In March 2016, Olbermann wrote a column for The Washington Post announcing that he was moving out of Trump Palace. Trump responded in an email to CNN Money the following month. “Keith is a failed broadcaster, and the people in the building couldn’t stand him,” he wrote. “He is just trying to use ‘Trump’ to get publicity and stay relevant. The prices of Trump apartments are today the highest they’ve been. When people find out he is leaving Trump Palace, prices will probably go up.” It was the last time Trump would publicly acknowledge him.

On a frigid Friday afternoon this winter, Olbermann invited me to join him for lunch at the Atlantic Grill, a tony restaurant near Central Park. He was just coming down with the illness I’d see the following week on set, and within minutes, he received a call from his doctor. While on the phone, he recited his date of birth, which is how I learned that the meal we were sharing was his birthday lunch. He ordered us what he said were the best oysters in the city, then told a story about how he first really tried oysters six or seven years ago, while dating a woman from Cape Cod who could, he claimed, dive them out of the ocean and open them with her teeth. Until then, he’d spent his whole life avoiding seafood. “My dad grew up basically where the Throgs Neck Bridge is,” in the Bronx, he told me, “and as he said: ‘We never had fish growing up.’ He said: ‘The only thing I ever saw coming out of the water was missing union organizers.’ ”

Back in 2010, Olbermann used a Major League Baseball blog he was running to take a shot at one of ESPN’s most celebrated personalities, Bill Simmons. “I am again left to marvel,” he wrote, “how somebody can rise to a fairly prominent media position with no discernible insight or talent, save for an apparent ability to mix up a vast bowl of word salad very quickly.” Simmons responded in a tweet: “KO, please know the feeling is mutual. You’re my worst case scenario for my career in 12 yrs: a pious, unlikable blowhard who lives alone.”

It was cruel because it was factual. Olbermann is a bachelor with no children. His loves of history and sports seem less like escapes than parts of his job. He seems to have lived for little else until four and a half years ago, when he adopted his first dog. He’d never owned one before. “I avoided it for many years through, like, 12 girlfriends,” he told me. “Then one time the girlfriend was young enough that the family dog was dying.” They went into a pet store and emerged with a Maltese. A year later, he adopted a second. “And after I got them, I was calling all my friends who had dogs and saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this is the meaning of life?’ ” Olbermann now spends two hours a day outside with his pets; before the election, when the idea of a Trump presidency still seemed unlikely, he shot an episode of “The Closer” in which he examined whether Trump had ever owned a dog. (He couldn’t find any evidence.) When he dies, he imagined, “my last thoughts would be about the dogs. My next-to-last thoughts will be a flashback to how much I enjoyed ‘SportsCenter.’ ” Then he corrected himself. “I think my last thoughts will be: I pushed back against bad things.”

He tracks his show’s traffic obsessively and appears to spend much of most days on Twitter, sharing links to episodes and directing antagonistic tweets at Trump. He emailed me several times after we met with the average number of page views “The Resistance” was earning, boasting that the number of views per episode was between three and four million — numbers that would rival Fox News’s prime-time audience and surpass those of MSNBC and CNN. The difficulty with this comparison is that Olbermann isn’t a television anchor anymore. His work is online, where a “view” consists of three seconds on Twitter or Facebook, and 30 on YouTube. Television is a commitment: You can’t watch 10 shows at one time, so your choice to tune in at 8 to watch Tucker Carlson is a choice against Chris Hayes or Anderson Cooper. Online, you can open dozens of tabs, click away and never come back.

“He’s still looking out the side of his eye at cable,” his GQ editor, Geoff Gagnon, told me. “That’s his world. For years he lived in a profession shaped by certain values, by certain viewership metrics, that judge success in a certain way.” Cincinnatus’ fight required him to leave his peaceful farm, but Olbermann is currently fighting to return to the place he feels most at home. “If CNN called tomorrow and said, ‘We resolved the thing from two years ago; do you want to do the 9 o’clock?’ I’d sign,” he admitted, “and then go, ‘By the way, what are you paying me?’ ”

On some episodes of “The Resistance,” Olbermann sounds prescient; more often, and more recently, he doesn’t sound much removed from the unfocused rage and wild speculation that so many, including Trump, directed at Obama’s presidency. When he says that Trump is growing crazier by the day, or that he’ll soon be revealed as Russia’s puppet and impeached, Olbermann is suggesting to liberals that there is an endpoint — that the right mole, whistle-blower or leak will end their nightmare. He’s offering hope. The professed aim of the show may be to end Trump’s presidency, but it has another purpose too: It is a world built by Olbermann that justifies his existence. If “Countdown” was a refuge for liberals in a time of crisis, then “The Resistance” is a refuge for Olbermann himself. A man with his success and self-regard almost has to believe he has a role to play in shaping American history, and within this show, he is Cincinnatus — wanted, needed and fighting for the very soul of America.