Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

PRINCESS COMPLICIT
https://claytoonz.com/2018/02/27/princess-complicit/

Designing second-rate handbags made in third-world countries by eight-year-old children does not make you qualified to discuss diplomatic strategy with the president of South Korea. Inheriting wealth and building a career of creating havens for money launderers does not make you qualified to negotiate peace in the Middle East. Being a trust-fund baby does not qualify you to have access to classified information.

Being related to Donald Trump does not make you qualified for government service or a job in the White House. Being Donald Trump doesn’t make you qualified to be in the White House. If anything, being Donald Trump, or anyone related to him, makes you uniquely unqualified to be anywhere near the White House. You shouldn’t even be allowed on the White House tour.

Despite all that, Ivanka Trump and her squeaky-voiced husband are senior advisers to the president of the United States. During an interview while in South Korea leading the American delegation during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, Ivanka stated that she and Jared did not want any special treatment in their roles working for the president. I didn’t realize everyone in the Trump White House was able to leave work multiple times a year for vacations in Aspen and the Bahamas.

The FBI has been unable to clear Ivanka or Jared for a permanent security clearance. Chief of Staff John Kelly declared last Friday the deadline for obtaining a permanent clearance to continue to have access to classified information. Last Friday was last Friday. It’s behind us. Jared and Ivanka, who don’t want special treatment, are still in the White House with access to classified information.

Not only that, Ivanka, along with Jared, is in the White House using a private email account for government business. Maybe someone should start a lock-her-up chant.

Ivanka wanted to go to Washington and play government by representing women issues. Yet, each time she’s confronted with the fact that Daddy Bone-Spurs has grabbed more women than cheeseburgers, Princess Complicit has been silent, until now.

During an interview with NBC, which will probably be the last time she ever does an interview with a news outlet other than Fox News, she was asked, “do you believe your father’s accusers?”

Complicit Barbie expressed feigned indignation and said, “I think it’s a pretty inappropriate question to ask a daughter if she believes the accusers of her father when he’s affirmatively stated there’s no truth to it.”

That’s when the interviewer should have rephrased the question and asked, “do you believe your boss’ accusers?”

If someone had asked Tiffany Trump that question then the answer would have been totally acceptable. Tiffany is merely her father’s daughter. Ivanka, on the other hand, is not. Ivanka is a senior White House adviser who has stated she doesn’t want special treatment. So, since she’s to be treated like everyone else working for the president, she should be able to answer a simple question.

She should answer why she finds Roy Moore’s accusers believable, but not the more than a dozen who claim her father sexually assaulted them. She should be asked about her father’s lawyer gifting a porn star $130,000. She should be forced to answer about her father and Playboy Playmates. She should state whether she believes her father’s own words about grabbing vaginas and walking in on teenage girls while they’re undressed.

Nepotism laws were made to prevent people like Ivanka and Jared from working in the government. Donald Trump hasn’t had any problem filling government positions with a variety of incompetent, greedy, useless, and horrible people without dipping into his gene pool, or those who married into it. Ivanka and Jared should return to New York and go back into the handbag and money laundering businesses.

There’s a rule in politics that you leave the children alone. There isn’t a rule that White House advisers are untouchable. Ivanka needs to decide if she wants to be her father’s daughter or a servant of the United States government.

It’s a hard choice because she’s doing a crappy job at both.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, first indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, the former chairman and deputy chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, last October on charges including money laundering and conspiracy against the United States. At the time, the White House and its apologists argued that these alleged crimes pre-dated the campaign, and were thus unrelated to any putative election-related conspiracies with Russia. Tweeted Trump, “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign.”

This wasn’t true then — multiple charges referred to crimes that were said to continue at least through 2016. But Mueller’s new indictments, released last week, render Trump’s defense even more ridiculous. They provide detailed evidence that Manafort and Gates’s alleged financial crimes continued while they were running Trump’s campaign. And despite the White House’s insistence otherwise, the felonies that Manafort is accused of, and the two that Gates pleaded guilty to on Friday, bear directly on the question of Russian collusion.

