look in a mirror and you correctly see YOU but you are firmly convinced that when OTHERS look in THEIR mirrors… they ALSO see only you.

Human beings do not believe these things. Trump does. It means he can believe - and do - anything.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump’s losing streak has hit 27 days. His LATEST losing streak.

MAGA knows it. The Head of the Republican National Committee knows it. The Wall Street Journal knows it. The Indiana GOP knows it. The Ukrainians know it. Anybody who saw his pathetic credit-grabbing disinformational tweet Saturday night after the Brown shooting knows it. His own economists know it. The terrorists know it.

Even TRUMP knows it.

Since the house passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19th Trump has been SINKING. In quicksand. SINKING. And not more than one or two of his more insane more desperate colleagues even getting close enough to hand him a rope, for fear of being pulled down with him. 

They are beginning to blame him. “We are facing almost certain defeat,” says the purulent face of the RNC Joe Gruters, about the midterms. Then, “this is an absolute disaster.” Then “There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a pending looming disaster headed our way.” Then, I think quoting me quoting the late football owner Al Davis, “the chances are Republicans will go down and will go down HARD.”

Just lose, baby.

And boy, has he been losing. On affordability. In the Miami election. In the Georgia state house election. On affordability. On telling you to buy your daughter only two dolls. In Indiana. About Somalia. In his "peace" deal in the Middle East. In Thailand. In Syria. In Ukraine. About ObamaCare. About Alina Habba. About Kilmar Abrego Garcia. About the National Guard troops in L.A. 

And mostly about Epstein. Those four photos show nothing and would normally would therefore MEAN nothing. But they form a reminder that Trump tried to stop you from SEEING photos of him with Epstein. That THOSE photos weren’t PART of the tranche in the files, doesn’t matter. It only raises a kind of instinctive speculation about how much WORSE those OTHER Epstein-Trump photos are. It keeps the Epstein story alive when Trump COULD HAVE killed it, weeks ago, months ago. But he knew better. And now we get an endless scandal that only has to promise shocks to self-perpetuate. Trump used to win with those. Now he's losing.

Because he's Donald Trump. Donald - with 47 L's.

B-Block (30:30) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Anna Paulina Luna, member of the U.S. Congress and top Russian influencer? Governor Josh Shapiro is so stuck on bipartisanship he's bothsides-ing political violence (including the day the fascists firebombed his family). And Howard Lutnick with the greatest self-contradiction of the year.

C-Block (38:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: A tragic event on the streets of New York 65 years ago led to me winding up in the authorized biography of the creator of Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl. He was a complicated and controversial figure but he did great things too - like encourage any kid he interacted with. Including me!

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: As Trump threatens the New York Times with sedition and treason charges and tells finance clowns and his government goons that he gets to choose who gets to be on CNN and what they get to say, we are at the tipping point.

The first news reporter who stands up to his insults and calls him out to his face in public will get fired - and within 48 hours get a new job paying twice as much or more, and will become a national hero.

America is crying out for somebody to take the risk that isn’t really a risk and tell him to shut the hell up and to EFF off and to SHOVE his A++++ economy and his threats and stochastic calls for destruction and violence. It is time. NOW NOW NOW.

The tragedy here of course is that it is accepted, inside the news business, without a second thought, that there is nothing reporters – even bad ones – can do about this without risking their careers and lives. Bull. The first one who gets told “You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you -- you are an obnoxious -- a terrible reporter” and replies “So what? What does that have to do with my question? Nothing. And, with all due respect SIR, the majority of this nation considers you a failure as a president. And what does THAT have to do with your answer? The one you DIDN’T just give? NOTHING. The majority of this nation thinks you are vindictive, stupid, hypocritical, hateful, destructive, soul-less, and quite probably losing your sanity. I’M a terrible reporter? You’re the worst government leader in the history of the western hemisphere.”

B-Block (32:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Sean Duffy wants you to wear a suit to the airport and...work out in it before you get on the plane? Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale calls for public hangings and says without irony or self-satire "If I'm in charge later..." OK, you first. And Missouri congresswoman Ann Wagner, in the middle of redistricting gerrymandering, turns out to not know the name of the third largest city in the state capitol district and thinks that city is in California.

C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Somebody asked me how I felt about Chris Matthews being back on MSNBCNOWWHATEVER with Joe Scarborough and I actually said I felt sorry for Scarborough. Then I told them the saga of Chris, co-anchoring a funeral with me, drooling over Jennifer Granholm. On the air. So I'll tell you.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: It’s not simple gaslighting about the price of gas: It’s neurological disintegration; obsessive repetition of the same lie. He has now - for the 14th time in 28 weeks - announced with shock and excited surprise that gas has "just hit" $1.98 a gallon (or "$1.99" or "under $2.00"). It's not just a lie; it's something he heard, could not understand in the first place, and is repeating at regular intervals as if he just heard it moments earlier.

It is a classic sign of neurological crisis. And it is proof that invoking the 25th Amendment is imperative. And won’t happen. Any more than Trump realizing he already TOLD that lie.

ALSO: Jack Smith still has a way to make the second half of his report convicting Trump public, while it turns out he tried to get rid of Aileen Cannon a year ago. It is also becoming increasingly apparent that ESPN's Stephen A. Smith may be the Jill Stein of 2028 - a stalking horse pretending to be a Democrat while being pushed by fascists. We know this much: he's mailing it in. He thinks the name of the governor of Florida is named "Ron Santis." 

AND TRUMP AND MELANIA talking about "Pile Driving" at night in the White House? That must be the first time in eighteen years.

B-Block (35:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Shamwow guy is back and, what else, running for Congress as a MAGA because he can't keep this up all day. Bari Weiss obviously never saw the Mary Tyler Moore Show: she's fired her old CBS News Anchors before she's fired her NEW CBS News Anchors. And Jake Tapper really does it: after he put his thumb on the scale for Trump in the Biden debate and wrote a book and sold it on CNN about Biden's acuity, he's defending Trump's mental instability.

C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Hal Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees whose franchise has increased in value by three billion in just the last four years, is trying to convince people that maybe the Yankees aren't profitable. This is clownage as old as sports itself: the saga of the year the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers insisted "we lost two million last year!"

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: There are three critical headlines: Trump has now convinced me he is sick, the way President Woodrow Wilson was sick. Once again it looks like Tuesday's cabinet meeting attendees were warned: praise him today because he may not recognize you tomorrow. It's Anosognosia and it's why Trump can convince himself that of course nobody knows what body part the MRI they just got was for. They never tell anybody what the MRI is for. What are you, an idiot?

Secondly, with his nauseating attack on Somali-Americans of Minnesota yesterday and Tuesday, we will no longer accept any debate on this point: Donald Trump is a full-on White Supremacist, a racist who is no longer hiding it, who cannot continue as president. The hood is OFF.

And thirdly, it is increasingly obvious that the Democrats must have put out that Do-Not-Obey-Illegal-Orders video when they did because there a chain of evidence has come to light suggesting the September 2 kill-the-boat-survivors order from the Secretary of War Crimes…was an illegal order, right?

Plus, the racist reaction to the DC shootings will remind anybody in the next Afghanistan whose help we need that any promise we make to them, we will break. Thank you John Ratcliffe and Trump.

B-Block (35:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The Department of Labor couldn't decide which would best enhance its Lincoln meme: the stars from the Confederate flag, or the font the Nazis used. So they chose both! Bari Weiss wants more main stream charismatic figures for CBS News. You know, like Alan Dershowitz. And not to say Larry David destroyed Bill Maher's life with his article about Bill breaking bread with Trump ("My Dinner With Adolf") but Maher is complaining about it again. The article was in APRIL.

C-Block (56:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: The passing of the greatest Production Assistant in SportsCenter history, future stand-up comic Steve "Sarge" Pickman. And that little Nuzzi-Lizza story now extends to illegal taping, erasure of evidence, what might be the worst reviews for a political book this century ("Olivia Nuzzi's Tell-Nothing Memoir"), a series of rebuttals so long that it could become the basis for a Ken Burns Documentary series - and the under-reported news that Nuzzi's contract with Vanity Fair expires in four weeks. There's no need to fire her, she'll just fade away over the holidays.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-BLOCK (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well here's a switcheroo. For the first time in more than a decade, the far right and the far left and everybody in between are in full agreement: NONE OF US knows… what the hell is wrong with Trump.

Trump was so smitten with Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani that by Saturday he was DRESSING like Mamdani; a neat black overcoat that fit him – and a red scarf that enveloped his neck – hair, combed with something other than a garden claw. And remember: some far right commentators had almost expected that when Mamdani arrived at the White House he would be greeted by Trump and Tom Homan and hooded ICE gestapo agents who would fabricate some story about Mamdani lying on paperwork, seize him, and expel him. They expected Mamdani to leave the Oval Office in chains; instead, Trump left the Oval Office in love.

AND NOW MARGE GREENE is out, and Laura Loomer is asking 'why bother to vote next year?' and Charles Gasparino is saying the wheels are off the Trump presidency and even the MAGAs think Trump has gone nuts and it's over. It's not - but it's nice to watch them squirm. Plus the Kash Patel/Girlfriend/SWAT team fiasco and even the Ukraine proposal literally written in Russian by Russians has embarrassed them. It's fabulous.

PLUS A NEW THOUGHT ON TRUMP'S INEXPLICABLE MRI. Maybe he really doesn't know what happened. Maybe he has anosognosia, the disease that makes it impossible for you to acknowledge or even remember that you have a disease. Maybe they told him why he got that MRI - and he immediately blocked it out.

B-BLOCK (34:00) YOUR LATEST NUZZI DOOZY NEWS. Yes, the big screaming uh, RECYCLING headline is gross. But it's not the real story. The real story is: Ryan Lizza now claims that for a year, before the election, while she was working for New York Magazine, my ex was doing Catch and Kill operations on RFK's behalf. Very bad news for all involved. And that she told him if anybody ever found out about her and Bob, he'd kill her. She exaggerates, but he doesn't think this was one of those. Plus, Vanity Fair is about to get rid of her. Feel free to skip this update.

C-BLOCK (1:02:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Rookie Chicago cop shoots himself in the silver bullets, the Ellisons are willing to fire any CNN anchor Trump doesn't want in exchange for him letting them buy CNN, and Laura Loomer and Catturd are so stupid they fell for the oldest joke in the "Arabic" book.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-BLOCK (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump is now a lame duck.

A lame Donald. A lame duck Donald. A lame Donald Duck. I like it.

It’s not just that MAGA stood up to him and a GOP/Democratic coalition beat him 427 to 1 on Epstein. It's that that was something even most of the Washington political media industrial complex can understand, can process, can WRITE using the cliches in which they trafficked until Trump and his unprecedented madness came along. This looked all too familiar and they jumped on it with both feet and the same cliché: LAME DUCK.

Fortune used it. NBC. Semafor. The National Review. Nate Silver's site asked "Is Trump A Lame Duck?" CNN's went further: "Is Trump A Lame Duck NOW?" It's so bad there was a Politico Lame Duck Listicle! "Seven signs Trump is losing his groove." And then the final nail: “It’s Official: Donald Trump is a lame duck by President”by Chris Cillizza, part of his weekly conversation with Chuck Todd.

It's never over til it's over, Yogi, but it's over.

B-BLOCK (25:00) SPECIAL COMMENT: I'm the character in The (Latest) Olivia Nuzzi story who gets shot in the first scene, but I still know more about her than almost any outsider and there is a lot to correct on her epically bad book excerpt in Vanity Fair, and the riposte by the more recent ex, Ryan Lizza, who was apparently told by Olivia that I was stalking her at the same time as Olivia was telling me there was a guy in Washington stalking her, named Ryan Lizza. The Nuzzi News is a Doozy and we all lose. This was to be a comeback; now she'll need an entirely new comeback to come back from her come back. And how does Vanity Fair keep her employed after the Mark Sanford accusation made her explanation of her RFK Jr lies into a separate lie?

C-BLOCK (1:00:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump accuses himself of rigging the 2020 census. It was in July, but Bill O'Reilly insisted that Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted by Biden and Garland, and refused to correct himself even after he was reminded Epstein died during Trump's first presidency. And Bill Maher says he's giving up touring because people who are half as funny are selling twice as many tickets. Who does he mean? The New York Jets?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: So, will he?

I mean you don't think he's serious about WANTING them released, do you? He's just trying to avoid a 100-vote defeat. Note he hasn't asked the Senate to pass a bill. And he's already throwing out "what can be legally released" caveats - like he cares. And Trump is still threatening to prosecute President Clinton. He's thrown Marjorie Taylor Greene under the bus. He's destroyed the House and the DOJ. He's invoking The Streisand Effect and insisted we all stop talking about it. His Government Shutdown ran out of gas - what does he do now? He's terrified of what's in there, to the point where Senator Chris Murphy said it's enough to potentially end his presidency.

I mean Alexander Haig and others told Nixon to burn the Watergate tapes, in public, with the media present and Haig says Nixon asked him to do it but Haig demurred and later says it was the biggest mistake ever.

So? Will Trump destroy the Epstein Files? Burn them, bury them, dump them, or order Kash Patel or Pam Bondi or just Walt Nauta to do it? And can Democrats make Epstein and what is at minimum Trump's protection of pedophiles the centerpiece of the midterms? To explain to voters that burying the files is why Trump is gerrymandering and trying to fix or cancel those midterms?

