Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump’s posh Mar-a-Lago Club was set to host a high-priced gala on Saturday night intended to celebrate Trump’s first year in office and raise money for his reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee.

Tickets started at $100,000 per couple, Bloomberg News reported.

The guest of honor, however, would not be there. With the government shut down and https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/government-shuts-down-after-senate-bill-collapses-negotiations-fail/2018/01/20/dca0d7e0-fda6-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-banner-main_shutdown0121-753am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.623f76235793 (Congress in negotiations), Trump postponed his scheduled departure from Washington. But he will still make money.

By holding the event at his own club, Trump will be able to collect tens of thousands of dollars in fees for food, ballroom rental and other costs. In effect, he will have transformed his supporters’ political donations into revenue for his business.

Again.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

SEOUL — Even before he was elected South Korea’s president eight months ago, Moon Jae-in was vowing to take the “driver’s seat” in global efforts to deal with North Korea.

But as the inter-Korean talks have shown this week, it’s clearly Kim Jong Un who’s steering, although Moon could fairly claim to be riding shotgun. It’s Kim who’s decided when the Koreas will talk and what they will talk about.

As for President Trump? Well, he could be said to be in the back, going along for the ride.

As South Korea presses ahead with efforts to bring a large North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang next month, it is willingly agreeing to North Korea’s demands.

But Trump, a former businessman who prides himself on being a masterful negotiator, is claiming — and getting — most of the credit for the sudden burst of Olympics-related diplomacy between the two Koreas.

During a Jan. 4 phone call in which the South Korean leader briefed the American president on the plans for talks with North Korea, Trump asked Moon to publicly give him the credit for creating the environment for the talks, according to people familiar with the conversation.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

But amid all these disputations the central question facing anti-Trump conservatives — and not only us — can be simplified to this: Is what we’re watching a tragedy or a farce?

The case for tragedy is made this month by David Frum in his book “Trumpocracy,” which builds on his year-old Atlantic essay, “How to Build An Autocracy” and amplifies its central theme: that our president is a corrupt authoritarian, that his party has prostituted itself to wield unfettered power, and that this is an hour of great peril for the American republic, which teeters on the lip of the precipice that Erdogan’s Turkey and Putin’s Russia have toppled over.

I agree with much of what Frum writes — his diagnosis of how the Republican Party succumbed to Trump, his judgment of Trump’s enablers and toadies, his critique of Trump’s disgraceful behavior and its coarsening effect.

But I am not convinced by his overarching theme of looming crisis, his hour-is-late tone and the frequent implication (however hedged and qualified) that Trump might be on his way to establishing a regime to rival the populist authoritarianisms of other unhappy countries.

So as a counterpoint to Frum’s argument for tragedy, let me make the case for farce. ...

Trump is a dictator on Twitter, a Dear Leader in his own mind, but in the real world there is no Trumpocracy because Trump cannot even rule himself. And while real tragedy may arrive eventually, in this historical cycle a dismal sort of farce is what comes first.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Historians have long looked to a few key criteria in evaluating the beginning of a president’s administration. First and foremost, any new president should execute public duties with a commanding civility and poise befitting the nation’s chief executive, but without appearing aloof or haughty. As George Washington observed at the outset of his presidency in 1789, the president cannot in any way “demean himself in his public character” and must act “in such a manner as to maintain the dignity of office.”

New presidents also try to avoid partisan and factional rancor, and endeavor to unite the country in a great common purpose. In line with their oath of office, they dedicate themselves to safeguarding and even advancing democratic rights and to protecting the nation against foreign enemies. They avoid even the slightest imputation of corruption, of course political but above all financial.

Donald Trump, in each area, has been a colossal failure. The truest measure of his performance comes from comparing his first year not with those of the best — Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt — but with those of the worst.

...

What do these bad presidents’ first years tell us about Mr. Trump? Some performed reasonably well at first, only to slide into disaster later. Might Mr. Trump grow in the job, making us forget his rookie-season bumbling? Or should we expect more of the same through 2020?

