Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said Thursday that Vladimir Putin’s multi-pronged attack on the U.S. presidential election won him just what he wanted: the “chaos” created by Donald Trump.

The Russian president’s assault on the election clearly involved several “modalities,” including hacked emails and social media manipulation, McFaul told Chuck Todd on MSNBC. It also involved multiple players, such as Russian agent Maria Butina. She has pleaded guilty to conspiring with a Kremlin official to forge links to the National Rifle Association to create a “back channel” to influence the election, McFaul said.

“It was a comprehensive strategy on multiple fronts, trying to influence the outcome of the election,” McFaul said of Putin’s operation in America.

When Trump won, Putin didn’t get any “short-term payout,” such as the lifting of sanctions against Russia, McFaul noted. “But the chaos that President Trump has caused to the Western Democratic world, not only within our own country but within the alliance, within the EU, that is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants. The withdrawal of the American leadership creates a vacuum for Vladimir Putin. The long-term payout has been extraordinary for him.”

McFaul is convinced that Putin decided to try to manipulate the 2016 election as “revenge” on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who attacked Putin and his party during Russia’s parliamentary election in 2011 when she was secretary of state. So he “went on the offensive in 2016,” McFaul said.


 


They were collateral damage as Donald J. Trump and his siblings dodged inheritance taxes and gained control of their father’s fortune: thousands of renters in an empire of unassuming red-brick buildings scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

Those buildings have been home to generations of strivers, municipal workers and newly arrived immigrants. When their regulated rents started rising more quickly in the 1990s, many tenants had no idea why. Some heard that the Trump family had spent millions on building improvements, but they remained suspicious.

“I’ve always thought there was something strange going on,” said Jack Leitner, who has lived in the Beach Haven Apartments in Coney Island, Brooklyn, for more than two decades. “But you have to have proof, and it’s an uphill battle.”

As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.

Padding the invoices had a secondary benefit for the Trumps, allowing them to inflate rent increases on their father’s rent-regulated apartments.

“The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged,” Robert Trump, the president’s brother, once admitted in a sworn deposition obtained by The Times.

The president and his siblings have long since sold their father’s buildings and moved on with their inherited fortunes. But for tenants, the insidious effects of the scheme continue to this day.
 


WASHINGTON — President Trump’s budget proposal, unveiled on Tuesday, purported to show the benefits of cutting taxes on businesses and consumers: By the end of the decade, faster growth could balance the federal budget.

The numbers looked great because the White House left out something essential: the cost.

When the government cuts taxes, it collects less money. That is the purpose of a tax cut. But Mr. Trump’s budget does not include any hint of a decrease in federal revenue. To the contrary, it projects that federal tax revenue will increase every year for the next decade.

The White House is indeed projecting faster economic growth as a consequence of tax cuts. What it is not doing is projecting the cost of those tax cuts: that is, the loss in tax revenue. It is the rough equivalent of trying to raise $10,000 for a project expected to produce $100,000 in revenue, and telling investors the profit will total $100,000. It won’t, because you have to account for the cost.

Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist who served in senior roles in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/23/larry-summers-trumps-budget-is-simply-ludicrous/ (wrote in The Washington Post) that it was “the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them.”
 


Late Friday night, a district court in Texas https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/federal-judge-in-texas-rules-obama-health-care-law-unconstitutional/2018/12/14/9e8bb5a2-fd63-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html?utm_term=.fe7e9c3038fb (declared) the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional — lock, stock and barrel. That includes not only the individual mandate and the protections for people with preexisting conditions, but also the entire Medicaid expansion as well as a host of other ACA rules without any connection at all to health insurance.

The logic of the ruling is as difficult to follow as it is to defend, and it sets the stage for yet another round of high-stakes constitutional litigation over the future of health care in the United States.

To understand the court’s decision, you have to see the mandate as consisting of two discrete parts. There’s an instruction to buy insurance, and there’s a penalty associated with failing to do so.

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What happens next? California has already said it will appeal, and the decision won’t take effectwhile that appeal is pending. The constitutionality of the most important piece of social legislation since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid won’t be resolved by a single judge in Fort Worth. Nor is the 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court likely to have much patience for this partisan lawsuit.

So nothing changes for the time being. And nothing should change. The legal arguments in previous rounds of litigation over the ACA may have been weak, but they were not frivolous.

This case is different; it’s an exercise of raw judicial activism. Don’t for a moment mistake it for the rule of law.
 
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