If he doesn't destroy them, does he destroy the process by which they could get out? Does he destroy what's left of democracy? The full monty of authoritarianism? 

And as an aside, when he was even willing to change the topic from Epstein to his MRI last month, did anybody else note that he made a remark as crazy as anything ever said by - anybody? That he had no idea what part of his body they MRI'd but he had the greatest MRI ever? What if he's not crazy, lying, or unable to understand what an MRI is? What if that's true? Was he unconscious? Sedated? Did they just surprise him? What are the implications for the theories that he's being treated for some form of dementia?

Or: Maybe they MRI’d Trump looking to see if he stuffed the Epstein files up his...assisted living facility.

PLUS: The self-beclowning of Stephen A. Smith continues. He can't figure out why Gavin Newsom and AOC and other Democrats won't come on his new political podcast: "I'm A Right Wing Dupe." And Olivia Nuzzi's new book is about to arrive and I have only one detail to address, but I have two big fears. What if her publicity tours include interviews with Ingraham on Fox and Tur on MSNOW? Lol

B-Block (34:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: JD Vance wants us to believe all those undocumented immigrants are stealing SNAP benefits, eating pets and driving up home prices by snapping up $500,000 houses. It seems like Eric Trump just said his wife charges him a fee to have a glass of wine with her. And Megyn Kelly explains Jeffrey Epstein wasn't technically a pedophile and the age of the victim makes a difference, after a career filled with her screaming at anybody else who suggested exactly the same thing.

C-Block (45:00) IN MEMORY OF MISHU: It's the fourth anniversary of the month my late hospice puppy with the incurable, untreatable heart condition, taught me one of the meanings of life. I like to remember him; I hope you'll remember him with me.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: From beyond the grave Jeffrey Epstein has accused Trump – and there’s a smoking gun and maybe four of them.

The allegations that one of Epstein’s female victims “spent hours at (Epstein’s) house with (Trump)…” that Trump was “that dog that hasn’t barked” and he “has never once been mentioned”… those specific allegations, MADE by Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 and acknowledged by Ghislaine Maxwell minutes later. And now, Trump and his Republicans – especially Speaker of the House Mike Johnson – and his MAGA enablers – and his Fox News propagandists – are complicit in another extraordinary, disgusting cover-up: cover-up of pedophilia, a NEW cover-up - right now - playing out in real time as Trump tries to blackmail Republicans into burying the Epstein FILES. A cover-up, most of all, of Trump’s GUILT.

Trump is guilty and Epstein has provided the evidence.

And now we turn to the real crisis for Trump. If what the Democrats released yesterday had been the worst thing in the files, Trump could've held a news conference explaining it all away and welcoming full release. Instead he went into full panic and dragged Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room to try to bully her into removing her name from the discharge petition. Didn't work. Now reportedly 100 Republicans in the House will vote for discharge and against Trump and a MAGA lynchpin has declared MAGA is dead.

So what is next? What if Trump pardons Maxwell, or commutes her sentence, it will cost him his presidency. Because a pardon or commutation of her would amount to a confession by him.

So what MORE is in the Epstein Files? To what lengths will Trump go to stop the release of the files? And when will Trump’s role in the Epstein Crimes, in his past cover-ups of them, in his current cover-up of them, in his cover-up of whatever he is guilty of - when will the true horror of Trump’s guilt become so overwhelming, so disqualifying, that Republicans will have to make the choice between covering up for Trump or saving THEMSELVES?

How much time does Trump have left before Epstein destroys him?

AND AN UPDATE ON TRUMP'S ACCELERATING DEMENTIA: He wants troops sent to a place that doesn't exist. "The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago," he wrote. There IS no "Miracle Mile Shopping in Chicago" but there is one in Monroeville, PA, and if Trump wants to send troops into Chicago to protect Monroeville he's further gone than we have ever imagined.

B-Block (37:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Some late quotes from the Democratic Quislings Jeanne Shaheen and Dick Durbin, and Independent (from reality) Angus King. Bill Pulte and the 50-year mortgage and the lowered standards for getting one. And America's Sweethearts, Kash Patel and Alexis Wilkins and Alexis is suing three MAGA podcasters and being attacked by Candace Owens.

C-Block (49:30) GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Quislings. Traitors. Cowards. Capitulators. Collaborators. Fakes. Frauds. Enablers. Betrayers. Failures. Political Prostitutes.

Senators Durbin, Kaine, Fetterman, Shaheen, Cortez-Masto, Hassan, Rosen, and King need to be expelled from the Democratic party and any that mistakenly think they have a chance of retaining their seats must be primaried. Must be.

They are not progressives, they are not pragmatists, they are not even moderates.

They are fools.

Their careers must be ended. Now. Durbin, Kaine, Fetterman, Shaheen, Cortez-Masto, Hassan, Rosen, and King. Now. Done. Forgotten. Let us hear their names no more.

Last night these eight Senators voted to fold, without any pressure, without any bribe, without anything. They voted to kick millions of Americans off ObamaCare in order to reopen and fund the government – for only three months, mind you – in exchange not for magic beans but just the promise of a vote in which they’ll GET magic beans – a vote ON the health care subsidies - IF half a dozen Republicans defy Trump. A vote about magic beans. Which they won’t win.

Their rationalizations were pathetic and suggested their familiarity with the reality of the Senate, of Trump, of the Republican Party, was less than that of the average Senate Page.

What's worse is, this happens now as the reality becomes more and clear: Trump’s mind is gone. It’s so bad even The Washington Post noticed. It’s so bad The Washington Post even put it on their front page.

He’s hyping weight loss drugs. In The Oval Office. And how he and he alone can bring down their price. And a weight loss patient there to extoll weight loss drugs and say how safe they are and praise Trump’s wonderfulness… collapses. Folds. Drops, slow-motion, like a deflating inflatable tube man at a used car sales lot.

Trump – whose mind is gone - not only doesn’t help the guy on the floor… he’s offended he upstaged him. And then Trump – whose MIND IS GONE - falls asleep. For the second time.

Or as The Washington Post put it: “A Closer Look At Trump’s Apparent Struggles To Fight Off Sleep In The Oval Office” read the Post headline. “A Washington Post analysis of multiple video feeds found that the president spent nearly 20 minutes apparently battling to keep his eyes open…” 815 words follow. And four pictures. One of Trump – whose mind is gone - with one eye closed. One with one eye closed and two fingers rubbing it. One with both eyes closed. One where you can almost SEE the snoring.

Even. The Washington Post. Knows It.

Let’s step back from the nuts-and-bolts of the government shutdown to try to process how it was perceived by Trump…whose mind is gone. HE thought it would be a GOOD idea to cut off food stamps so lines at soup kitchens would get longer just as it was getting cold. He thought the correct political move as the Holidays approached was… government-sponsored starvation. He believed that the country would praise him for… gradually shutting down all air travel – including all air travel FOR HIS SUPPORTERS – first for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas and New Year’s.

He thought these were good political moves.

SPORTSBALLCENTER (30:00): Yes, legal gambling could send two Cleveland pitchers to jail for 65 years. But no, they didn't actually make a Shohei Ohtani Used Jockstrap baseball card.

B-Block (38:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Politico thinks the first thing a Mayor-Elect of New York has to do is answer questions about the 2028 Senate elections. The Breaker media newsletter finds the New York Times fricasseeing its own digital books. That's right: FIFA isn't just polishing Trump's knob, it's inventing a "Peace Prize" so it can polish it harder. And Dr. Oz wants you to lose 400 pounds by the midterms.

C-Block (55:00) WHY I'M NOT A HOCKEY ANNOUNCER: One of my favorite sportscasting stories: how my budding career as a plucky pucky play-by-play guy was thwarted when the team we were broadcasting "forgot to rent the rink" - and how I avenged myself.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Do you want to hear the real lesson of this week’s Democratic landslide?

Mamdani ran on your money issues and  that Trump equals death. Sherrill ran on your money issues and that Trump equals death. Spanberger ran on your money issues and that Trump equals death. Prop 50 won on your money issues and that Trump equals death. Hey, you can do both at the same time! Who knew?

Not difficult. Easy to remember. Useful on all occasions.

Worked in New York, where they elected a socialist when only a quarter of the voters say they are socialists. Worked in Virginia, where they elected as governor an ex-congresswoman born in Jersey. Worked in Jersey, where they elected as a governor an ex-congresswoman born in Virginia. Money Issues, and Trump Equals Death. Useful on all occasions. It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping.

Of course the context is just as much fun as the lesson. That's becauseTrump not only doesn’t realize he got the S kicked out of him, but he doesn’t realize he’s already forced himself to both end the government shutdown and lose the government shutdown. “Trump wasn’t on the ballot,” Trump screamed. “And ‘Shutdown’… were the two reasons that Republicans lost elections...”

Ah, poor Trump. Metaphorically, Trump not only was on the ballot - every ballot but he was on the ballot in the worst possible way. Everybody could vote no on him, but it was almost impossible to vote YES. The lame duck politician’s worst nightmare. 

And right now no duck is lamer than Trump.

Democrats: run on your money issues and that Trump equals death. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!

ALSO: No, I am not going to sanewash Dick Cheney, even after his passing. Yes, at the end, when it was loyalty to the country or Trump he chose the country and it's good to finish strong. But I will still remember him for that 9/11-Iraq exploitation thing. And I am still proud that - as you'll hear - I pissed him off enough as Vice President for him to publicly clap back.

B-Block (30:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Roger Stone, who helped advance the deplorable Laura Loomer, is now shocked she's deplorable. Similarly Ben Shapiro, who helped sell Tucker Carlson's evil to the far right, is now shocked he's evil. And I-Never-Winsome Earle-Sears and scabby Fox host Charlie Hurt think Barack Obama not voting for her when he voted for Kamala Harris is hypocritical (so...Earle-Sears voted for Kamala, and Hurt voted for Spanberger?)

C-Block (40:30) SPORTSBALLCENTER: You probably aren't interested in my thoughts on the latest new selection committee and the latest eight nominees for baseball's Hall of Fame (though I have many of them). But you may be entertained by the sagas of the previous selection committees and the legend of how the ex-players on them used to cast "courtesy votes" for their old buddies and one year Ted Williams and the others screwed up and accidentally cast way too many of them for a not-so-Hall-of-Famish catcher named Rick Ferrell and he actually got elected.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT:  If Andrew can no longer be PRINCE because of Jeffrey Epstein, Trump can no longer be PRESIDENT because of Jeffrey Epstein.

I think Trump understands this. I have no doubt Mike Johnson understands this. I believe even large swaths of the otherwise imbecilic MAGA understand this. It is why Trump and Johnson and the others are starving the needy; dissolving Congress; destroying the domestic balance of power and gutting the work infrastructure at airports, government agencies, and services. It is why they are even cutting the legs out from under every Republican candidate in tomorrow’s handful of elections.

Andrew has been convicted of nothing; Trump has been convicted of nothing. There are no astounding legal findings against Andrew; there are no astounding legal findings against Trump. There are probably no smoking guns about Andrew in the Epstein files; there are probably no smoking guns about Trump in the Epstein files. The status of their scandals is roughly identical. 

Just as importantly: the English monarchy wants to publicly atone for Andrew and based on heavy news reporting in the UK it is apparently pressing Andrew to reveal what he knows about Epstein – presumably about TRUMPStein. Meanwhile only Trump, would throw a Gatsby party with himself as Gatsby and scantily-clad women in giant Martini glasses, in the middle of his own sex ring crisis.

In any event: If Andrew can no longer be PRINCE because of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump can no longer be PRESIDENT because of Jeffrey Epstein.

B-Block (28:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: After O'Donnell flames him, Scott Jennings insists Lawrence O'Donnell, whose show is beating Jennings's CNN show in the ratings by 60%, is irrelevant. Karolyin Leavitt was appalled that there was a bathroom inside the White House. And before tomorrow's election, Andrew Cuomo has proclaimed himself "Mayor."

C-Block (36:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Well the World Series ended just as I told you it would: With everybody demanding Fox never again interview a manager during Game 7. I was a Fox TV Baseball Dugout Reporter: Here's Why We Don't Need Them (except for emergencies; in 40 games in which I filled that role, there were maybe three emergencies. I'll recount the best of them - the on-field dispute that came this close to turning into a riot involving the New York Yankees, the Boston Cops, and thousands of drunken Red Sox fans. And it ended with me being ordered to sit, essentially, on George Steinbrenner's lap).

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: The correct question has been lying there, invisible in the forest, for the trees.

It was Mary Trump who finally saw it – and asked it: “Why the hell (do) they KEEP giving him cognitive tests?”

That’s IT - isn’t it? THAT'S the question.

None of the details, none of the giraffes versus elephants, none of his stupid boastful insults about it, none of the small stuff. It's the big picture. Why the hell DO they keep giving him cognitive tests?

And I’ll add a corollary to Mary Trump's burst of simple genius: Why the hell do they KEEP giving him cognitive tests almost exactly six months apart?

Friday October 10, 2015 at Walter Reed, which he boasted about on board Air Force One this week. And Friday April 11, 2015, which he had also boasted about on board Air Force One last spring. Those dates are almost six months apart. 182 days.

If they’re not giving him pre-scheduled cognitive tests every six months that’s a helluva coincidence. 

Why the hell do they keep giving him cognitive tests?

