Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

When Donald Trump was running for president, he routinely bragged about being the “King of Debt.” “I’m great with debt,” he told Norah O’Donnell in a June 2016 interview. “Nobody knows debt better than me. I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing.” Armed with this vast professional experience, Trump declared that as president he’d be better than anyone at fixing America’s debt and deficit problems, even insisting, incredibly, that over a period of eight years he would make America debt-free, a feat not accomplished since 1835.

Of course, as everyone but the president seems to understand, screwing over your creditors isn’t something you can do as a head of state, nor is the United States government some seedy Atlantic City casino you can refinance—a fact that economists have been at pains to drive home since the president embarked on his massive spending spree.

“My view is that this fiscal expansion is probably the most foolhardy escapade in modern economic policy history,” Albert Edwards, a global strategist at Société Générale wrote in a report to clients on Wednesday.

Noting that the timing of Trump’s giant fiscal stimulus was “utterly ridiculous” considering the strength of the economy, Edwards warned that Trump’s yuge tax cuts, plus a $300 billion spending package, plus a proposed $200 billion infrastructure plan “will only accelerate the collapse of U.S. financial markets as the Federal Reserve hikes rates even more quickly. . . . The post-mortem will identify President Trump’s ludicrously timed fiscal stimulus as a key trigger for the collapse.”

The ludicrous timing is the crux of the problem. As my colleague William D. Cohan notes, there’s only so much gasoline you can pour on a white-hot economy before it overheats. Last week’s market correction was primarily the result of fears that the Federal Reserve will respond to rising inflation by hiking interest rates and slamming the brakes on the whole shebang, kicking off a potential Twitter war between Trump and new Fed chair Jerome Powell in the process.

That’s a dangerous position to be in when you’re already in a nearly decade-long expansion cycle. When the economy inevitably slows (which, memo to the president, is how business cycles tend to work), the debt problem gets even worse.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

If McCarthy’s argument ultimately rests on the idea that a president can never commit obstruction of justice for an action that is encompassed in his core presidential authority, then he would effectively be giving the president a get-out-of-jail-free card. For under such a theory, if President Trump were to exercise legitimate power for an illegitimate purpose—like, say, making an ambassadorial appointment in exchange for a bribe—he would not be punishable. In any case, some of Trump’s actions, like alleged witness tampering (telling Flynn “to stay strong”) fall outside of any enumerated presidential power. Even by taking an exceptionally narrow view of how a counterintelligence investigation might proceed, and an exceptionally expansive view of a president’s power to do as he pleases, one still cannot reach McCarthy’s blanket conclusions about the absence of obstruction.

But McCarthy is undeterred. His parallel narrow and expansive views bring him, by his own iron-clad logic, to a preposterous conclusion, namely, that “the point of the Russia investigation is to gather the information that President Trump needs to protect the country, including our electoral system.” That is not true either in theory or in practice; as we have seen, the Russia probe is officially intended to uncover criminal wrongdoing, and as we have also seen, President Trump has displayed as much interest in protecting our electoral system from Russian meddling as he has in studying Hegel’s influence on Feuerbach.

Perhaps because this is his weakest point, McCarthy grows most emphatic:

You can snicker at that all you want if you are Trump-deranged and invested in the fantasy that Trump “colluded” with Russia to undermine our electoral system. But the following happen to be constitutional facts: Trump is President and counterintelligence operations are conducted for the purpose of informing him, not for the purpose of building criminal prosecutions.

I do not think I am Trump-deranged—I have self-examined that diagnosis here. I have my suspicions, but I also have an open mind about whether Trump colluded with Russia; I certainly don’t think it’s a “fantasy”; rather, it is a plausible theory that I expect Mueller’s report will either verify or debunk.

