-President Trump is demanding an investigation
into last week's anonymous op-ed warning
about his mental fitness
and slamming the author of a new book
about the chaos in his White House.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Applause ]
One of the weirdest aspects of having Donald Trump as President
is the fact that every few months or so,
people working at the highest levels of government
have to put down everything they're doing
and hunt for the anonymous mole who just called
the President a brain-dead moron.
Same thing over and over.
Someone calls the President an idiot
or they call him a fifth grader
or they leak a transcript of him telling the President of Mexico
he wants a piñata for his birthday.
And then serious government officials
and four-star generals have to
issue so many denials, they start to sound like Shaggy.
-♪ It wasn't me ♪
[ Laughter ]
-And sure enough...
sure enough, the government is once again
grinding to a halt as the President demands
that the Attorney General use actual law-enforcement resources
to investigate who wrote last week's anonymous op-ed
in "The New York Times."
-President Trump is now calling
on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to track down
that unnamed senior official
behind that scathing "New York Times" editorial.
-He sounds like Sherlock Holmes after a concussion.
[ Laughter ]
[ As President Trump ] My dear Watson,
we're going to find out who the suspect is,
and where he is, and what he did,
and who he what, and why I where.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Trump apparently thinks
a crime might have been committed
by whoever wrote the op-ed.
Yesterday White House counselor Kellyanne Conway
was asked on CNN what exactly that crime may be
and didn't have an answer.
-President Trump has said that Jeff Sessions,
the Attorney General should be investigating
who the author of the piece is
because of national security reasons.
Is that a directive to DOJ to investigate?
-From what I understand, there can be an investigation
if there's criminal activity perhaps.
-There doesn't appear to be any.
-I don't know that, and I don't think you know that.
-What would the criminal activity be?
-It really depends
on what else has been divulged by an individual.
Anybody who would do this --
-But we read the op-ed.
There was nothing -- There are no national secrets divulged.
-Anybody who would do this,
you don't know what else they're saying.
-You think the person broke the law?
-I don't know. I have no idea.
-You think because he or she wrote the op-ed,
he or she might have also broken the law?
-I have really no idea, nor do you.
-Yeah, we do.
We do because we all read the op-ed.
There are no crimes in there.
It's called "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration,"
not "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration,
and Also I Murdered a Guy."
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
The fact is, calling Donald Trump
an incompetent moron is not a crime.
It's not even new information.
[ Laughter ]
And yet he's very obviously freaked out by both
the anonymous op-ed and famed journalist Bob Woodward's
blockbuster new book, "Fear."
He brought it up repeatedly last week
and tweeted obsessively about it again this morning.
>> "The Woodward book is a joke," he tweeted...
-Please do that.
I would love to see you try to write a book by yourself
without a ghost writer, and I mean, a real book,
not one of your airport books
because I'm pretty sure those books
have exactly one word on each page.
[ Laughter ]
I'm talking an actual book with chapters and an appendix.
Of course, if you told Trump you need an appendix,
he'd probably say, "Fine, just take Eric's."
[ Laughter ]
I got to say.
I got to say, I love imagining Trump sitting at a typewriter
punching away at the keys with his stubby meat paws.
He either types one finger at a time grandpa-style
or with palms fully open like he's playing Whac-A-Mole.
[ As President Trump ] Sad.
[ Laughter ]
Exclamation point.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Trump has spent the last week
fixated on these anonymous leaks
from inside his own White House
warning the country that he's erratic and unstable.
So he's responding by going on national TV
and acting erratic and unstable.
-The latest act of resistance is the op-ed published
in the failing "New York Times" by an "anomonous" --
really an "amonmos," gutless coward.
-Hmm.
Who -- who do you think it was?
Maybe it's the same person
who replaced your denture adhesive with Silly Putty?
[ Laughter ]
[ As President Trump ] Anonomomy.
[ Normal voice ] But it's not surprising to me
that Trump wouldn't know how to pronounce the word "anonymous"
since he's never done anything anonymously in his life.
If he had been the Gossip Girl,
he would have signed the notes "XOXO, Donald J. Trump."
[ Laughter ]
But this...this is one of the most surreal aspects
of the moment we're in.
The President of the United States regularly has to go on TV
and try to convince people that he's not out of his mind.
In fact, last week he just straight up asked his supporters
to tell him that he's good at his job.
-I beat all these Senators, all these governors,
all these brilliant political minds.
Then I beat the other side.
And then I listened.
"Is he competent?"
I think I'm pretty competent, right?
Don't you think so?
-As a general rule,
it's never good when you're the President
and you have to go on TV
and ask your supporters, "Do you think I'm competent?"
If I was about to go under and my surgeon said to me,
"Do you think I'm competent?"
I'd say, "You know what? I'll keep the gallstones."
[ Laughter ]
Trump also argued that years from now,
his speeches would be viewed favorably by history,
drawing a parallel with Abraham Lincoln
that made absolutely no sense.
-When Abraham Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address speech,
the great speech,
do you know he was ridiculed?
He was ridiculed.
He went up to Gettysburg and he delivered that speech --
the Gettysburg Address -- and he was excoriated
by the fake news.
They had fake news.
He was excoriated.
They said it was a terrible, terrible speech.
They said it was far too short. It's not long.
Many of us know it by memory.
-No.
[ Laughter ]
You do not know the Gettysburg Address by memory.
I doubt you know your own address by memory.
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
[ As President Trump ] It's...
Yeah, three large pizzas.
It's a white house.
It's just a big, white house.
[ Normal voice ] So now Trump's White House is engaged
in an aggressive attempt to hunt down and expose
the leakers in his government who think he's out of his mind
and they've reportedly considered
some extreme measures.
-Advisors to the President
are considering all their options,
including the idea of a lie-detector test.
-You want Trump staffers to take lie-detector tests?
That thing's going to start freaking out
as soon as you get it inside the building.
Bringing a lie-detector test inside this White House
is like bringing a Geiger counter to Chernobyl.
All right. Let's start with you, Kellyanne.
[ Geiger counter clicking ]
No, uh, let's start with you, John Kelly.
[ Geiger counter clicking ]
You know what? Let's just start with the President.
[ Geiger counter clicking, explosion ]
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
We have a paranoid President who's demanding investigations
of his critics.
If you were looking for the Constitutional crisis,
it's here.
It's being aided and abetted by people whose names
we don't even know, people who are --
-Anomonous.
-This has been been "A Closer Look."
[ Applause ]