Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A shouting match has erupted inside the White House between two of President Trump’s top advisers. While angry arguments are typical in the world of stressful, high-stakes White House decision-making, this one has true revelatory potential: It opens a window on a big, festering lie at the very core of Trump’s worldview.

That lie is actually two, interrelated lies. The first is that immigration to the United States is fundamentally a malicious, destructive force that Americans should feel taken advantage of or menaced by. The second is that it can be dealt with primarily through “toughness.” Those lies feed each other: If immigration represents a zero-sum threat, in which migrants or their countries of origin are merely driven by a desire to prey on Americans and America, then a “tough” response will overwhelm that predatory motive. Respond “weakly” and you’re a sucker, a victim.

Bloomberg reports that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton got into a furious argument over immigration. Bolton sided with Trump, who has raged at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for failing to stop families trying to cross the border. Kelly defended her.

The New York Times adds this crucial detail: “The two men also differed over how aggressively to push Central American countries to do more to discourage their citizens from seeking refuge in the United States.”

Trump has been in a seething fury over a recent spike in migrant families trying to cross the border, and more specifically over a caravan of Central American migrant families moving north through Mexico. Trump has accused Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador of waging an “assault” on the United States and absurdly threatened to use the U.S. military to “CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!”

We cannot be sure of the particulars of the Bolton-Kelly dust-up. But it appears Bolton agreed with Trump that DHS is to blame for failing to stop the migration, and that more must be done to force those countries to prevent it.

The backdrop for all this is the argument raging inside the White House over the rise in migrating families. Stephen Miller, the Trump kingdom’s Immigration Iago, has been whispering in Trump’s ear that the United States is being taken advantage of — whether by child smugglers or countries herding immigrants northward isn’t clear — to push Trump to reinstate some form of the family separations he canceled amid intense blowback.

Trump has come to believe that those family separations are the only thing that has worked — in other words, that a tough deterrent is the only answer. Except that this is highly questionable.

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

ISTANBUL — A spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party vowed Saturday that Turkey would “uncover what has happened” to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, hours after Saudi authorities said that the Washington Post contributing columnist had been killed earlier this month during a fistfight inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

The Saudi explanation — that an argument in the consulate led to a fatal brawl — is at odds with the conclusions of Turkish investigators, who believe that Khashoggi was deliberately killed by a team of Saudi agents who were dispatched to Istanbul.

“We don’t blame anyone in advance, but we do not consent to this being covered up,” said the ruling party spokesman, Omar Celik, according to the semiofficial Anadolu news agency.

Turkey’s reaction to the Saudi admission is being closely watched because of the conflicting stories and because Turkish authorities are said to possess evidence, including audiotapes, that could reveal exactly how Khashoggi was killed. Erdogan’s government has so far refused to publicly reveal that evidence, possibly to protect Turkish surveillance methods but also, analysts said, to preserve a measure of leverage over the Saudis and the Trump administration, which has tried to protect its Saudi allies.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

MOSCOW — For more than three years, a Finnish journalist who investigated Russia’s army of vicious internet trolls faced a barrage of false accusations online that she was an American intelligence operative, a drug dealer and an unhinged bimbo driven by Russophobia.

This week, the journalist, Jessika Aro, got a measure of satisfaction when a court in Helsinki convicted two of her most dedicated slanderers of defamation and handed them unusually harsh sentences.

Ilja Janitskin, a Finn of Russian descent who ran MV-Lehti, a vituperative website that rails against Russia’s critics, immigrants, Jews and the European Union, was sentenced to 22 months in jail after being convicted on 16 criminal counts related to his website. His lawyer said he would appeal the judgment.

Johan Backman, a self-declared “human rights defender” who spends much of his time in Russia and has acquired a reputation as a strident defender of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, received a one-year, suspended jail sentence for aggravated defamation and stalking. Scorning the judgment as “another dirty trick by NATO,” he said that he, too, would appeal.

A third defendant, a Finnish woman who worked on Mr. Janitskin’s incendiary website, was also given a suspended sentence.

Together, they were ordered to pay damages totaling around $155,000, plus legal costs.

The verdict, delivered on Thursday by the Helsinki District Court, was the first time that a European country had taken action against pro-Russian disinformation spread through social media, websites and news outlets controlled by or linked to Russia.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

After lying for more than two weeks about the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi government has now announced a series of new lies about his murder in ways that insult both Jamal’s memory and our intelligence.

The Saudi government on Friday issued a statement claiming that Jamal was killed when a fistfight went bad in its consulate in Istanbul. Really? This is a fistfight to which the Saudi goons reportedly brought a bone saw so that they could dismember him afterward; by some accounts, they began the dismemberment while he was still alive.

It’s also grotesque for the Saudi authorities to claim that a journalist whose fingers they reportedly amputated as part of their torture somehow managed to engage in a fistfight. Jamal had no fists left.

I had known Jamal for more than 15 years, and I’m appalled by every element of what happened: By what appears to have been his brutal torture-murder, by the cover-up afterward, by President Trump's downplaying of Jamal's killing, and now by the effort by the Saudi government to set up scapegoats to take the fall.

Saudi Arabia even announced that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who almost everybody believes must have approved this operation — his initials, M.B.S., are now said to stand for “Mr. Bone Saw” — will lead an investigation into what happened. That’s like appointing O.J. Simpson to investigate the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

These lies are so blatant and implausible that they underscore how out of touch M.B.S. is, and also suggest M.B.S. believes that he will have the backing of the United States in this cover-up. That’s a good bet, since Trump has lately celebrated the assault on a journalist by a Montana congressman and previously suggested that maybe a rogue killer was responsible for killing Jamal.

But M.B.S. has already gotten away with kidnapping Lebanon’s prime minister and starving eight million Yemenis; if he also gets away with murdering Jamal, who was an American resident and Washington Post columnist, as many believe happened, then that’s a green light to him and any other autocrat who wants to make a troublesome journalist disappear. Journalists and democracy activists all over the world will have targets on their backs.

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[xy5jn0]

 

[Michael Scally MD]