And I’ll add a second corollary to Mary Trump’s question: why did they give him an MRI? Is it the first MRI to accompany a cognitive test? What was it an MRI of? I mean it may be irrelevant (I once had an MRI to see how my sinuses were draining correctly). You really CAN get MRIs for almost trivial stuff.

But you don’t get cognitive tests for trivial stuff.

Why the hell do they keep giving him cognitive tests?

PLUS: Trump says the Constitution prohibits him from running for president again. Again, mid-flight, after boasting about things that aren't real, he said: “If you read it it’s pretty clear. I’m not allowed to run." So that’s that, huh? That’s what all the experts say.

The same experts who said there was no Presidential Immunity.

So – what happens next? He just changes his mind? Or decides this term is eight years not four? Or he just cancels the 2028 election?

This isn't bluster and it isn't trolling. They might get away with it and they might not, but there are plans. And the more we're convinced they can never pull them off, the more likely we are to see another "presidential immunity" ruling from The Supreme Court. Or another Aileen Cannon. Or another January 6.

B-Block (24:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Steve Bannon wants to expel Zohran Mamdani from this country. Hell, we should expel Bannon. If we can find a truck that can carry that much blubber. There's a media writer named Rich Greenfield who has extrapolated from the possibility that Comcast might buy CNN and merge it with MSNBC and he has the exact right person to run it: Charlie Kirk's widow (a bible student). And as ludicrous as that sounds, the guy now running CNN wasn't even home from his visit to the White House to try to butter up Trump and the Trumpists when one of the Trumpists mocked him on twitter for visiting. Today, appeasers not only lose, they get flamed on social media.

C-Block (36:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: With the Dodgers in the World Series again it is time to hurry back to the greatest moment in their Los Angeles history: Kirk Gibson's pinch-hit homer even though three-quarters of his body was barely movable, to win Game One of the 1988 World Series and set them on the path to one of the greatest upsets in baseball history, over the vaunted Oakland A's. Gibson's homer was a surprise to everybody. Except me. Because I predicted it just before the first pitch of that final inning began. And there's a WITNESS.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT:  Donald Trump does not own the White House. Donald Trump does not own the United States of America. Donald Trump does not own the world.

NOTHING Trump has done, in sending in thugs and military to attack people that did not vote for him in cities and states that do not support him, is LEGAL.

NOTHING Trump has done in having his Nosferatu Stephen Miller threaten Governor Pritzker with “seditious conspiracy," is LEGAL.

NOTHING Trump has done in sending so-called “election monitors” to interfere in the voting in California and Jersey on BEHALF of Republican Thugs, is LEGAL.

NOTHING Trump has done to let himself say – supposedly jokingly, per the New York Times – “I’m the speaker AND the president," is LEGAL.

NOTHING Trump has done in his demolition against, destruction of, attack ON the East Wing of the White House, is LEGAL.

Almost NOTHING about Trump administration - his presidency - his forming unilateral DICTATORSHIP, is LEGAL.

And it is TIME to CUT HIM OFF FINANCIALLY by taking the one measure that will force an end to this Trumpian madness: for the blue states to follow up on Gavin Newsom’s suggestion, on the suggestion of others including me in this forum, and stop transmitting federal taxes to the national treasury until Trump resigns. We must have a tax payment boycott and it must be led by Governors and other STATE OFFICIALS so that there can be no attempt by Trump or his enablers and flunkies to prosecute or further threaten democracy-loving civilians. 

De-fund Donald Trump. Now.

ALSO: More on these "election observers." Also the targeting of Mike Johnson as the fall-guy. And a media update on Bret Baier, CBS, NBC and the Ballroom, Cheryl Hines and Olivia Nuzzi, and Bill Maher making a jackass of himself. AGAIN.

B-Block (36:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Kayleigh McEnany trying to sell her audience Hamburger Helper and convince them it's steak. ICE arrests a guy for playing the Star Wars imperial march. Anna Paulina Luna has a debate with a California congressman who doesn't exist. And Andrew Cuomo achieves a new high in low: laughing at a 9/11 racial slur about the man who beat him in the primary.

B-Block (48:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Before the World Series ends (and I still think that's in five games) it's time to tell the 25th Anniversary edition of Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza, the bat, and how Clemens was actually throwing it at me.

C-Block (1:06:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL, CONCLUDED: There are so many ripples in the pond on this Clemens saga - they're still rippling!

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Today is the dawn of Trump’s new policy: destroy America. Literally.

Well, destroy part of the WHITE HOUSE – Literally. And steal $230 million from the government and pretend he’s going to give it to charity; AND give away 172 million dollars for two private jets for Kristi Noem; AND give Ukraine and eventually Europe to Putin, AND make America a one-party nation, AND get elected Democrats killed, AND destroy America. Literally.

Well, ok, describing this as Trump’s new policy to destroy, steal, give away AND get elected Democrats killed - that’s not ENTIRELY fair. Because it’s not really NEW. He has long tried to stochastically encourage violence against opponents, but now key minions like Tom Emmer and Tom Homan talk about the quote “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party, and, Presto! A January 6th traitor Trump personally pardoned tries to assassinate Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Looks like cause and effect to me.

Josh Marshall just invoked imagery I used in 2016 and he’s right: Trump has entered (actually RE-entered) the stage in which he is the omnipotent petulant child, Anthony, from the terrifying Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life" who could destroy the world and kill people just by thinking it. Josh is right. I was right. Trump is now destroying just because it gives him something to do. And because in his psychosis it no longer matters whether he's constructing or deconstructing, it only matters that HE does it.

ALSO: The Democrats can stop self-flagellating. Party identification has now swung back away from the Republicans and the seven-point margin is nearly as big as the Dems' was in 2012. So let's focus instead on taking out the trash like Graham Platner. For 17 years or so, the populist Maine Democrat somehow didn't know that was a nazi tattoo on his chest, which I suppose is possible. But when it was going to come out, instead of going right to a tattoo parlor and holding a news conference explaining and apologizing as they turned it into something else, he released a drunken video and waited three days to (supposedly) actually fix the problem. He has no judgment. None. Get out.

B-Block (33:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Bob Iger and Disney didn't walk back the Jimmy Kimmel firing because of justice and the 1st Amendment. They did it because of a boycott. The Andrew Cuomo self-destruction tour continues as he confuses the New York Jets and the New York Mets. And The Washington Post columnist who said we'd be fine whether Hillary or Trump was elected is back with more stupidity.

C-Block (49:12) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: This time of year, 51 years ago, I was about to sign up to go to Boston University when a radio student there gave me the inside story of the limitations undergrads faced. He talked me out of it. I was 15 and he was 20 and his name was Howard Stern.

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A-Block (2:00) SPECIAL COMMENT: Can we? Involuntarily? Any way you can think of?

I don’t know the answer, I suspect not, not even after the video he put out in which he proudly covers America in, uh, crap. A video he thought was some kind of flex, as opposed to reality, that it is the confirmation of everything that was being protested at No Kings, everything that defines Trump as president, as leader, as human being – sort of: a crapshow with a crown and he has to wear an oxygen mask and the MAGAs are standing below just hoping to catch some of it maybe with their mouths! Trump crapping on America – the only thing he’s good at – and in the limited coverage it gets in the media they sanitize it for your protection, literally not referencing WHAT it was flying in Trump’s Freudian video, his confession, the climax of his life.

After that, let me say it again: Trump is insane and unchecked he will kill us all because nothing matters to him BUT him. He’s insane, he’s psychopathic, he’s murderous, he’s vile, he’s deranged, he’s damaged, he’s dysfunctional, he’s – on top of everything else there he is discharging himself all over New York and No Kings and America and my final thought was, if that AI video were real, and he really got rid of all that crap: what WHAT would he be left to THINK with?

THAT PLUS the amazing under-coverage of the largest American political protest since 1970, and Trump him whoring and stalling for Putin again in Ukraine, and Trump’s Eternal Middle East Peace falling apart, and Curtis Sliwa stuffing Andrew Cuomo in a locker - it was glorious.

B-BLOCK (30:00) ANOTHER SPECIAL COMMENT: You saw ESPN's Stephen A. Smith (who isn't trying to run for president but is humiliating himself, doing everything he can to make other people try to convince him to) appearing on the farcical News Nation's farcical "town hall" on the government shutdown? And a guy in the audience gets up and says he's an air traffic controller but because of 'them' he now has to deliver food to make ends meet? And Smith starts ranting and in solidarity with the people storms off the show because...I dunno why? Something about this story (in fact a couple things) just don't add up. Let me give you some hints.

C-BLOCK (48:00) MONDAYS WITH THURBER: "Meet Birdey Doggett" is not his best known story. It is one of his best to hear read aloud. On a day when I'm under the weather and need a little cheering up myself - enjoy.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Is Trump Bombing Boats off Venezuela to test to see if he can get away with Bombing Americans in America? I mean now he says he’s going to try to get away with Bombing Venezuelans in Venezuela.

If, 72 hours before Saturday’s No Kings protests around the country, we are at the stage – (and we are AT the stage) that Trump is threatening to invade Boston and San Francisco, and where Trump’s lackeys are calling everybody who disagrees with him “Antifa” and Trump has declared “Antifa” a quote “Domestic Terrorist Organization” – acronym DTO, and we’re at the stage where Trump has again this week – Tuesday morning – had the Secretary of Brylcreem blow up a probable sardine fishing boat in the Caribbean after declaring it was “affiliated with a “DESIGNATED Terrorist Organization” – acronym ALSO DTO… if we are blowing up people Trump and Trump alone gets to decide were in DESIGNATED DTO’s and in the process destroying ALL evidence for-or-against, how far in his madness and Stephen Miller’s evil are we from Trump blowing up people Trump and Trump alone gets to decide were in DOMESTIC D-T-O’s and in the process destroying ALL evidence for-or-against?

The huge leap from bombing DTO’s to bombing… DTO’s.

It's a big step. But it’s one even Trump, as his body disintegrates, can still manage.

Plus my ex Olivia Nuzzi has reportedly written a new book. So now you know what to get me for Christmas. I have title suggestions. They are not cordial ones.

B-Block (34:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Fox's Emily Compagno assumes anybody criticizing the appointment of Bari Weiss is an antisemite. Including critics who are Jewish. There is a MAGA celebrity chef named Andrew Gruel, from "Gravy Concepts" and he's one of Fox's Antifa experts. And then there is Governor Janet Mills of Maine who is trying to bigfoot Graham Platner and actually make Susan Collins the youngster in the race.

C-Block (46:25) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The actual anniversary was two weeks ago, but whenever the leaves start to fall I think of the 1993 launch of ESPN2. The inside saga of the night I achieved immortality by announcing "Good Evening And Welcome To The End Of Our Careers."

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: If Trump didn’t have much time left as president, how would his cabinet behave?

If Trump didn’t have much time left as president, how would his henchmen behave?

If Trump didn’t have much time left as president, how would his Stephen Millers behave?

If Trump didn’t have much time left as president, how would HE behave?

Would he have a straight-up public delusion that 1448 days into his first presidency it was Joe Biden’s FBI even though Joe Biden hadn’t BEEN president yet? Ending with the panicked, plaintive cry to the universe: “DO SOMETHING?” Would he have hallucinations about Watergate being a hoax? Would he start accidentally posting private messages to his attorney general demanding prosecutions of those who prosecuted him? NOW NOW NOW! DO SOMETHING! Would he be unable to close his umbrella?

I’m not saying he’s DYING, I’m not saying he’s IRRETRIEVABLY SICK, I’m not saying he’s being raptured, I’m not saying he’s resigning, I’m not saying he’s fleeing… I’m not talking about cause, just EFFECT.  If Trump didn’t have much time left as president… if he were getting a PROMOTION to something, how would they all BEHAVE?

I think the answer is they’d all behave as they are behaving now.

They’d panic.

And, they are panicking.

They’d panic because they know, there is NOBODY to take over for him. Junior? Eric? Bannon? Miller? Vance? WHAT? VANCE? After Stephanopoulos stuffed him in a locker yesterday? What do they think they know about Trump’s longevity, that we don’t? Why is Stephen Miller panicking? Why is Mike Johnson panicking over the Epstein Files and more importantly what could his end game be here? What? He's just never bringing the House back into session?

And this all ties in to the indefensible Charlie Kirk assassination because all of this could be explained if you recognize that the Right thought Kirk was a future president, maybe THE future president.

MEDIA OBEYING IN ADVANCE: Trump attacks Politico's Dasha Burns to her face and instead of accepting the Orange Badge of Courage she tells him Karolyin Leavitt will vouch for her. That's disqualifying. And I'd like to read you only about one fifth of one of the best media essays I've read this year, written by Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge. It completely changed my mind about Bari Weiss going to CBS. Weiss is no less evil, but Lopatto brilliantly argues she is not going to destroy CBS - CBS is going to destroy her. And they should televise it.

B-Block (35:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Milwaukee Brewers win, then humiliate themselves and their guiding light Bob Uecker, by taunting the losers. Governor Greg Abbott makes a joke about somebody else's physical incapacity. Trump's Beauty Pageant Miss Uncongeniality Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan makes another amazing typo. And a Kristi Noem twofer, performed with the Benny Hill Yakety Sax Theme playing in the background.

