Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Sims, who enjoyed uncommon personal access to Trump, recounts expletive-filled scenes of chaos, dysfunction and duplicity among the president, his family members and administration officials.

Unlike memoirs of other Trump officials, Sims’s book is neither a sycophantic portrayal of the president nor a blistering account written to settle scores. The author presents himself as a true believer in Trump and his agenda, and even writes whimsically of the president, but still is critical of him, especially his morality. Sims also finds fault in himself, a rarity in Trump World, writing that at times he was “selfish,” “nakedly ambitious” and “a coward.”

The author reconstructs in comic detail the Trump team’s first day at work, when the president sat in the residence raging about news coverage of the relatively small size of his inauguration crowds, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer scrambled to address it.

“It’s impossible to deny how absolutely out of control the White House staff — again, myself included — was at times,” Sims writes. The book’s scenes are consistent with news reporting at the time from inside the White House.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[hunterbro]

I guess spending hours every day of your life and posting thousands of posts about a politician to sway the minds of 50 bodybuilders sounds like rational behavior to some....

the sky is falling!.

carry on...

 

[Senorman]

^To each his own my man.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

HATER DREAMS
https://claytoonz.com/2019/01/22/hater-dreams/

How long will a racist spend at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial when forced to go? About two minutes.

I can relate. It’s like going to a party you don’t want to go to, or has often been my case in the past, a band’s show. But, you feel you need to make an appearance, so you show up for a little while, engage one or two people in conversations, have a drink, then cut out. If you’re lucky, enough people will have seen you to say you were indeed there in case anyone asks. I mean, how many times do you need to hear the same band cover “Dirty Deeds?”

Normally, when you make the obligatory appearance, it takes longer than two minutes. That’s about how long Donald Trump and Mike Pence spent at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington yesterday on MLK Day. In their defense, it was cold, nobody was selling hamberders, and they’re racists.

While Democrats fanned out to public events across the nation to commemorate the holiday, the prez and his veep were in and out of the memorial faster than Mike and Karen Pence discovering they had accidentally walked into a gay wedding.

Mike Pence also commemorated the holiday the day before by comparing Donald Trump to MLK. While on CBS’s Face the Nation, Pence said, “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.’ King inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do.”

Seriously, if Dr. King inspired you to use legislation to create medieval, racist, vanity projects, I don’t think you were listening very closely.

Certainly, Dr. King didn’t inspire Mike’s wife, Karen, to take a job at an anti-LGBT Christian school as an art teacher. Pence is upset over criticism his wife is receiving for teaching at the school that seeks to exclude homosexual and transgender students and staff members because of their “moral misconduct.” How dare people not tolerate their intolerance. If this teaching gig doesn’t work out, she can always apply at Catholic Covington where the students wear black-face at basketball games.

The good news is, Pence oozes tolerance when it comes to worshiping a deity who paid hush money to porn stars. He’s a 19th century kind of guy.

What shouldn’t be tolerated is Pence comparing Dr. King to a man who sought to disavow the nation’s first black president with a racist birther theory, was slow to disavow David Duke, protested the removal of “beautiful Confederate monuments,” and approved of the “very fine people” marching with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Trump was a young man during the Civil Rights movement. While Dr. King was protesting the Vietnam War, Trump was avoiding it by claiming he had bone spurs.

While Dr. King said he hopes there comes a day when his children are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Trump said his daughter has “got the best body” and if he wasn’t her father then he’d probably be dating her.

Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump can’t spell “Nobel Peace Prize.”

Dr. King donated his Nobel prize money to charity. Trump steals from charity.

Dr. King was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Trump hangs fake Time Magazine covers of himself in his snooty golf resorts.

Dr. King was defined by civil disobedience and was arrested for it 29 times. Trump says “fire that son of a bitch” when an NFL athlete protests and there should be limits on a free press.

Dr. King said, “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.” Donald Trump says, “Build the wall.”

One of these men inspired millions to fight for Civil Rights and equality. The other inspires millions to hate and oppress. One of these men asked America to open its mind and the other is telling us to close it.

MLK had a dream to make this nation better. Trump has a dream to make it worse, and to get away with Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, tax fraud, and maybe dating his daughter. I don’t want to get in that head.

Mike Pence should stop the comparisons of Trump and Martin Luther King Jr., unless he’s pointing out that one was one of the greatest men in American history and the other is one of the most vile persons to ever command a podium.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump and his allies have spent days talking up the idea that his new proposal to reopen the government constitutes a “compromise.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has vowed to bring the proposal to a vote this week, arguing that it’s a “compromise” that includes “priorities” that “both sides” want. Vice President Pence insisted that it’s a “compromise” that has been offered in “good faith.”

But on Monday night, Senate Republicans released the bill text of this supposed “compromise.” Surprise: It has been so loaded up with poison pills that it looks as if it was deliberately constructed to make it impossible for Democrats to support.