Already, we know from publicly available evidence that the president has taken actions that are highly inappropriate during a criminal investigation. A great deal more evidence pointing one way or the other will no doubt come from Mueller. The case that Trump has committed obstruction of justice might be complicated. It might require considered analysis and debate. It might be very difficult to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. More pertinently, it might be very difficult to prove to the satisfaction of Republican Senators running an impeachment trial. But is the case really “cockamamie” and “patently absurd,” as the formidable Andrew C. McCarthy would have it? Answers will eventually come, but the hyperbolic tone of McCarthy’s writing has not helped to persuade me that Trump is innocent.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

We have no idea if the wildest and most memorable allegation Christopher Steele picked up in his investigation of Donald Trump — that the future president is vulnerable to Russian blackmail related to his paying Russian prostitutes in 2013 — is true. There are two common grounds for skepticism. One is that Trump, who is known both for his affairs and for grabbing women, would pay for sex. The second is that a man so happily associated with infidelity and vice could be blackmailed at all. We now know neither of these objections holds water.

Ronan Farrow’s new story shows that Trump habitually pays for sex. He had an affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, and offered her money after sex, which she turned down. At another point in the story, he offered adult entertainer Jessica Drake $10,000 for “her company.”

Farrow’s reporting also implies, without quite establishing as an absolute certainty, that Trump maintained a system for silencing his sexual partners. A network of sleazy operators, sometimes working in conjunction with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, would pay off women to prevent their stories from seeing the light of day. In any case, previous reporting by The Wall Street Journal has already established that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid at least one of his former mistresses to stay quiet.

So, we know Trump habitually pays for sex, and we also know he is willing to pay to keep embarrassing secrets from going public. That is to say, these secrets could be leveraged against him. One of Pecker’s former employees tells Farrow, “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power — he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.”

What else do we know? We know Russia has a decades-old system for gathering compromising sexual secrets on prominent foreign visitors. We also know Trump harbored a burning resentment of President Obama in the wake of Obama’s mocking him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. And many reports of Trump’s decision-making suggest that the strongest consideration in any decision is the chance to defile or destroy something associated with Obama.

Far from being bizarre, imagining Trump paying prostitutes to pee on a bed Obama used as a primitive revenge ritual, and Russians taping the episode, is perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties. That exact scenario may not have happened. Indeed, sex is not the only kind of secret Trump harbors. He endured months of criticism first from Republican candidates, then Democrats, and all along from the media, for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Trump clearly feels protective of his financial information. Some of that information is in the hands of his business partners, many of whom are associated with Russia or are unsavory in some other way. All in all, the odds are disconcertingly high that Russia, or somebody, has blackmail leverage over the president of the United States.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that Donald Trump's third travel ban is unconstitutional because it was adopted for the purpose of discriminating against Muslims, in violation of the First Amendment. The presidential "proclamation" permanently bars nearly all entry into the United States by citizens of six Muslim-majority nations. In a 9-4 en banc decision, the court concluded, after "[e]xamining official statements from President Trump and other executive branch officials, along with the Proclamation itself,... that the Proclamation is unconstitutionally tainted with animus toward Islam." Five of the judges in the majority also conclude that the Travel Ban 3.0 violates immigration laws enacted by Congress, relying on reasoning similar to that adopted by the Ninth Circuit in in its December ruling against the ban.

The Fourth Circuit decision includes a detailed discussion of why Travel Ban 3.0 is just as "tainted" by religious animus as its predecessors, and why the addition of North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials in this latest travel ban does not materially affect its anti-Muslim focus. The inclusion of North Korea and the Venezuelan officials does not keep out any significant number of people who might have gained entry otherwise, and the other six nations covered by the travel ban are all overwhelmingly Muslim.

In addition, as the court explains, the supposed security justifications for the travel ban are extremely weak, and "the President repeatedly distanced himself from the[se] non-discriminatory policy rationales." For that reason, the court concluded that it must "accept the President's consistent characterization of his Proclamation as intended to invidiously discriminate against Muslims—and therefore hold that the Proclamation violates the law."

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]