C-Block (46:22) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The ACTUAL writer of The Washington Post's first Watergate story, Bart Barnes, has died. He pulled together the first-day work of Woodward, Bernstein and the crime reporter the day the thing broke in June 1972 and had a 50-year career that probably hit its nadir a decade later when he wound up covering the same story as...me. For months he and I and a couple of others were the core beat reporters on the 1982 NFL Strike. He was wonderful, and he was the final straight man in an intricate, fantastic practical joke we played on the New York Times' guy. The story of Bart Barnes - and The Janofsky Maneuver.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Here we go again.

Trump is talking about his own mortality or career mortality or heaven or all of the above… AGAIN at the same time he’s talking about declaring insurrections and jailing more political opponents, like Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker and any one of a dozen judges including at least one he appointed – not prosecuting them, just jailing them - and, as if it could GET any worse, he specifically segued from the issue of wanting to prove to God that he’s been good to how great all those weapons are at his naval base.

The missiles are flying, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Plus he's written: “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also." Look, you and I know it should be TRUMP in jail because he’s not only broken laws, he’s nearly COLLECTED THE COMPLETE SET of broken laws. But the process of convincing Trump that he's not crazy, that his predictions are coming true, that Portland is ablaze, is how Stephen Miller and the others manipulate him into eroding American democracy a little more every damn day. And this has worked since at least 2016 and I was told about it by Ed Rollins in 2017. It's the Trump personal feedback loop.

And when the interruptors in that loop get in the way, they get bought out and destroyed. CNN first, The Washington Post, and now CBS News and the "B" stands for "Bari Weiss" who once told The Federalist Society that it was ok if it didn't believe her and her wife's marriage was legal because they all shared what really mattered: a desire for lower taxes. Let me expand upon the death of CBS News and her disastrous debut at its helm by retelling the story of the miniature version enacted at the CBS flagship station in LA when I worked there in 1991: The Mystery Of The Broken Number 3 CBS Pencils.

B-Block (37:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: What is wrong with these dweeb MAGAs? Ken Paxton can't keep his pants on, every other day there's some new story causing his wife to again decide to divorce him, and he's just announced "undercover operations" against leftists. Hey, Pal, if you did anything BESIDES undercover operations you wouldn't be dismissed as a sex pest. Poor Derrick Van Orden continues his descent: now he's yelling at people for not learning how the Senate votes the way he learned about it in the 4th Grade (all of what he learned was wrong). And the Bad Bunny Super Bowl blowback reaches Marjorie Taylor Greene who demands a law making English the official language which is going to be trouble for her since she doesn't speak it.

C-Block (45:00) THURSDAYS WITH THURBER: It's one of those weeks, plus my back is gone, one of my eyes is fighting me: it's time to bring back the first Thurber story I ever read aloud to an audience, the oddly soothing "A Box To Hide In."

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That quote, might be the biggest headline Trump has made this year and it sailed RIGHT past the American news media yesterday. What in the HELL did he mean by that and more importantly why did he suddenly acknowledge there is an end, maybe soon?

After being MIA for five days – no live public viewing of him, just one video that according to White House time stamps took more than two hours to produce even though it only required him to try to speak for a minute-ten… he EMERGED with what was, even for him, such an utterly bizarre and especially vulnerable admission. 

He was out of view for FIVE DAYS. FIVE. From that bizarre “please clap” speech before the Generals at Quantico on Tuesday – the Pete Hegseth International Day of Military Hair Care Symposium and Product Sampling – through yesterday morning when he managed to stagger out of the White House, blast a series of non sequitirs at the press pool, and then go to another military celebration for which we have the money even in the middle of his shutdown of the government.

Nobody asked: HOW have you been, WHERE have you been, WHAT are they treating you for, WHAT does that "when they don't have (you) to fight for them" quote mean? Because again, as in the week he went MIA at the beginning of LAST month, nobody had a clue what would take a man with compulsive talking disease and an ego so large it has own it zip code, from appearing in front of crowds and cameras for FIVE DAYS. 

And THEN Trump went in front of the Navy and said he warned about Osama Bin Laden last year, and told Pete Hegseth about it a year before 9/11, and claimed he was president in 2016 but they fixed the 2016 election, but they ran it again and he "got 250."

What. In The Hell. Is Wrong. With Trump’s Health?

B-Block (27:44) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A $1 Trump coin? Ten cents per chin? Ian Miles Cheong doesn't think they'll eat his face. Noem and Lewandowski think they'll find undocumented immigrants attending the Super Bowl. And Kristi really has to go to the toilet. THIS IS OFFICIAL BUSINESS!

C-Block (38:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Well, here we are. Fifty years ago Tuesday night, at 11:15 PM, I did my first broadcast on an actual radio station with advertisers and listeners. I was 16 and it's not bad for 16 and for the fact that my much older colleagues at WVBR-FM did a superb job of hazing me. And yes, that first broadcast is still extant, as you'll hear.

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A-Block (2:30) COULD TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST? Warning: this is a PARTIAL RE-RUN. If you heard Thursday's episode, don't bother. But I got such a great response to re-reading and annotating and updating my July 2016 piece for Vanity Fair Magazine on this topic that I wanted to post this as a stand-alone segment in case you skipped it and had time to listen now. The Thursday news-of-the-day stuff has gotten slightly outdated so I've stripped it off. As you know, I don't make a habit of re-posting episodes and I'm not going to start. Again: if you listened to the whole thing Thursday, this is NOT going to be new to you. Don't listen - unless you're trying to memorize it.

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

B-Block (24:31) PART TWO OF "CAN TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST": We conclude the annotated 2016 piece on Trump's already provable mental distress with the disturbing reality that takes us back to where we began on Thursday with Representative Madeleine Dean's lament: "The president is unwell."

C-Block (45:00) THIS IS JUST THE SIGN-OFF: Honestly, there is no reason to listen to this. It's just the credits.

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

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

“The President is Unwell.”

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

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

Maybe it was.

“The President is unwell.”

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

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

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

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump is escalating his terror campaign against you. If you oppose him, if you criticize him, if you even question him, he will try to call YOU a terrorist, put YOU on a terrorism BLACKLIST. And if that doesn’t work, ARREST you, and if THAT doesn’t work, invade your state and terrorize IT.

On the other hand, he has apparently TACO’d out on his terrorist invasion of Portland now saying “well I mean we’re certainly LOOKING AT IT.” But on the OTHER OTHER hand National Security Presidential Memorandum Seven is not on hold; in it Trump claims the right to prosecute you for domestic terrorist if you express quote “anti-Christianity” or oppose the government in any way. 

Get you indicted when there is literally no case, like James Comey. Or reenact the McCarthy Era blacklist and try to get you fired, as with Lisa Monaco. Or just label you a domestic terrorist because you called Stephen Miller a "fascist." When Stephen Miller has called 150 million Democrats "fascists." That'll be quite the indictment against Miller. Which reminds me: Fox's Jesse Watters calls Miller a "sexual matador." Which I presume means he winds up getting gored in the groin.

And just to bring this up a notch, Trump's insanity is growing and it certainly looks like over the weekend, he wanted his social media followers to believe he can bestow upon them the gift of immortality. 

Not IMMORALITY, "immortality." The saga of Trump's Med Beds and RFK jr's face.

B-Block (34:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Isabel Vincent writes the weakest New York Post hit job on me in the history of New York Post hit jobs. The breaking news? An anonymous source says I may have been rude to a waiter in 1997. Marco Rubio bans the president of Colombia, tags him on twitter, tags the wrong guy. And Newt Gingrich complains about Abby Spanberger not voting for a particular bill in the House this month. Maybe because she hasn't been a member of the house since January?

(45:47) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's Stevie Week! Thirteen years ago tomorrow since I was born again in dogs, when Olivia Nuzzi and I were adopted by a tiny Maltese who opened up a new world to me.

C-Block (1:06:00) PART TWO OF STEVIE WEEK: The adventures of Stevie and the five dogs who have followed her, including a cameo appearance from the Gotcha Day Girl herself.

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The last 96 hours:

His U.N. speech, sounding like an escapee from a psych ward.

His Tylenol news conference, sounding like an escapee from a psych ward who’s been living on the street for a month.

His suggestion NATO countries shoot down Russian jets.

His sudden embrace of Zelensky, either another stall or a stupid dare to Putin.

MAGA’s RAGE AT his sudden embrace of Zelensky.

The cover of a London right wing daily: his picture and in 72-point type, the word “DERANGED.”

The ICE shooting in Dallas; his sadistic Homeland chief pretending the victims were agents when they were detainees; his idiot simpering Vice President pretending the victims were agents when they were detainees; his corrupt venal FBI director pretending the victims were agents when they were detainees.

His ICE chief not denying he took $50,000 in a paper bag.

His staff THEN denying he took $50,000 in a paper bag.

His cancellation of a meeting with Democrats making sure if there’s a government shutdown it’s all his fault.

His crackpot pal Milei crashing the Venezuelan economy and needing us to bail him out.

His paranoia over the stopped teleprompter at the U-N that was his White House staff’s fault.

His paranoia over the stopped escalator at the U-N that was his own vanity videographer’s fault.

His desire to arrest the U.N. escalator technician or the U-N escalator button pusher.

His desire to arrest the escalator AND James Comey.

The election of Raul Grijalva’s daughter to Congress.

The fact that Adelita Grijalva will be the last Representative needed to force a vote on releasing the Trump Epstein Files.

His self-humiliation at the Kirk Memorial.

ABC reinstating Jimmy Kimmel.

Meaning Disney told him to eff off.

Meaning the National Football League told him to eff off.

Meaning they all told his propagandists at Sinclair to eff off.

Kimmel then shoving him in a locker using only a monologue.

Kimmel getting a record 6 million viewers and 22 more online in the first TWENTY hours.

Kimmel and his show getting new life and maybe a new contract.

His self-owning confession that HE and his goons used threats to get Kimmel cancelled.

The fact that Kimmel, and ABC, and Bob Iger, and Disney, and America told Trump to SHOVE HIS THREATS.

And that’s just since Sunday night.

You lost to an escalator. Resign. Take Vance with you. Take Noem with you. Take Ho-man with you. Take Milei with you.

LEAVE the Epstein Files.

B-Block (32:53) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Jason Whitlock says eff everybody, this is Christ-land and he won't be brainwashed any more (no brain, no pain). Derrick Van Orden says Kirk was Jesus and you don't F with the Jesus so defund The Mayo Clinic (he should go there and get CT scanned) and Kristi Noem says a tweet saying she'd have a bad day was terrifying for her. This is a piece of crap who in her spare time murders puppies.

C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The New York Post BS firehose points at a couple of liberals at a time, then it rotates away, but eventually it makes a full circle and comes back to you. For me this has been going on since the mid-1990's and it's just started again. If you'll permit, here's a brief history.

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A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: How about this for a plot twist? I'll believe it when I see it - it still depends on television executives doing the moral, right, professional thing AND tacitly admitting they are correcting a mistake, but multiple sources insist that at least at this moment the ABC people expect Jimmy Kimmel to not only not be fired but to return, on the air, in late night, probably before the end of the month. Maybe even this week.

Yep. The fascist FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr may have delivered Liberals the biggest gift of the year. The blowback towards ABC is untenable (even polling: the Carr threat was "unacceptable" is above water by 17%; the Kimmel monologue was acceptable, 43%-36%) and the desire to keep Kimmel and maybe now even extend his contract has only grown since last week.

And that's in large part because so many key right wingers from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to Scott Dilbert Adams and Ben Shapiro are enraged by Carr's bullying and rightly recognize that if Trump can do this to ABC, what could a Democratic president do to Murdoch and NewsMax and... THEM. I mean, two out of three MAGAs have podcasts, right?

My sources pointed to seven landmarks. First: they HAVEN’T fired him. Second: they actually haven’t said ANYTHING about him since the one sentence announcement about taking him off. Third: HE hasn’t said ANYTHING about ABC, good bad or indifferent. Fourth: remember the Sinclair owned local stations that started all the trouble? The ones who were bribing Trump and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr by DEMANDING Kimmel be sidelined, so Trump and Carr would waive the rules and let Sinclair buy more than the legal limit OF local stations? Remember their plan to run a Charlie Kirk tribute last Friday night in Kimmel’s time slot? They didn’t run it. They put it on YouTube. No other explanation. Fifth: what happened to the Sinclair demand that Kimmel apologize and pay a bribe, uh, make a donation to Kirk’s scam Turning Point Company? Sixth: how much grief did ABC take for folding to Trump AND for not defending Kimmel as the entire right wing misquoted him? So much that no human can estimate it. And Seventh: how could you possibly put all the Kimmel and Kirk toothpaste back in the tube? As Eric Idle said: All You Need Is Cash.

ALSO: Grandpa posts a self-incriminating note to Pam Bondi that he must have thought was being printed or emailed or lord knows what. He is running out of prosecutors who'll prosecute innocent opponents about whom there's no evidence. The Tom Homan $50,000 scandal also involves Emil Bove (and how in the hell did we not see that coming? He literally has the word "HO" in his name). And a self-proclaimed prophetess says she saw Charlie Kirk get his reward in Heaven: a large ice cream cone.

B-Block (40:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Congressman Randy Fine sets a new high in low. Stephen A. Smith thinks the Kimmel-Kirk controversy is over a joke. And Vanity Fair's hiring of Olivia Nuzzi is not sitting well with journalists (as one put it, all of them who DON'T sext their sources).

C-Block (52:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Hard to understand anything she says or writes but I'm pretty sure Nancy Mace threatened to end my career over Charlie Kirk. Thus I need to review the efforts to end my career, which professionally date back only to 1984 but if you count my semi-pro days in college actually stretch back to late 1977. Virtually everybody who declared me done is out of the business, or deceased. Take a number, Nance.

