Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

(CNN) Incoming White House acting-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney once called President Donald Trump's views on a border wall and immigration "simplistic" and "absurd and almost childish."

A physical barrier would not stop undocumented immigrants from crossing the Mexican border and ranchers at the border say they don't need a fence, Mulvaney said in a 2015 interview uncovered by KFile.

As Trump's man in charge at the White House, however, Mulvaney would be tasked with leading the administration's push to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

"Donald Trump says, build a wall. Deport all illegal immigrants. Rules are rules. You either play and stay or you cheat and you get deported. What challenges does this plan pose?" Patti Mercer asked in the August 25, 2015, interview on WRHI radio in South Carolina.

"A bunch," Mulvaney responded.

"The fence doesn't solve the problem. Is it necessary to have one, sure? Would it help? Sure. But to just say build the darn fence and have that be the end of an immigration discussion is absurd and almost childish for someone running for president to take that simplistic of [a] view," Mulvaney added, without making a distinction between a fence or wall.

KFile uncovered the comments as a government shutdown looms over funding for Trump's border wall. "Shutdown today if Democrats do not vote for Border Security!" Trump tweeted Friday.

A spokeswoman for Mulvaney, nor the White House returned a request for comment.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House with his resignation letter already written, but nonetheless made a last attempt at persuading the president to reverse his decision about Syria, which Mr. Trump announced on Wednesday over the objections of his senior advisers.

Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, was rebuffed. Returning to the Pentagon, he asked aides to print out 50 copies of his resignation letter and distribute them around the building.

...

Mr. Mattis’s letter did not single out any decision. Instead, it condemned Mr. Trump’s approach to the world as destructive to American influence and power.

He said the core of American national interests lay in “providing effective leadership to our alliances,” and specifically described the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a defense alliance Mr. Trump has often derided. Mr. Mattis also praised the “Defeat ISIS” coalition that Mr. Trump just abandoned in Syria.

But Mr. Mattis’s core complaint was that Mr. Trump had lost sight of the importance of the competition for global power with Russia and China, who want “a world consistent with their authoritarian model.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

• Republican megadonor Robert Mercer was one of President Trump's biggest backers in 2016.
• Yet people close to Mercer say he's "disappeared" and he's no longer playing as big a role in supporting the Republican Party as he used to.
• "He's out," said a former associate of Mercer. "He's not going to play any major role going forward."

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Senorman]

Winning. Save your money fellas, tough times are coming.

Wall Street suffers worst week in a decade as economic worries mount

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The adults in the room are gone. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis quit because he could no longer abide President Trump’s ally-bashing isolationism. With his departure, it’s clear that the only way to stay in the West Wing is to be a Trumpian toady, blindly repeating the president’s lies and uncritically enabling his worst impulses. (The jobs of Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Sanders and Trump’s family members are safe).

Those people have virtually no knowledge of the rest of the world. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants while systematically purging experts like Mattis who tried to serve the country. During the presidential campaign, Trump was asked who his main foreign policy advisers were. His answer then is our reality now: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

Trump is advising Trump.

We are entering a new and dangerous stage of Trump’s presidency. It will be defined by a reckless man who will happily burn down the international order or launch missiles to distract the country as he tries to save his own skin. History will likely judge the first two years of the Trump era as the comparatively normal and stable period.

Unfortunately, it’s a perfect storm. Trump is already the most incurious and poorly informed president in modern history. But now he faces few constraints from advisers who understand the risks of rule-by-tweet. Trump is more likely to lash out than before, too. He surely understands that the legal cases closing in on him pose an existential threat not just to his presidency but to his post-presidency freedom, too. He also understands — or will soon realize — that his domestic agenda will be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled House come January.

The next two years are certain to prove frustrating. And for a man obsessed with branding, “Donald the Lame Duck” isn’t a moniker that he will accept quietly. He will want to create news that buries his bad news. Given his domestic constraints, however, foreign policy will be the logical recourse.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

And then there were none. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Jim Mattis, the outgoing US secretary for defence, was the last grown-up in Donald Trump’s “axis of adults”. Around the world, America’s allies and adversaries alike have treated Mr Mattis as their comfort blanket. No matter how impulsive his commander-in-chief might be, Mr Mattis was there to curb his instincts.

For the past two years he has tirelessly toured the world to reassure America’s partners that nothing has fundamentally changed. Sometimes they believed him. Now he is leaving. He will join an august — and not so august — roll call of serving and former generals and diplomats who surrounded Mr Trump at the start of his administration.