If so, that would be perfectly in keeping with the M.O. that we’ve already seen from top adviser Stephen Miller, who appears devoted to scuttling any and all policies that could actually prompt compromises but which don’t endeavor to reduce the total number of immigrants in the United States to as low a figure as possible.

...

Trump argued that the plan is “straightforward, fair, reasonable and common sense, with lots of compromise.”

This is utter nonsense on just about every level. And the bill itself now proves it.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

(CNN) One thing about Donald Trump: He knows how to tell you what he's really thinking.

About the wall, for instance.

Consider this from Trump during the campaign in 2015, explaining the rationale for his favorite edifice:

"What I do best in life, I build. ... I want it to be so beautiful because maybe someday they'll call it 'The Trump Wall.' Maybe. If they call this 'The Trump Wall,' it has to be beautiful."

There you go. The wall, for the President, is a monument. To himself. A visible legacy of his achievement; an example of what he considers himself best at: building and branding. It's not like tax reform or trade policy. It's actually concrete (or slats) and there for all the world to see as a Trump achievement. Even when he leaves the Oval Office.

And way beyond.

If he could put his name on it in gold filigree, he would. But maybe calling it The Trump Wall is good enough.

This is not new for Donald Trump. His life has always been about the theatrical product. "It's like the curtains opening at an opera," says biographer Michael D'Antonio. "It's like a piece of scenery for his show."

Indeed. And as Trump produces this scene, his concern for the hundreds of thousands of furloughed government workers is lost, taking a back seat to his star, the wall. Kind of like Atlantic City 30 years ago when he was building other monuments to himself, inconspicuously named The Taj Mahal, for instance. The gilded splendor marketed as Trump mattered the most; paying the contractors what they were owed took a back seat. Always.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

It’s important now to take a step back and view the present crisis — https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-voters-now-blame-him-for-the-government-shutdown/2019/01/20/416051de-1b55-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?utm_term=.9b46c7524070 (the federal government mostly shut down) for more then a month, 800,000 workers not getting a paycheck, and a president refusing to fix it unless his entire demand for $5.9 billion physical border wall or barrier is agreed to — in the context of these barbaric policies, which are the translation of a hate-filled political campaign into governmental action.

In other words, the obvious cruelty of Trump’s immigration program — whether it’s kids in cages or arresting faith-based humanitarians in Tucson — isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of necessary federal actions. No, the cruelty IS the policy — Trump’s desperate effort to cling to the adoration of his huddled masses, the ones chanting “Build the wall! Build the wall!” It’s a chant that animates Trump supporters not just at his Nuremberg-spiced rallies but also Indiana Catholic high school kids who shouted it at a predominately Latino basketball team — the exact same thing that happened at a Wisconsin girls' soccer game, at a high school football game in Utah. And also in Connecticut, and https://www.totalprosports.com/2018/09/11/fans-reportedly-chant-build-the-wall-hold-racists-signs-during-high-school-football-game/, and so on, and so on.

In Donald Trump’s America, the phrase “build the wall!" isn’t a line-item in an infrastructure package, and it’s not even really about border security. It’s become an avatar for racism, xenophobia, and the worst kind of bullying — a rallying cry for a lynch mob of the spiritually weak. It is in this dangerous climate that Trump is holding 800,000 federal workers and their families hostage while chanting at Democrats to “build the wall!”

America’s problem right now isn’t the number of unauthorized refugees crossing the border, nor is it an old-fashioned budgetary impasse. No, America’s crisis is a growing cancer of immorality — the very thing that Trump’s zeal for the $5.9 billion (for starters) border wall represents. In the past, Democratic members of Congress have supported immigration plans that included money for walls or fencing. But that was a very different time. If House Democrats and the party’s filibuster squad in the Senate allocate even $1 to support the cruelest, most central element of Trump’s creeping fascism, they aren’t fixing the real crisis, the moral crisis. They will be feeding the cancer, helping it metastasize.

It’s important to remember this because the big story — as this week, and the shutdown, drags on — will be increasing political and pundit pressure on the Democrats to back down, to somehow meet Trump halfway (which usually means more than halfway). Is there any way for responsible adults to cut a deal without the stench of the president’s wall? Of course. There are several ways to spend money that would make the border region more safe yet also more humane — a vast expansion in the number of immigration judges, for example, so that asylum cases don’t drag on for years. The challenge for Democrats is to package what the southern border really needs to make it look like a compromise that Trump and his supporters would want.

There is, after all, a real crisis at the border — but it’s the one we’ve created with years of lousy policies that destabilized America’s southern neighbors and then funneled too many desperate human beings into a desert death trap. And the only real humanitarians working to fix things right now are the ones that we’re trying to send to Leavenworth.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]