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In an Oval Office news briefing crazy even by his standards, Trump answered a question about the FCC blackmailing of ABC over Charlie Kirk by changing the topic to himself, making up a statistic that "94, 95, 96, or 97 percent" of all network television stories about him are critical of him, and declaring of such criticism: "That's really illegal, in my opinion."

In Trump's damaged condition he could forget this by morning. But after this week's mafioso style shakedown of ABC by the FCC and the owners of Sinclair to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air by FCC Commissioner, Brendan Carr, the real question is - what if he doesn't? What if somebody like Carr in his administration decides to curry favor with Trump by trying to enforce an "it's illegal to criticize Trump" declaration"?

Taking the two stories together, and perhaps adding in Trump's threat to declare something that doesn't really exist (Antifa) a "terrorist organization" (which could just as easily lead to him declaring you a member of Antifa and thus a "terrorist") the FCC's action is so bad that it provoked serious, well-thought-out, sober yet angry condemnation Friday afternoon from the unlikeliest of sources: Senator Ted Cruz, who warned Republicans that the government needed to stay out of the bullying media business.

Whether that will register with Trump remains to be seen. For now the gist is: Trump says criticizing him (or in the best possible interpretation, criticizing him a LOT) is illegal. He cannot remain president under such circumstances.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (2:30) SPECIAL COMMENT: Charlie Kirk died because he lived amid the violent madness of Donald Trump's America.

Now that we can say with some certainty that if Tyler Robinson indeed shot Charlie Kirk, he shot him for personal reasons, that he saw Kirk as a direct threat to someone he loved, that Robinson was NOT a stochastic proxy murderer from Antifa or the Groypers or the Right Wingers who had so recently called Kirk a fraud like Laura Loomer, it is also clear that there is truly only ONE person whose WORDS created, amplified, mainstreamed, and manufactured the nightmarish environment that led to Charlie Kirk’s indefensible death.

The leading threat in this country in this moment, to the safety and the lives of Conservatives and Republicans and MAGA commentators and politicians and citizens - the leading threat to ALL of us - is Trump.

The America in which Charlie Kirk was murdered… the America in which Melissa and Mark Hortman were murdered… the America in which Paul Pelosi was beaten… the America in which Donald Trump was shot is DONALD TRUMP’s America.

THIS is Donald Trump’s America and ALL THOSE who are endangered by it, and all those who fall dead at its feet, are the victims of one man and one man alone: Donald Trump. The institutionalization of vengeance is Trump. The introduction of political persecution is Trump. The inspiration for the only attempted VIOLENT OVERTHROW AND COUP against the government of the United States is Trump. The weaponization of the mob and the government against individuals he names and hopes somebody else hurts is Trump.

The TERROR is Trump.

B-Block (29:20) BREAKING NEWS: And the transformation of flawed democracy into lethal autocracy… is Donald Trump. After the FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took a page from the Goebbels playbook in 1930's Germany and threatened to revoke ABC's ownership of local stations because Jimmy Kimmel dared to tell the truth about Charlie Kirk's hate speech and the MAGA exploitation of his death, Bob Iger - the Disney chairman desperate to hold on to his job and his money and his only purpose in a failed life - folded to the fascists. Kimmel is off the air, indefinitely, probably for good, and has no legal recourse to be reinstated. All he can get is the money.

C-Block (49:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Robert Redford, RIP. I interviewed him once and he and it were great. And then the booking producer who was trying to get promoted to segment producer got into his ear and told him "Wrap!"

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BULLETIN (2:55): ABC announced late this afternoon that it had taken "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" off the network's air effective immediately, because Kimmel had the nerve to tell the truth about how Trump and the MAGA terrorists have exploited the indefensible assassination of Charlie Kirk, how they have tried to blame the left without evidence and with increasing evidence that this was an instance of a man who feared Kirk was a direct threat to a person he loved, and how they have ruthlessly tried to suppress all public comment that contradicts their narrative, or the nonsensical whitewashing of Kirk's violent, ultra-right platform that once included him publicly calling for the execution of President Biden.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said Monday.

By this afternoon FCC chairman Brendan Carr dipped into the Goebbels playbook and threatened ABC's station licenses if it did not take Kimmel off the air, and the Nexstar stations that own many ABC affiliates, said they would not broadcast any more of Kimmel's shows. At that point ABC simply said the show was off the air "for the foreseeable future."

Fascism can truly overtake this country's democracy only with the collaboration of Disney and ABC and people they run them - desperate people like Bob Iger, who reclaimed the chairmanship of the company and will do anything he can to maintain it - including selling this country out to the fascists.

I'll also discuss why Kimmel has no recourse against the action and will most likely not appear again, and why ABC's only contractual obligation to him is to pay him the remaining year of his salary. This part of it I've personally been through - though under far less dire circumstances.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fraud News Channel morning anchor Brian Kilmeade "apologizes" FOUR DAYS LATER for saying America’s 771,000 homeless (that'd include 33,000 Homeless Veterans and 140,000 Homeless Kids should be killed. By “involuntary lethal injection. Or something. Just kill them.” His co-host Lawrence Jones agreed with him.

Fox did nothing about it. They planned to get away with it, and would have, but for Media Matters saving the original clip from last Wednesday and Aaron Rupar re-posting it Saturday morning. I had seen the clip and thought it was fake. It's that bad. And finally Sunday Kilmeade issued a wallet-felt apology.

We are in such a place in this country – thanks to Trump, thanks to MAGA, thanks to the late Charlie Kirk, thanks to the Tea Party, thanks to Bush, thanks to… the list continues backwards almost indefinitely and infinitely – that this horrific vision, which in its essence is mass murder of the homeless (the most widely accepted high-end estimate of homelessness in this country is 771-thousand) – and no Kilmeade didn’t say let’s submit 771-thousand people to quote “involuntary lethal injection” – he didn’t have to. Is 771 people somehow less horrific? 77? What’s your threshold to be enraged at the prospect of simply pulling SOME homeless people off the street and lethally injecting them? Seven? One?

We know what you are Kilmeade. We are just arguing about the price...to be spent on lethal injections.

Fire him now.

SHOCK: TRUMP HELPS PUTIN AGAIN as he escalates his attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union. Now it's test drones at the Poland border (again) and the Romanian border (new). Waiting to see if Trump blinked. He blinked so much he could've been sending Morse Code.

St. CHARLIE OF KIRK: So, as Andrew Lawrence of Media Matters summarized it: Kirk "was a champion of free speech and if you disagree youre under arrest” The Trojan Horse phony bi-partisan governor of Utah is now down to insisting the family says the shooter had been indoctrinated with left wing ideology. What kind of left wing ideology? That he said he was "not a fan" of Kirk.

Funny, the most venomous, most threatening criticism of Kirk in the last 60 days was Nick Fuentes saying Kirk could no longer call himself a Christian and his college events should be interrupted and he should be shouted down, and Laura Loomer insist Kirk "stabs Trump in the back." Hmmm. If harsh words killed Charlie Kirk, is that leftist ideology Fuentes and Loomer were spouting, or right wing guilt?

B-Block (37:04) MORE ON CHARLIE KIRK: There are bigger issues in play. It is clear now that there were two different public Charlie Kirks. On the left we saw a slick but rather run-of-the-mill hate monger who mocked Democratic victims of political violence and wanted to see public executions. On the right, they literally never saw those videos. They only saw a "beautiful man, armed only with a bible" preaching family values. How? Different social media feeds. The other big issue with the right's collective mania and desire to punish the left for Kirk's death when it still looks like the far right did as much or more? All of those right wing influencers just assumed God was on their side and was protecting them like he "protected" Trump last year. Oops.

C-Block (1:00:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: This is the longest all-new episode ever but always time for worsts. Ezra Klein last week? "Charlie Kirk Practiced Politics The Right Way." So, Ezra Klein next week? "Brian Kilmeade Practiced Television The Right Way?" Ken Paxton is screwing around again? Does he have a wandering eye oh right. And when MSNBC fired Matt Dowd for, you know, telling the truth about the death of Kirk, where were Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O'Donnell, risking a dollar or two to defend accurate commentary? I mean they whiffed so badly that they made the anchor who was on with Dowd look perfect by contrast: Katy Tur.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: I suppose it could've been worse. Rather than reacting to Russia’s drone attack on Poland the way he did (“What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”) Trump could’ve done the Martin Sheen bit from “Dead Zone” where as the messianic psychopath president Greg Stillson he starts World War 3 and announces “The missiles are flying hallelujah, hallelujah.”

"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace…?” Seriously, jackass? That’s your JOB, you great decaying pile of burger grease. YOU are supposed to KNOW “what’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace?” and if you DON’T, get out, turn the government over to a general or an ex-general or somebody who understands that your owner Putin PLAYED YOU AGAIN, and that when everybody, everybody in this country with an IQ greater than 47 said that we have to support Ukraine because if we do not stop Putin in Ukraine his next stop was Poland and you twisted your bulbous face into that stupid 45-degree angled smirk, you were WRONG and everybody else in AMERICA – all 340,111,000 of us – WE were RIGHT.

There are 10,000 American troops IN Poland. What would have happened if mere DEBRIS from one of the drones destroyed in the air hit a U-S base, or ONE U-S soldier? Would Trump have tweeted out a shrug emoji? Does it even register any more that even in the narrowest of views of this disaster – Trump IS the commander-in-chief and he is RESPONSIBLE for keeping American soldiers safe.

ANYBODY NOTICE THAT GHISLAINE MAXWELL'S OLD LAWYER went on CNN and admitted that there was a quid pro quo that got her moved from a high-octane Florida prison to Club Fed in Texas? Now there’s ANOTHER Trumpstein cover-up?

AND LASTLY, No I’m not in favor of shooting commentators. Or politicians. Or anybody. But my god, this is America. All we have done for virtually all our history is shoot political opponents. Add to it THIS America that MAGA wanted, where the military is politicized, and politics are militarized, and Trump has spent a decade stochastically encouraging terrorism against, and assassination of, his opponents, where conservatives REPEATEDLY call for the killing of Trump’s opponents. Trump was shot a year ago and not one of his supporters was willing to support meaningful gun restrictions.

You can have many reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk and I hope sorrow and disgust are among them for you as they are for me - but surprise shouldn’t be one of them. Kirk himself said in April 2023: "You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am -- I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal."

B-Block (30:13) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The online poster who says it's ok for JD Vance to boast about war crimes because his mother was an addict. We started, writes an Andrew Klavan, to lose our civil rights as a result of the civil war. And to prostitute yourself as Jeff Shell has: from liberal anti-Trump head of NBC to installing a political officer inside CBS News to rat on journalism and anti-Trump facts. What a waste of life.

C-Block (42:07) 24 YEARS SINCE 9/11: Apart from applying the "midpoint" rule to really sense how long ago something was (9/11 was the "midpoint" between September 1977 and today) there is one story that has stayed with me permanently. The man's name was Tomas Reyes, he wasn't anywhere near the World Trade Center - but he was supposed to be. How I came to meet him as part of my reporting on that horrible day.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Jayvee Vance has got to resign as Vice President.

Relax; he won't.

But you cannot BE Vice President of the United States if you're crazy enough to boast about repurposing the military as a War Crime committing death squad killing probable migrants in international waters. Plus if you’re responding to tweets by the Krassensteins you’re clearly insane and unfit for office. Even under Trump..

MEANWHILE: if Trump was an FBI informant against Jeffrey Epstein that means he was a witness to everything Epstein did with those girls? And yes, Mike Johnson tried to "back off" his claim that Trump was an FBI Epstein agent late Sunday, but a) the "back off" came 72 hours after he blurted it out; b) it still implies that Trump knew about Epstein and went to the authorities about it, suggesting he had first-hand evidence like HE WAS THERE, and c) it is a cardinal tenet of QAnon that if Trump is ON the Epstein client list. "He did it for 'Merica!" might not be the flex Trump and Mike Johnson think it is

ALSO: Trump was booed as he arrived at the U.S. Tennis Open yesterday. You didn’t see it because Bob Iger and ABC and Disney whored themselves out pre-censoring the truth. CBS just did that too - and worse, agreeing NOT to edit out any lies by Trump Gang members. 

THE PRIMARY RESIDENCE WITCH-HUNT? The mortgage app alleged white lie with which Trump hopes to bring down a Fed governor and Letitia James and Adam Schiff? The nut job releasing the alleged evidence is Bill Pulte and guess what public records show HIS OWN PARENTS DID? They ALSO CLAIMED multiple "primary residences" - and you can only have one. Oops.

THERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS: per G. Elliott Morris: mainstream Trump polling is flat, unchanged. But the INTERIOR numbers? Since January Trump’s STRONG approval number - the diehards - has dropped from 34% to 24%. That's down a third. And his STRONG disapproval number - the haters - has grown from 36% to 46%. Also a third. That is unsustainable.

B-Block (41:53) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: "Gunther Eagleman" and the other similarly stupidly named Right Wing influencers now alleged to be on yet ANOTHER country's payroll. Plus the man who killed CNN John Malone may have inadvertently outed a racist: himself. And And a CBS correspondent named Robert Costa let Trump pee on his leg about Russia and all he did was report: “CBS Exclusive: Trump Exclusively Peed On MY leg!”

