There’s a lot you can say about Keith Olbermann, but you can’t allege that the guy holds back his opinions.
The man who once brought the “Worst Person in the World” segment to ESPN unloaded on Donald Trump in an op-ed in the Washington Post, calling the Republican presidential front-runner a “cartoon character” and “Oompa Loompa,” among other things.
It turns out Olbermann owns a condo in a Trump-managed building in New York but has decided to sell because he can no longer stand to live somewhere that constantly reminds him of the businessman-turned-presidential-candidate. From the op-ed:
I’m getting out because of the degree to which the very name “Trump” has degraded the public discourse and the nation itself. I can’t hear, or see, or say that name any longer without spitting. Frankly, I’m running out of Trump spit.
After explaining why he’s leaving his condo, Olbermann unleashed a brutal stream of anti-Trump rhetoric, beginning with Trump’s “historically unique fashion combination of a cheap baseball cap and Oompa Loompa makeup” and continuing into more substantive matters.
This is the campaign of a PG-rated cartoon character running for president, interrupting a string of insults the rest of us abandoned in the seventh grade only long enough to resume a concurrent string of half-crazed boasts: We’re gonna start winning again! We’re gonna build an eleventy-billion-foot-high wall! We’re not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!
All this coarseness is largely masking the truth that the Trump campaign is entirely about coarseness. Take away the unmappable comb-over and the unstoppable mouth and the Freudian-rich debates about genitalia, and there is no Trump campaign. Donald Trump’s few forays into actual issues suggest he is startlingly unaware of how the presidency or even ordinary governance works.
Frankly, we wouldn’t expect anything less of Olbermann, who made his living in the mid-2000s as a fiery liberal commentator trashing George W. Bush and generally made a name for himself trafficking in creative insults.
All the same things that made Olbermann a legendary SportsCenter anchor in the ’90s — quick wit, sharp writing, biting sarcasm — make him a wonderful writer of hit-pieces. He’s still without a new gig after ESPN parted ways with him last year, so perhaps this column is a sign that a return to political commentary could be on the horizon.
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