It’s certainly possible that Trump himself didn’t personally connive with Russia for campaign help. Perhaps, through a combination of carelessness and miserliness, he unwittingly allowed his campaign to be infiltrated at the highest levels by both alleged and admitted criminals with Russian ties. Such a scenario, however, would not be exculpatory.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

TrumPsychopath ... InfoSickAsFuckWars ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump is not known for personal courage. He used “bone spurs” to get out of military service in Vietnam. (He apparently is not scared of stairs, but is petrified of sharks and, by his own account, is revolted by the sight of blood. He’s also a germaphobe.) He’ll fire people, but not if he has to confront the person directly.

(He sent an aide to fire FBI director James B. Comey; gave up trying to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — when White House counsel Don McGahn wouldn’t do it; and backed off trying to remove deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe when FBI director Christopher A. Wray threatened to quit.)

When caught saying or doing something he shouldn’t (e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/25/trump-blasted-by-new-york-times-after-mocking-reporter-with-disability/ (mocking a reporter) with a disability, calling https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html (African countries) “shitholes,” calling Democrats “un-American” and “treasonous,” etc.), he figuratively flees the scene by either denying what he said, or pretending it was a joke. And, for whatever reason, he will bend over backwards to avoid offending Russian President Vladimir Putin.

So when https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2018/02/26/trumps-gross-action-star-fantasy-is-the-last-thing-school-shooting-victims-need/ (he declared on Monday) that, had he been at the site of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” he was widely derided on social media. Obviously, few human beings, even brave ones, would race into a building to confront an active shooter with no weapon.

In fact, it would be idiotic to do so. The fact that Trump felt compelled to brag about superhuman physical bravery (and further demean the school resource officer who failed to) is telling.

Lacking a service record of his own, he repeatedly feels compelled to equate military service with other conduct (e.g. sexual promiscuity, military school). He longs to be in the company of military men, but fails to understand the ethos of the American military.

(Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had to talk him out of adopting torture as a policy. He thinks the military wants https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2018/02/24/trump-would-like-to-see-a-military-parade-on-veterans-day-with-a-lot-of-plane-flyovers/ (a parade) to show off.)

He tries to ingratiate himself with the police by telling them that it is fine to rough up suspects. During the campaign, he said about a protester: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” In office, he called the Kim Jong Un “short and fat” and then made an empty boast that his nuclear button is “bigger” than the North Korean dictator’s nuclear button. His efforts to project manly strength are laughable.

You don’t have to have a medical degree to notice his ocean of insecurity and his need to overcompensate. (“They say X has never been done.” “They say X is the biggest ever.”) And you don’t have to be a political scientist to see that his insatiable need to prove his own worth may lead to international confrontations and domestic dysfunction.

In the case of Trump, his empty bravado has another ramification, a legal one. Trump faces a real confrontation that could end his presidency and land him in a heap of legal trouble, namely an interview with the special counsel about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and Trump’s actions after the investigation began.

The president has bragged he’d love to talk to Mueller, but for now is hiding behind his lawyers’ skirts. His lawyers think he is so dishonest that he will lie under oath or is so foolishly loquacious that he’ll implicate himself in wrongdoing. They have resorted to silly excuses. (Too busy!) But, of course, Trump could override his lawyers; he is the client.

Moreover, he is the president, who is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, which entails getting to the bottom of a plot to interfere with our election. A refusal to testify would be tantamount to admitting that his personal interests conflict with his obligations as chief executive.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

SEOUL — The State Department’s point man on North Korea, Joseph Yun, will leave his post on Friday, amid glimmers of hope that Pyongyang might finally be willing to sit down for talks with Washington.

Yun, 63, is retiring as special representative for North Korea policy and deputy assistant secretary for Korea and Japan after more than three decades of service.

His departure reflects widespread frustration within the State Department at diplomats’ relative lack of power in the Trump administration, according to someone familiar with Yun’s thinking.

It will leave another gaping hole in the United States’ staffing on Korean issues. Washington has still not nominated an ambassador to South Korea, 13 months into the Trump administration. Victor Cha had been in the running for the job, but the administration abruptly scrapped his candidacy last month.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]