C-Block (55:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: They're going to use A.I. to try to reconstruct the infamous 43 missing minutes in the classic - possible greatest film of all time - "Magnificent Ambersons." I loathe the concept. I will watch the product as many times as they let me! But of more immediate relevance, if they ever release it, I'll be able to say I knew the star of a new 2025 film who died in 1994 and I met in 1985 only I didn't realize it was him. I swear I thought she said "Carlton."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump ain't dead, and neither is his cover-up of the Epstein Files. The TRUMPStein Files. And if you gave him a script and told him what to do to RE-IGNITE the Trumpstein Tire Fire every time it begins to go out, it would start with: A) leak an anonymous statement to Republicans considering signing the Massie Discharge Petition to force release of the real files B) make sure that statement read as much likely a slightly sanded down threat from a mafia boss as possible, like, oooh, quote: "Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration. C) actually release only the same documents Pam Bondi released to the Libs of TikTok worm Chayik and the DC Draino dipshit in those $2.69 thin three-ring binders they bought at Staples in February D) send a military flyover to try to drown out the Epstein survivors’ news conference on the steps of the capitol E) choose THIS moment to ask the Supreme Court to overturn where the court found him GUILTY of being LIABLE FOR SEXUAL ABUSE of E. Jean Carroll and of DEFAMING a sexual abuse victim and of course F) sit there as THIS actual bona fide excellent comprehensive question is rolled out in front of world media when you can only come back with an answer that makes everybody think “wait, he said THAT? Maybe he IS dead and he just forgot to lie down.”

WHERE WAS TRUMP LAST WEEK? We know the media won't probe. We can assume the following: he wasn't dead. He also wasn't at a psychiatrist to help him get past these hallucinations that he 'turned the water on' in California or solved seven wars (including, no doubt, The War Of The Planet Of The Apes). He also wasn't at a political retreat figuring out what to do about New York other than pull Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa out of it to make sure it's a Trump Referendum in a city that's 75% registered Democrats. Plus, the unusual but all-too-plausible explanation for what is really behind the RFK Jr/MAGA hatred of the Covid vaccine that saved their lives but won't, next time.

B-Block (33:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: It's bad enough that Stephen A. Smith doesn't see he's risking his career by diving into politics. But in a time of rampant gun violence against children and politicians, he's chosen to name his new political show "STRAIGHT SHOOTER." A great line from a conservative about how Trump was just caught literally about losing his marbles. And Laura Loomer blasts the foreign-born judge who thwarted Trump's child-trafficking and demanding we have no more foreign-born judges. You mean like Aileen Cannon, moron?

C-Block (45:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The relentlessly principle-free Joe Scarborough has done it again: whored himself out to Trump, demanding JB Pritzer "partner up" with the dictator on militarizing the streets of Chicago. Scarborough has been getting away with this at MSNBC for 23 years. It's his life (if you call getting up at 4 AM every day to find some new part of democracy you can sell out for cash, a "life").

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Of course Trump’s not dead.

On the other hand, how could you really TELL?

But this much is clear: He’s never voluntarily STFU for five days before in his effing life.

And how could his own White House have possibly made it look MORE like he was dead! Or is desperately ill. Or had surgery. Or is having surgery. Or… what? They maximized the ways that conspiracy theories could build – including that 3-1/2 hour Cabinet Meeting/Comedy Roast/Dear Leader Circle Jerk last week. If that didn’t look like a farewell event I don’t know what could. I don't know what's really going on and YOU don't know what's really going on and America doesn't know what's really going on (except that the media has completely dropped the ball, not even covering the rumors let alone providing solid information). But there are lots of provable facts in the last five days of Trump MIA that might explain what's going on at a White House that couldn't manage radio silence.

PLUS: Trump's desire to boast about the Covid vaccine, the hallucinations of Kristi Noem and Bobby "What Kind of Mitochondria Are You Wearing" Kennedy, the solution to baseball's Tommy John Surgery crisis that isn't a crisis, and a farewell to the beloved Mrs. Weiner.

B-Block (32:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: As soon as the staff of Vanity Fair threatened to walk off if they put Melania Trump on the cover, she leaked a story to the NY Post that she didn't have time to be on their stupid cover anyway (she was on it in 2017). Candace Owens is back and now blaming the Minnesota school shooting on the government bid to take away your guns. So Trump is trying to take away your guns? And expanding kinda late into 9/11 trutherism, nitwit fascist Tucker Carlson gets the YEAR that 9/11 happened, wrong.

C-Block (43:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL/SPORTSBALL CENTER: So another all-star baseball pitcher, Randy Rodriguez, needs Tommy John Surgery. So baseball is back with preposterous solutions to the "crisis" of too many such surgeries. I'll offer two rules changes that would really do the job, but more importantly I would suggest that Tommy John Surgery is one of the most positive improvements in baseball in the last 60 years. The same percentage of pitchers get injured as they did in 1965, only in 1965 there was nothing to do when they tore up their elbow, shoulder, or anything else.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Donald Trump might as well have shot those kids in Minneapolis himself yesterday.

Trump sends the WRONG guns in the WRONG hands to the WRONG places pursuing the WRONG criminals. You want to be tough on crime, Trump? Deploy the National Guard to the headquarters of the gun-manufacturing companies and arrest the monsters who make their money from the child-murdering business. Murdering children during their thoughts and prayers. And have ICE round up the politician prostitutes who take the gun money to protect a lie about what the second amendment really means.

These are the criminals. Trump is the criminal. Trump is soft on crime, especially on the most prevalent, heart-rending crime of our century, school shootings. You want to push back against Trump as he militarizes this country? As he makes it The United Police States of America? You want to make something good happen in the wake of these latest children that we as a nation have sacrificed on our mindless altar of worship to guns? You want these to be the last? You have to say it; you have to SAY the truth: Trump might as well have shot them himself.

Democrats are strangling themselves by listening to consultants and strategists who insist they cannot push back on Trump's deployment of troops in big cities because polling shows Trump's only policy that gets approval (53%) is his new stance on "crime." And yet the biggest political event of the week was a man who simply stood up and concisely and with controlled rage told the truth: Trump is crazy, Trump is trying to provoke violence, Trump's enablers will be prosecuted (or betrayed by him), and the media is bothsidesing us to death. His name is Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and his comments may have been the true headline of this week.

Also, bookkeeping news: the fine folks at iHeart and I have agreed to continue this podcast through at least the midterms. And a further announcement on a wider footprint is coming.

B-Block (27:33) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: This may be the best edition of this, ever. Could this be the craziest thing (out of the 50,000 crazy things) Stephen Miller has said? Is he the first person to use the phrase "pool hall" in 60 years? Oh here we go: my ex is back in the news and stuck with the worst headline I've ever read: "RFK Jr's Digital Lover." And Candace Owens is being sued for defamation by the President and 1st Lady of France and she wants Trump to declare them "foreign invaders" and is amazed he won't because she's just not bright.

C-Block (44:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Do people like Owens believe the crap they spout? I actually have 45 years' experience dealing with the phenomenon of the product subsuming the salesman. I met Rush Limbaugh when he was just a baseball guy and 30 years ago he stood at my desk at ESPN dreaming of doing SportsCenter. I knew Hannity when he said "why do people get worked up about this? It's just TV?" And then the link is established. The more they believe, the more money they make.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: So WTF with Trump's health? Is he dying? Or is he fine?

Clearly, there is a Donald Trump health crisis. What is its exact nature? Is he sick? Is he fine? Is there some acceptable explanation for his swollen face and narrowed eyes last shown publicly on Friday? And what does the enlarged left hand mean? And what does the bruised right one covered in make up MEAN? And are those ballooned engorged ankles as benign as claimed by the latest doctor, Captain Barbabella? Is the president of the United States – whoever he is, whatever we think of him - gravely ill?

Would they tell us if he were?

Would they tell… HIM?

No, no, it’s all just “chronic venous insufficiency." Not serious. When we saw him Friday he looked like he'd just changed out of a hospital gown. And behind these questions –  why is the national news media still giving the clear decline in Trump’s appearance and clarity and likely in his physical health less attention than the irrelevancy that is Biden’s cognition level from LAST YEAR?

Lost in the Trumpstein cover-up, the Ghislaine Maxwell hostage video, Trump’s planned terrorism in Chicago, the John Bolton raid – Trump's face was so puffy – even for HIM - that his eyes looked like slits, barely open. Right hand with a contusion, clear tape, what could have been traces of blood near the fingers, running from the thumb through the middle finger and up, under the shirtsleeve, badly covered in make-up. Left hand so swollen it looked like something they’d draw for a cartoon character: the BASE of those fingers 40 or 50 percent larger than the ends and his ability to use the hand clearly impaired enough to make him hesitate. And we didn’t see the ankles this time. We saw them when he was in Alaska with Putin and they were wider than his feet.

Last time he only lied about his health on every topic from getting a colonoscopy to nearly getting intubated for Covid. Before that his personal doctor said everything except 'he's immortal' then confessed Trump dictated the statement. What's going on?

PLUS: Trump’s latest terrorist invasion will be of Chicago is about Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, just like LA was about Gavin Newsom, just like DC was about a Democratic local government, just like New York will be about Zohran Mamdani. And it’s all unconstitutional and more of the Trump dictatorship – unchallenged. And what, the Epstein Files were in John Bolton’s house? So Trump’s cult is going to believe ONE of Ghislaine Maxwell's 750 lies but not the other 749?

B-Block (29:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Live in Washington, Pam Bondi reveals she thinks she's in Miami. A confidante of NYC Mayor Eric Adams gives a reporter cash wrapped up in a potato chip bag. And the Cracker Barrel protestors prove they'll eat anything as long as you call them Crackers.

C-Block (45:30) SPORTSBALLCENTER/THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It is the greatest document ever written in the English language. Well, at least the greatest sports document. It is so amazing that for a long time, historians doubted it was real. It's called "Special Instructions To Players" and they had to read it, sign it, and hand it back because it was about banning them for life for excessive profanity. And there sure is excessive profanity! And I am going to read it to you.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Thank you William Barr! Thank you Jamie Comer! Thank you for rei-igniting Trumpstein! Turns out the Barr testimony to Comer that he never saw anything in the Epstein Files that implicated Trump (which may be officially released as early as today) is based on a little detail Comer didn't know about. Geoffrey Berman, the Barr-Trump prosecutor in the Epstein case, says he NEVER SHOWED ANY OF THE EPSTEIN FILES TO BARR. It's the Sgt. Schultz "I Know Nothing" defense. So trying to re-enact the washing of the Mueller Report won't work this time.

PLUS: WHAT'S TRUMP DOING WITH UKRAINE? Stalling. It's obvious now. He's just killing time for Putin because that's what Putin wants. And those "post-war guarantees" for Ukraine? Turns out Russia would be able to veto any country's efforts to defend Ukraine. 

THE BEST NEW NICKNAME OF THE YEAR: As the tiny shiny nut job treated the military thugs occupying DC to Shake Shack (not increased VA benefits, just burgers), The Lincoln Project named Stephen Miller "Pee Wee German." Also, Shake Shack? Hosting the junta? Possibly a bad business strategy.

KAROLINE LEAVITT - HALL OF FAME MORON: She's done it again. First she got the top Nazi's name wrong. Then she mispronounced "Trump" a bunch of times. Then "Noble Peace Prize." Now, wait'll you hear what she did to "pundit." 

B-Block (39:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The follow-up to the Zelensky/EU meeting at the White House on BBC News? An interview with Zelensky's Wardrobe Guy. Countdown and I have outlived MSNBC, or MSNOW. Joe Scarborough announced it. Although I understand he may change his name to Quisling. And Donald Trump wants to rehabilitate the reputation of American Slavery.

C-Block (57:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Happened again. Somebody else told me they'd been told their career in media was over, so I got to recount how many times I've been told that. Last year one of the guys who told me that in the '80s died, and one of the ones who told me that in 2001 retired from a magazine. Good evening and welcome to the non-end of my career.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: THE DISASTA IN ALASKA

The Disasta in Alaska - starring the cheeseburger-eating surrender monkey.

We have, to quote Churchill, suffered a defeat, without a war. Because we forget we don’t MERELY have an evil, deranged president, we have an evil, deranged president who is also a moron. Now, Trump - Putin’s butt boy, his errand carrier - will deliver Putin’s message to Zelensky in Washington. He will be accompanied by EU President von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Rutte, Presidents Macron of France and Stubb of Finland, Prime Ministers Starmer of the U-K and Meloni of Italy, and Chancellor Merz of Germany. Trump will be accompanied by a large selection of mirrors.

I suspect Trump will parrot what he remembers of Putin's message (whatever Trump's staff didn't leave on the printer of the business center at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage) and tell Zelensky that the way to achieve an end to the war in Ukraine is: to lose. The best thing Zelensky and the Europeans could say in response would be to state that they are withdrawing their recognition of the government of the United States of America because it is just too effing stupid.

From the Disasta in Alaska to the Occupied territory of Washington, D.C. And don’t forget what Trump today DOUBLING the number of National Guard in DC with new recruits from Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina (all of them, far more violent than DC) means: It means he’s read his cratering polls number and declared war on the United States of America.

Also: we rejoin the Trumpstein Cover-up Scandal, already in progress.