From the outset Mr Mattis was seen as the indispensable one. Almost alone among Mr Trump’s cabinet principals, he declined to offer effusive praise in public for his president — and was widely known to have spoken home truths to Mr Trump in private. In the first year, Mr Trump generally took his advice. But for Mr Mattis, Mr Trump would have been even more dismissive of Nato.

He would also probably have cancelled US-South Korea military exercises, pulled the US out of Afghanistan and announced the American withdrawal from Syria far sooner. Mr Trump initially loved the former marine general’s mien: he described “Mad Dog” Mattis as straight from central casting. The problem was that Mr Mattis did not live up to his name. Whenever Mr Trump had a madcap idea, his defence secretary was there to blunt it.

It would be wrong to view his exit on a par with the others. It is far more serious. Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, was fired. HR McMaster, the former national security adviser, was, at best, constructively dismissed. And General John Kelly, the outgoing White House chief of staff, was at loggerheads with his undisciplined president from day one.

The world drew far less reassurance from their presence than they did from that of Mr Mattis. His resignation is as shocking as it is unsurprising. Military figures do not resign. The only parallel would have been if former general Colin Powell had quit as George W Bush’s chief diplomat in the build-up to the Iraq war. He did not.

Military men obey orders. If their advice is spurned, they knuckle down. Mr Mattis swallowed that for almost two years. His friends believe he should have quit in October when Mr Trump ordered military personnel to defend the US-Mexico border from an alleged invasion of central American refugees. For the first time, Mr Mattis was heavily criticised when he meekly agreed to follow that order.

The move, which was classic Trumpian theatre ahead of the midterm elections, crossed a civil-military line. But the final straw was Mr Trump’s tweet on Wednesday on the US pullout from Syria. It went against the urgent advice of Mr Mattis — and almost all others. Moreover, Mr Trump’s premise of having defeated Isis was belied by the facts. In some parts of Syria, and the broader Middle East, the terrorist group is resurgent.

What happens now? Regardless of who replaces Mr Mattis, the world has lost a critical lifeline — much like that popular game show I used to watch. It can still phone plenty of friends, all of whom will sympathise. It can also ask the audience (ditto). But it knows that military men do not resign in US politics. That Mr Mattis could no longer stomach his job marks a watershed for an administration that is rapidly losing whatever shreds of credibility it had.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Swiper]

Winning. Save your money fellas, tough times are coming.

Wall Street suffers worst week in a decade as economic worries mount

i wonder if obama will take responsibility for this like he did for the economic growth. ha ha of course he won’t

 

[Swiper]

I can't see who they are and I am not about to turn off IGNORE to find out, so THANK YOU. tRump is going down.

gutless spineless mindless.

yea great idea, ignore everyone who disagrees with you. it’s too bad you can’t engage anyone here who disagrees with you i assume because lightweight whom knows nothing of substance. carry on with your pathetic life...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Senior Justice Department lawyers advised acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker not to sign a gun regulation change earlier this week, warning him that doing so could lead to a successful legal challenge to his appointment as the nation’s top law enforcement official, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

Whitaker, who was picked by President Trump in early November to lead the Justice Department on a temporary basis, also heard from Justice Department officials who felt he should sign a change in gun regulations that effectively https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-will-ban-bump-stock-devices-that-turn-rifles-into-fully-automatic-weapons/2018/12/18/6ee08434-02e2-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html?utm_term=.fd15884d3ddc (bans the use of bump stocks), devices that attach to semiautomatic rifles and allow them to fire more like automatic weapons, these people said. He signed the document on Tuesday.

The internal debate over Whitaker’s signature, which began weeks ago, shows how concerned even top Justice Department executives are that his appointment to acting attorney general is vulnerable to a legal challenge, particularly when lawyers suing the department over various policy issues need to find only one federal judge who agrees with that position, according to officials familiar with the discussions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail internal discussions.

...

The concern expressed by senior Justice Department officials who did not want Whitaker to sign the bump-stock ban was that by doing so, it presented a litigation risk to him and the department; a judge considering legal challenges to the ban could also be asked to rule on whether Whitaker was legally appointed as attorney general. If a judge ruled against him, Whitaker would be in the unfortunate position of having a federal judge declare he wasn’t really the attorney general, these people reasoned.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Every time some high-level member of the Trump administration leaves, the staff at FiveThirtyEight debate whether it’s a big deal — and therefore whether we should cover it. Sometimes the consequences of these departures are over-hyped. Sometimes the consequences aren’t clear, so there’s not much to do but speculate. But Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation on Thursday is a big deal. A really big deal.

 

[Michael Scally MD]