Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

What Bush 41 did with his pardons was so much worse than what Trump has done because Bush not only pardoned his criminal aides but did so to kill an investigation into Bush himself. Trump may abuse the pardon power that way in the future but has not yet done that. Yet ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy.

Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con.

Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you're not ripping someone off, you're getting ripped off.

From an economist's perspective, this is complete nonsense. Unless there are major information asymmetries or distortions of market power, and often even then, most transactions are generally to the mutual benefit of both parties.

Otherwise no deals would ever get made.

But Trump — the man who created a fake university, made stiffed contractors, hired the mob, and filed for bankruptcy six times — cannot believe his.

So he goes out of his way to cherrypick how he sees the world, so that everything we do looks like either a ripoff or a steal.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

(CNN)4,645 dead. That is the new estimate of the death toll in Puerto Rico after last year's Hurricane Maria, according to a Harvard University study out this week.

It is no slight uptick from the official number that the United States has been using, based on the Puerto Rico government's estimate. That number is 64 -- which was suspiciously low for a still-recovering island that suffered under a delayed and inadequate response from the federal government.

It is important to note that the Harvard study's figure https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05/29/trump-once-favorably-compared-puerto-ricos-death-toll-to-katrinas-a-new-study-shows-more-than-twice-as-many-died/?utm_term=.8cad6394bf1f (is more than twice the death toll from Hurricane Katrina) -- which happened during the George W. Bush presidency -- and puts to rest Donald Trump's boastful claim that during Maria few had died. For a President who likes to put much in competitive terms, it's not a comparison he can win now. He is indeed "the best" at something: The single most deadly natural disaster in modern America happened on his watch.

There is something beyond maddening and tragic here; lowballing the mortality means we will not have an accounting that can help us to do better the next time. If we don't accurately assess what went wrong in the response to Maria, we set ourselves up for another disaster.

Maria was the third major hurricane that season -- one in which the response was shamefully delayed and disorganized. Or as NPR noted, "The federal government had three times as many people on the ground in Texas (after Harvey), and twice as many in Florida (after Irma), as it did in Puerto Rico." The already weak infrastructure on the island crumbled.

 

[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]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]