B-Block (30:02) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: International Fop Piers Morgan FINALLY does a journalism - posts a meme of Trump on his way to meet Putin and Trump is wearing kneepads - and then DELETES the first journalism of his life? Pam Bondi proudly admits The Deep State has defeated her fascist DOJ with nothing more than a Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki Sub. And the battle of the most overrated people in their field: neither CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin nor House Democratic mis-Leader Hakeem Jeffries repeat Andrew Cuomo's canard that Democratic NYC mayor nominee Zohran Mamdani lives in a rent-CONTROLLED apartment when he, like HALF of all NYC renters (myself included) lives in a rent-STABILIZED apartment. Sorkin repeats this FOUR times, Jeffries doesn't correct him, and Jeffries who is theoretically a congressman from New York STILL refuses to endorse his own party's nominee, chosen by its MEMBERS, for mayor OF New York. Sorkin should be fired and Jeffries should resign.

C-Block (43:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Somebody wrote last week that Aaron Sorkin's HBO "Newsroom" version of some of what happened to Countdown on MSNBC was the worst fictionalization of journalism in the English language. I think that's an exaggeration. It wasn't nearly that good.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hey have fun watching Trump's "listening exercise" with Putin in Alaska today. No, Russia. No, Alaska. I don’t know any more. Listening exercise.” Trump listening to Putin telling him what to do. No crap.

This is simple. Trump and Putin will leave this photo-op having agreed on something utterly agreeable to Putin. Like the cease fire Axios reports Trump told European leaders yesterday he really wants. You know what THAT could be: Putin will agree to a cease-fire if Ukraine will stop annoying Putin by defending its territory. Then Trump will claim a victory. Then Ukraine will reject it – although President Zelensky’s real play is to say it is too naïve an idea to even merit a comment, and any child can see that – then Trump will blame Zelensky and say he resolved the war except for the war part. That Zelensky screwed it up.

Actually it may be worse. The Times of London headline: “US and Russia ‘propose West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine." Per its source close to the U.S. national security council: "It’ll just be like Israel occupies the West Bank. With a governor, with an economic situation that goes into Russia, not Ukraine. But it’ll still be Ukraine, because … Ukraine will never give up its sovereignty. But the reality is it’ll be occupied territory and the model is Palestine.”

THIS IS THE TEST MARKETING OF THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP: Trump says sure he'll go to Congress to get the use of troops authorized in DC past the 30-day limit. Or he'll just declare a national emergency. He boasts he closed the border and didn't get anybody's permission. He is moving towards the takeover. We are this close to him in the Kim Jong Un hat.

THE TRUMPSTEIN COVER-UP CONTINUES: Karoline "Noble Prize" Leavitt explains Trump “wants to see credible evidence released." The part she leaves out is that of course he wants to make sure that this evidence is NOT released. Some of the evidence about Ghislaine Maxwell's transfer has been revealed and somebody tampered with her prisoner status and she may now be free to leave Club Fed during the day.

AND JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn't the dumbest of them all - oh yes she is.

B-Block (34:03) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: CNN's Kasie Hunt says sure crime is down by a quarter in DC but does it FEEL like it's down? Andrew Cuomo finds another opponent he can beat: Muhammad Ali's most famous quote. And if OK! Magazine has the story right, Jeff Bezos has found the next Bond Girl: MRS. Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez.

C-Block (56:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Missed the anniversary by twelve days but it's always in the back of my mind anyway. Literally one month into my career and only the seventh time my bosses trusted me enough to leave me alone on a sportscasting shift at our 1,000-station radio network, Thurman Munson - catcher and captain of the New York Yankees - was killed when the plane he was still learning how to fly crashed at an Ohio airport. And the news came across my wire one minute before my sportscast.

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A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Hey! While Putin is here in Alaska so Trump can kiss his fanny, let's arrest him on behalf of the International Criminal Court and its member states Canada and Mexico who want to try him for kidnapping Ukrainian children and lying that they're orphans and forcibly converting them into Russians! 

The willingness to let this scum set foot on American territory is all part of Trump's desperate need to win an award. A major award. A major award like the one the father wanted in the movie "A Christmas Story." He wants what his idiot press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls "The Noble Peace Prize." He'll do anything to get it. Because he needs it to distract you from Trumpstein.

Happily Jayvee Vance is back to remind you all that the Epstein files contain all kinds of dirt about Democratic billionaire politicians of 20 years ago. Of whom Trump was one. Registered Democrat. Oops. And it turns out that meeting Vance and the FBI and DOJ chiefs and the White House Chief of Staff DIDN'T have at the VP's residence about Epstein WITHOUT Trump? They had the Trumpstein meeting. They just had it somewhere else. And once again: why did they have it WITHOUT TRUMP?

And now Trump is trying to distract by demanding all those DC homeless people who read Truth Social move out of town or else he'll...make them look at his new gold ballroom. And oh by the way as the leading universities continue to fold before Trump's dictatorial censorship and threat, somebody's standing up to him: Stanford's student-run newspaper is suing him for violating the 1st Amendment rights of its staffers. The leaders of all of the El Foldo Universities (Columbia, Penn, UCLA) should resign and let the students lead the resistance.

B-Block (29:17) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Kristi Noem is upset South Park made her look like a cartoon. Well, MORE like a cartoon. I need to apologize for Mike Huckabee again insulting England. And Pam Bondi just offered you $50,000,000 if you can tell her where Nicolas Maduro is. He's in Venezuela. Can we each have our 50 mill now?

C-Block (41:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's the 37-year anniversary of Gretzky Week! My greatest scoop, the one I did the least work on of any story I ever covered. The sources literally phoned it in to me. The day Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings and I was the first on television with it. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The United States of America does not have a functioning government. 

The Trump Dictatorship and the Library of Congress – Congress which Mike Johnson runs via a porn app – DELETED part of the official online edition of the Constitution – the part that limits the suspension of Habeas Corpus and bans presidents accepting foreign bribes. The Library says it was a coding error and would be fixed soon…ish. Yeah, the coding in Trump’s DNA.

The White House had to DENY that the White House Chief of Staff was to meet last night with the Vice President, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, and the FBI Director to discuss what to DO about the Trump/Epstein cover-up scandal, and what to do WITH the RECORDING of the Deputy Attorney General’s two days’ of bargaining with a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker… and nobody seemed to notice that the headline was that WHATEVER the Chief of Staff, A-G, Deputy A-G, and FBI Director WERE meeting with the Vice President ABOUT… the PRESIDENT WASN’T GOING TO BE THERE.

There is no competent executive authority, no congressional or senate oversight, no reliable judiciary. The United States of America does NOT NOW have a functioning government. The nominal president has spent the last few days making up economic statistics and poll numbers and threatening his predecessors with prosecution for imaginary crimes punishable by death while wandering around the roof of the White House, and phoning in to a business network with racist moronity the content of which is just this side of a 19th century minstrel show, or continuing to get more and more in bed, figuratively, with a convicted pedophile and child sex trafficker, in a scheme to cover-up her crimes, her late partner crimes, and whatever the president’s role was or was not… in them. And the first and seventh people in the line of presidential succession were going to have dinner with their Epstein expert who just met with Gulaine Maxwell and the head of the FBI and the woman who RUNS the White House but NOT the president and you know it almost doesn’t MATTER if they were meeting to try to figure out what to do about Trumpsteen or not. 

By 3:14 PM Eastern the Library of Congress said Sections 8, 9 and 10 of the 1st Article were back online so, shrug emoji, I guess there are limits on emoluments and suspending Habeas Corpus… for now. Fifteen minutes later, however, there were still huge swaths of all three sections missing from the official online version of the Constitution. But coding. And so what, it’s just the ONLINE version, what’s the difference? Trump just fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she wouldn’t delete the official online jobs numbers and will soon find someone to post fabricated numbers online which will then be accepted as real – and official – because they’re ONLINE.

There is no functioning government, just a mediocre Public Relations firm. Understaffed. Trying to sell Edsels, Google Glasses, New Coke, and fascism.

B-Block (40:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Acting NASA "Director" Duffy wants to put nukes on the moon, even though that was the plot of the re-make of the movie "The Time Machine" in which nukes on the moon destroyed the moon and rendered earth uninhabitable good call reality TV boy. The New York Times won't stop trying to make Harvard-Fetch happen. And the Trump Council on Lack of Fitness, the one Super Bowl star Saquon Barkley turned down membership on? The Council announced he accepted.

C-Block (55:00) THURSDAYS WITH THURBER: Of all his great stories, the one that might have been the most likely to have been written in order to be performed aloud, I humbly offer you this week: "The Night The Bed Fell."

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A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Jobs Report will now be handled by the same guy who keeps score when Trump plays golf.

But first, the unexplained move of Ghislaine Maxwell from near Alligator Alcatraz to Club Fed was just beginning to calm down when Trump detonated on Lenard McKelvey (political commentary name Charlamagne Tha God). All Charlamagne had done was to go on Fox News and claim to Lara Trump “I think that traditional conservatives are going to take the Republican Party back. I think there’s a political coup going on right now in the Republican Party that people aren’t paying attention to… we have the opportunity to have, like, a huge reset.” Trump has never known when to leave bad enough alone, but this time he just hit the side of the hornets’ nest with his tie. Called him “racist sleazebag… low IQ individual… has no idea what words are coming out of his mouth… knows nothing about me… this dope.”

So now millions of people who DIDN’T know an often conservative, Trump-accepting-if-not-supporting African American was describing a Republican Palace Coup AGAINST TRUMP OVER EPSTEIN… have THAT new Trumpsteen tendril to ponder.

Let’s sort this out. Somebody had to change Maxwell’s status as a registered sex offender to get her transferred to an all-women, all-white collar criminals, minimum security facility. She might no longer BE a registered sex offender; that could be a free sample offered by Trump if she’ll lie for him. The move to the cushier camp could be ANOTHER free sample. Or to make it easier for her to suffer rapid unscheduled disassembly.

Also there’s a Trump cover-up OF The Epstein Files, and a Trump cover-up OF HIS OWN NAME IN the Epstein Files, and a Conservative Coup Against Trump OVER The Epsteen files, and the unexplained cushy new home for Epstein’s co-rapist.

Oh and the true Orwellian shooting of the statistical messenger. But - you'd forgotten, hadn't you - he's always done this. He did this most infamously as Covid started.

B-Block (30:17) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There's little left for Andrew Cuomo. Apparently that includes flat out making up a story that mayor-to-be-Zamdani has never had a job before. Ryan "Who Put That Porn On The TV Monitor In My Office During The State Education Department Executive Meeting" Walters of Oklahoma doubles down. And the Republicans sure know how to sell American cars: with a picture of a car made in Soviet Russia in 1970 being sold by a Trump that looks like he was made in 1870.

C-Block (40:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The teachers of Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York are legendary. Nineteen of them there I graduated fifty years ago were still there the day I gave the Commencement Address thirty years ago. But now we may have lost the last of the greats, at least of that era. Gerry Murphy was the math teacher with empathy. He once recognized he had hit "the math wall" - he recognized I had. If he hadn't, I'd still be there failing that class for the 51st straight year. Gerald Murphy, R.I.P.

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A-Block (1:45): One shouted question to which Trump didn't even bother to reply reignites the entire Trumpstein scandal and cover-up: "What did you think Epstein was stealing those women FOR?"

It encapsulates the entirety of Trump's complicity: in the cover-up of Epstein's crimes, in his willingness to cut a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell, with his indifference to the suffering of the victims, to his belief the real victim here is him because Epstein "stole" Virginia Giuffre and other employees from him. 

It encapsulates Trump's worthless, despicable life.

The moral vacancy, the lack of humanity, summarized in one reporter's question. And it re-emphasizes that Trump now confesses he broke with Epstein not over the child rape but because Epstein hired rape victims away from him, was STEALING Virginia Giuffre away from him, Trump paints a picture OF Mar-a-Lago where the tragic Ms. Giuffre who just killed herself worked for Trump as not Epstein Island but the Recruiting Station and Waiting Room FOR Epstein Island, Trump calls going to the Island a quote “privilege” and keeps re-igniting Trumpsteen and finding new things to admit to, and after ten years of watching the fascists beat democracy to within an inch of its life using democracy’s own loopholes, Senate Democrats finally found a loophole which may FORCE the Justice Department to release the Trumpsteen files including whatever deal with the devil his man Todd made with the pedophile pimp Gulaine Maxwell last week, or at minimum take Trump and his inflatable rubber Attorney General and tie them up in court forever and thus keep the Trumpsteen Scandal ALIVE forever.

EVEN DEMOCRATS ARE DOING SOMETHING: Invoking federal law that says any executive branch agency SHALL supply any information to any group of five members of the Senate Government Oversight Committee. SHALL. 

Repeated daily, Trumpstein will end Trump's presidency.

B-Block (43:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: MSNBC says it's getting great new offices (in fact, it's getting kicked out of 30 Rock by a parent that has disowned it). Analyze the polls any way you want to: Andrew Cuomo is losing to Zohran Mamdani in NYC by 20 to 30 points. The move to disbar the FCC fascist Brendan Carr. And at our expense Kristi Noem brings Corey Lewandowski with her to Argentina with her so she can spend all her time riding.

C-Block (54:50) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I surprised a new friend recently by mentioning the late Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner was my friend. In fact we were friends for more than 25 years and my exchanges with him were unexpectedly and always delightful. The blessing of only knowing George, never working for him.

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A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Donald Trump is now getting into bed with a convicted pedophile. Figuratively.

