Former sports columnist Keith Olbermann partially blames President Donald Trump for the decline of boxer Mike Tyson that eventually led to rape charges.
Olbermann, a vociferous Trump critic, claims that Trump and boxing promoter Don King destabilized Tyson’s inner ring of advisers and confidants for their own gain several decades ago.
“King and Trump came into a situation that was seemingly permanently under control, disabled the brakes and busted the headlights and painted over the speed-limit signs, and within a few years, Tyson was in prison, convicted of rape,” Olbermann writes in the introduction to his new book “Trump Is F*cking Crazy,” out Tuesday from Blue Rider Press.
Tyson was convicted of raping 18-year-old Desiree Washington, a contestant for Miss America, in 1992. Olbermann — who points out that he is practically cousins with Tyson through Olbermann’s uncle’s marriage to the niece of former Tyson trainer Cus D’Amato — claims Trump, who promoted boxing events at his casinos in the 1980s, and King told Tyson “that he was a the champ now and he no longer had to do the things” that Tyson’s closest trainers and advisors told him to do.
Olbermann claims Trump and King discouraged Tyson from doing healthy things “like taking the cocktail of medications that kept him surprisingly stable and unexpectedly kind and even sweet-hearted but harshed his buzz, or sticking to a diet, or training, or not attacking people, or not giving away $200,000 cars to strangers.”
Olbermann made the point to illustrate why he wrote “Trump Is Fucking Crazy,” which is a 423-page anthology of Olbermann’s previously published anti-Trump columns from September 2016 to June 2017.
“The point of this book is to chronicle how Trump managed to get America to choose him to do to our country what Trump helped do to my cousin Mike,” Olbermann wrote.
Tyson and Trump have remained friends over the years, and Tyson even endorsed candidate Trump in 2015, arguing that we should “run America like a business, where no colors matter.”
“Whoever can do the job, gets the job,” Tyson said.
Olbermann gained notariety for his GQ video series titled “The Closer” during the final months of the election and rebranded “The Resistance” after the election.
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