I expect the latter. Mr. Trump’s first year has been an unremitting parade of disgraces that have demeaned him as well as the dignity of his office, and he has shown that this is exactly how he believes he should govern.

Most important, he is the first president to fail to defend the nation from an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power — and to resist the investigation of that attack. He is the first to enrich his private interests, and those of his family, directly and openly.

He is the first president to denounce the press not simply as unfair but as “the enemy of the American people.” He is the first to threaten his defeated political opponent with imprisonment. He is the first to have denigrated friendly countries and allies as well as a whole continent with racist vulgarities.

George Washington warned that the actions of a president “may have great and durable consequences from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government.” If history is any guide — especially in light of the examples closest to his, of Buchanan and Andrew Johnson — Mr. Trump’s first year portends a very unhappy ending.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Austin Frerick believes that corporate concentration is the fundamental issue of our time. We’re living in a 2nd Gilded Age where the middle class is disappearing while the rich get richer. And it’s all caused by this monopoly power. He saw this problem while working at U.S. Department of Treasury and now he's running in Iowa's 3rd Congressional District to fix it. He's on your side.

To keep up to date with the campaign, sign up to volunteer, or make a donation, please visit www.austinfrerick.com.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WTFU ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Twitter said Friday it's notifying 677,775 people in the U.S. who either followed, retweeted or liked a tweet from accounts of the Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency during the 2016 election period.

The company also said that since briefing Congress in November, it's identified an additional 13,512 Russian-linked bot accounts that tweeted around the election, bringing the total to 50,258.

"Any such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere, and we're committed to working on this important issue," Twitter wrote in a blog post. The company said it will share the account handles with congressional investigators looking at Russian interference in the election.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Year two of the Trump presidency began here overnight much like year one had ended: with his alleged ex-mistress smashing people’s faces into her bare chest at a strip club between an airport and a cemetery.

Adult film star https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/porn-star-stormy-daniels-detailed-alleged-affair-with-trump-in-2011-interview/2018/01/19/8bdd1a50-fbb5-11e7-ad8c-ecbb62019393_story.html (Stormy Daniels), who once claimed to have slept with Donald Trump not long after he married Melania, performed at 11 p.m. Saturday — the anniversary of his inauguration — and 1 a.m. Sunday here on the outskirts of town.

“HE SAW HER LIVE,” the Trophy Club’s flier said. “YOU CAN TOO!”

The federal government remained shut down, but Daniels was open for business.

She had received $130,000 in hush money days before the 2016 election as part of a payment arranged by a Trump attorney, according to the Wall Street Journal. And now Daniels was capitalizing on her new notoriety sparked by the revelation, though Trump’s attorney had issued a statement in which he and Daniels denied the payment and, on Saturday night, Daniels was largely silent in that regard.

“I’m trying to think of what I can say,” said the woman of the hour, sighing and shuddering simultaneously, as if to convey she’s been through an ordeal. She was in between performances, signing autographs and taking topless photos with oglers in a corner of the smoky club.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"


- George Orwell, 1984

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A former Trump campaign worker appointed at age 23 to a top position in the White House’s drug policy office had been let go from a job at a law firm because he repeatedly missed work, a partner at the firm said.

While in college, late in 2014 or early in 2015, Taylor Weyeneth began working as a legal assistant at the New York firm O’Dwyer & Bernstien. He was “discharged” in August 2015, partner Brian O’Dwyer said in an interview.

“We were very disappointed in what happened,” O’Dwyer said. He said that he hired Weyeneth in part because both men were involved in the same fraternity, and that the firm invested time training him for what was expected to be a longer relationship. Instead, he said, Weyeneth “just didn’t show.”

In a résumé initially submitted to the government, Weyeneth said he worked at the firm until April 2016. When an FBI official called as part of a background check in January 2017, the firm said Weyeneth had left eight months earlier than the résumé indicated, O’Dwyer said.


A spokesman at the Office of National Drug Control Policy — where Weyeneth, 24, is deputy chief of staff — said Weyeneth was unavailable for comment. In replies to The Post, the White House did not address questions about Weyeneth’s work at the law firm.

 

[Michael Scally MD]