Donald Trump has already cut a deal with a pedophile. A two-day deal to protect her. To PROTECT Ghislaine Maxwell from being prosecuted. Two days of immunity. It’s immunity. It’s immunity at the direction of Donald Trump. Immunity. What may be a precursor to a deal. To a pardon. To her walking out of jail earlier than the year 2037. 

This is sending the Deputy Attorney General, previously one of your own personal scumbag sleazebag shill lawyer mouthpieces, to meet with a convicted child sex trafficker who is not eligible to be released until she’s 76 years old, giving her two days’ worth of temporary immunity in which she can’t be further prosecuted for anything she says to him. You have ALREADY CUT A DEAL with a pedophile. You, Todd Blanche, are already figuratively in bed with a pedophile. YOU, Donald Trump, are already figuratively in bed with a pedophile. YOU, Trump supporters and blind MAGA cult slaves, YOU are already figuratively in bed with a pedophile.

Sure, make a deal. Art of the deal. Trump’s the great dealmaker. Make the deal with the rapist of children. Of the woman who essentially held the girls down. Make the deal with the woman who sold the children to the rapists. MAKE that deal, Trump. And you know what that deal is called – it’s called selling your soul to the devil. If you have any soul left. You, Donald Trump, and all who support him, stand on the precipice. You are figuratively getting into bed with Ghislaine Maxwell. You are figuratively getting into bed with a pedophile. You are figuratively getting into bed with the process of COVERING UP PEDOPHILIA. 

There is now no way out of Trumpstein for Trump.

ALSO: Anybody notice that on Friday Trump said reporters shouldn't ask him about Epstein, they should ask Clinton or the Harvard President: "I'll give you a list." So...he confirmed THERE'S A LIST and there's a LIST HE HAS and there's a LIST HE HAS THAT HE COULD GIVE YOU BUT IS COVERING-UP?

AND RYAN WALTERS, EXIT STAGE RIGHT: Oklahoma's lunatic Trump-bible-thumping head of public schools? Reportedly had porn playing on a monitor in his office during the executive session of the State Board of Education. And then couldn't figure how to turn it off. It's a classic story: the loudest moralist has the least morals.

B-Block (47:28) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Great news! A QAnon prophet says there are multiple Hillarys, Obamas and Bidens. Cool! An army? With which to kick Trump's ass? Let's goooooo. Senator Mike Lee again proves he is just a balding 5th Grader who just flunked Social Studies again. And while you may still be wasting your time complaining about Colbert, CBS has gone full obey-in-advance to placate FCC Commissioner Brendan "Don't call me Josef Goebbels" Carr. There will be an ombudsman inside CBS News snitching to corporate on things the CBS News people are doing that might displease Fuhrer Trump.

C-Block (49:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Did I ever tell you I was in a movie? And the star bothered to show up to see my little cameo shot because he was such a fan of mine? And he was a great guy and we stayed in touch for 20 years? And his name was...RANDY QUAID? "Dead Solid Perfect" may be the best golf movie of all-time, Quaid was (then, anyway) a delight, it has THE scene the golfers love the most starring actress Corinne Bohrer, and the director who personally asked me to be in it (and I'm terrible in it) was named Bobby Roth. And last week I worked with Bobby Roth for the first time in 37 years. He's a documentarian now and the new one is on saving democracy and he wanted me in it. All part of life's rich pageant!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Now that it's Murdochian Official (WHAT? Trump is IN the Trumpstein files? I'm shocked to discover there's gambling going on in here) and a Politico source says Trump and his White House goons are so lost "it's the first time I've ever seen them sort of paralyzed," expect them to push even harder on their QAnonTM fantasy that Barack Obama is guilty of 'treason' - even beyond the farce that the nitwitted Tulsi Gabbard and Karoline Leavitt presented yesterday.

So it is time for President Obama to respond - and crush Trump. It is Obama's moment. Rather than again insist that EVERYBODY ELSE needs to DO more and SAY more and STAND for more, he should give a national address in which he sues Trump personally for slander and defamation and announce a ridiculous figure sought - like $500 Billion - and call for a conference at which he and President Clinton and other Democratic leaders and the SCOTUS justices they appointed and every decent Republican and every true American meets to strategize how to legally and immediately remove Trump from office and replace his criminal gang with a bipartisan caretaker government to carry us through to Election Day 2028.

I will give a version of the speech Obama should now give, because he has been unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to perhaps actually start something that could end this nightmare of a madman steadily disassembling American democracy, a Temu Hitler gradually turning harassment of minorities into persecution and ethnic cleansing, a criminal who must stay in office at any cost or face the reality of dying in prison for his countless crimes. I have no doubt he can do better. I would not doubt he has a better idea.

I will take no offense - provided he DOES something.

“Trump is clearly furious,” a Politico close-to-the-White House source told its Trump stenographer yesterday. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.” Say Hey! Trump’s White House is paralyzed! Excellent – kick them down the stairs, they can’t fight back. It’ll hurt more. The Trumpsteen Birthday Card is real and it CAN’T be the worst thing about Trump in the files that we now know Bondi told him about in May, otherwise he would’ve released the files. The photos of Epsteen at Trump’s second wedding are real, and THEY can’t be the worst otherwise he would’ve released it. Whatever’s worst is at LEAST B+ material. Keep hammering.

B-Block (37:16) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: They piled up quick! Trump just asked Washington's NFL team to change its name; Trump once hammered Obama for asking Washington's NFL team to change its name. Mike Lee fell for an AI Jerome Powell resignation so badly done that the only word in the office logo that wasn't gibberish was "BUREAU," Chris Cillizza is actually criticizing somebody else for talking politics when nobody wants to hear that person talking politics, and the passing of the eternal Ozzy Osbourne inspires John Yang to get Ozzy's native country wrong and Alex Jones to get the cause of death wrong.

C-Block (48:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Can you believe it? After I presented the inarguable evidence that CBS didn't fire Colbert just to please Trump (how are you shutting him up if he's not fired until next May?) I get invited to speak at a PRO-Colbert rally. I explained what I was going to say, and the line went dead. One of the things I was going to say was how this is the same as MSNBC's firing of Phil Donahue in 2003. I was actually in the room for that, so let's go through it step by step.

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A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: We have been burying the lede here.

Trump. Is. Suing. Murdoch.

Trump and Murdoch are at war. Over Jeffrey Epstein. The two worst people in the country, probably the world, at each other's throats, until further notice. Weeks, months, years. Amid rumors Murdoch's people at the Wall Street Journal are upworking ANOTHER Trump-Epstein/Epstein-Trump/Trumpstein story. And that Murdoch is preparing a Defcon scenario in which he turns Fox News against Trump.

Because if Trump is stupid enough to try to put Murdoch out of business, Murdoch will have no choice but to try to put Trump out of business.

Trump also seems to be doing everything else he can think of to make sure the Trumpstein story never leads the headlines again. Attacks his own people again. Left a paper trail inside the DOJ and FBI of Pam Bondi searching for thousands of Trump references inside an evidence pit the size of The New York Public Library. Changing the story of the latest plot against him for the sixth time in a week. And watching the polls - 17% approve of his handling of the Epstein issue - actually get worse since just last Thursday (89% want everything, not just the almost-meaningless Grand Jury testimony, released).

Oh by the way there IS a Trump Client List inside DOJ/FBI. The only part of Trump's claim that there isn't that's true, is that it may not bear that title. There's literally 40 computers, 70 CDs of video, and 300 gigabytes of data.

The Trumpstein story will swamp his presidency. For sheer volume it exceeds almost everything else Trump has ever done. It makes Watergate look like the editing out of four words in a 5,000 word document. IT'S WONDERFUL.

Trumpstein, Trumpstein, Trumpstein.

ALSO: Trump's unpopularity has now reached 1st Term proportions. Tulsi Gabbard is conflating two Russian stories and claiming the one nobody believed (Russia tampered with voting machines) disproves the one Robert Mueller proved (Russia hacked emails and got them to Trump's campaign). How does that work? I'll explain the psychology of morons who want to please their bosses, with the story of Tennessee Ernie Williams.

And if you think Trump isn't brain dead he wrote something that must've come directly from a dream about how the Cleveland Guardians (formed 1901, not named "Indians" until 1915) are one of baseball's "six original teams" (Major League Baseball started 30 years earlier; it's HOCKEY with "the original six" and that's wrong too).

B-Block (39:15) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: I understand this busts the narrative and reduces our ability to suffer as martyrs, but there is one inarguable and unanswerable fact that disproves the almost-universally accepted premise that CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert solely to appease Trump. It's this: If they are silencing him, why have they decided to keep him on TV for THE NEXT TEN MONTHS? This is the Phil Donahue cancellation all over again. It works to CBS's corporate advantage to make it look like they are sucking up to the psycho. Sorry. This is the least of the reasons. 

C-Block (1:09:10) MONDAYS WITH THURBER: Haven't done any of his priceless stories lately, and with Trump's new permanent Trumpstein Crisis, it's fitting to do James Thurber's stunningly prophetic saga "The Greatest Man In The World."

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"I never wrote a picture in my life," Trump told The Wall Street Journal, with his typical cognitive confusion, as he denied its bombshell report tonight that he contributed a bawdy letter and drawing of a naked woman to a special bound '50th Birthday Book' for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. 

Within minutes, literally dozens of pictures wrote (or as we'd call it, "drawn") by Trump appeared online - most of them auctioned for charity. Trump was immediately defended by others like JD Vance who said was written in the book (compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell) didn't sound like him. Which him? The "Grab 'Em" him or the "I never wrote a picture in my life" him? Vance also asks why WSJ hasn't produced the letter. And Laura Loomer says Trump never types letters, he writes notes. I have a fan letter from Trump - from 2014 - typed by him or somebody for him.

The denials aren't relevant to the existence of the letter or what it says about Trump's relationship with Epstein at this perilous moment in Trump's presidency. And the denials didn't survive an hour. And they didn't deal with the most ominous part, the content of the letter, which includes Epstein and Trump "talking" to each other and concludes with Trump "saying" "Happy birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret."

Another wonderful secret? What in the HELL could that mean?

ALSO: in addition to the Trump Epstein cover-up there is the Trump Health cover-up and parts of the story about his acutely swollen ankles don't hold up. And the only thing swollen about Stephen Colbert is his ego. CBS has tonight cancelled his show, effective next May. The man is untrustworthy and rarely funny but his platform was consistently anti-dictatorship so the forum will be missed even if he will not.

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A-Block (1:45): Trump self-destructs over the Epstein files: now calls his supporters “weaklings” calls Republicans “stupid” for believing the Epstein story HE sold them, now demands reporters don’t cover it, and demands MAGA stops talking about it.

And now - most meaningfully - HE is connecting his Epstein Cover-up to his Russia Collusion Cover-up and continually tying Epstein to "The Steele Dossier." And what was the most grotesque part of the Steele Dossier story? Sexual perversion. Video. Blackmail.

Trump is himself tying himself and Epstein to the purported pee tape!

And that nauseating link and amazing implications (which he alone is making) are on top of the established reality: Donald Trump is president of the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.Trump is RUNNING the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up. It’s TRUMP’S Jeffrey Epstein cover-up!

President Pervert. President Epstein. President Pee Tape. President Pedophile. President cover-up. "TRUMP’S EPSTEIN COVER-UP" -  I want to hear that every day, from a leading Democrat. Every day and SIX TIMES on Sunday. Forever. I’m delighted Trump is destroying himself; I want Democrats to finish the job. I want it to destroy MAGA. I want it to bury them all, under a mountain of their own amoral, uncaring, "bullshit" – the word Trump just used in an enraged screed against his own MAGA "weaklings" whose support he now claims he no longer wants.

Is pursuing this Shapiro-Steele story disgusting? Yes. Is it sleazy? Yes. Is it what the Trumpist scum would do? Yes. Is it a terrible way to prevent dictatorship and terror? What? There are RULES here? No, there are no rules. Pick up the damn tire iron. This is democracy-saving gold. Every. Damn. Day.

Trump's the one who did this. He's the one who has now linked whatever he's choosing to do in covering up the Epstein story, to whatever there was in the Steele Dossier that would destroy him. He's the one who... crossed the streams.

B-Block (32:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Homeland Security Spokesman Micah Bock with a cleverly phrased bit of dishonesty which actually says Texans calling FEMA during the floods had the same chance of getting through as people buying tickets have of winning the lottery. Mehmet Oz, whose senate bid crashed over crudités, now sees his Medicare disembowlin rationalization not cut it over carrot cake, and what trophies did soccer mogul Gianna Infantino let Trump walk away with this time?

C-Block (42:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Twenty years, almost to the day, since I quit smoking and began my MSNBC campaign to get others to quit, too. Which the PRESIDENT of MSNBC naturally responded to...by trying to kill me.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well, there it is, finally - the perfect storm that can dethrone or at least deplete Trump and of course it's his fault. HE has openly admitted he's covering up the Epstein Files, and he has in essence confessed he's in the Epstein Files.

The problem is a simple one: Trump promised to give them pedophiles. They were promised politician pedophiles. They were promised that the politicians who were covering up Epstein were the pedophiles. And then one day Trump suddenly decided to announce that HE was the politician who was covering up Epstein and he SCOLDED them and HUMILIATED them and YELLED at them for challenging his god-ordained RIGHT to cover up Epstein, and they said in their confusion “but you promised us that you would reveal the pedophile politicians that were covering up Epstein and…wait a minute... that means...”