Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

More than any wife, more than any party, more than any opinion, President Donald Trump has remained fiercely loyal to golf. But I’ve played golf my entire life. Years ago, I even played with Trump once. Whatever sport he’s playing, it isn’t golf.

He cheats. He lies. He kicks. And not just his ball — yours, too. He props up a 2.8 handicap that’s faker than WrestleMania 35. He wins tournaments he never even played in. He wins tournaments that weren’t even held.

He does all of this because he has to win. A loss is to Donald Trump what a shower is to the Wicked Witch of the West. He has to win no matter how much cheating, lying, and pencil erasing it takes. He has to win whether you’ve caught him or not. Maybe it was his father beating into his kid brain, Win, win, win. Be a winner, over and over. Maybe it was where he learned the game—Cobbs Creek, a scruffy public course in Philadelphia full of hustlers and con men who taught him to cheat your opponent before he cheats you.

...

Donald Trump does not represent the world of golf; he repels it. Most American golfers (about 90 percent) play on public courses, not country clubs, according to the National Golf Foundation. Every golfer I know plays by the rules (aside from a first-tee mulligan), except him. Every golfer I know finishes his round and—even before his beer—immediately posts his score in the GHIN computer, so everybody knows a bet with him will be fair, except him. In 2018, Trump played an estimated 60-plus times. He posted one score.

While writing my new book about Trump’s cheating, I left calls, emails and even FedEx letters for him and his people and got no replies. Meanwhile, he’s still telling America he’s this champion golfer, and he isn’t. How do I know? Whenever he’s played in front of cameras (Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Tahoe Celebrity), he’s not once made a cut or finished in the top half among the celebs.

I’m just a sportswriter. I’m not an expert on politics, immigration, or the Mueller report. But I can tell you one thing. When it comes to golf fraud, President Trump is not exonerated.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is expected to offer her resignation at a meeting at the White House on Sunday, U.S. officials familiar with the matter say. Nielsen was set to meet with President Trump at 5 p.m., the officials said.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is expected to offer her resignation at a meeting at the White House on Sunday, U.S. officials familiar with the matter say. Nielsen was set to meet with President Trump at 5 p.m., the officials said.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Here’s the state of play right now, two weeks after Barr published the Mueller Report: the Cliffs Notes Edition. Barr insists that a much more informative “version” of the Mueller Report is coming, after a series of redactions — a task that could have been done with Mueller’s help in hours yet which for some reason is taking the attorney general and his massive Justice Department days, which are now turning into weeks.

The slow-walking of the Mueller redactions is a “tell,” as is the AG’s failure to go before a judge and ask for permission to disclose grand jury material — as was done in Watergate. That’s because every judgment call from Barr has been on the side of slowness, obfuscation, and whatever is good for Trump, and never on the side of transparency, the inherent right to know, and whatever is good for the American people.

You don’t need a Harvard law degree to see what’s really happening here. Barr and Team Trump surely knew that today’s media and political tornado abhor a vacuum, and so they were able to fill it — with the president’s bogus claim of “total exoneration,” backed up by an online lynch mob going after any journalist who insists otherwise with their torches and pitchforks.

...

If you thought that the media would be able to process that the Barr letter was an obvious sham — not to mention the even-more-obvious fact that we’re less than 1 percent closer to knowing what’s in the real Mueller Report than we were when when they were breathlessly waiting for it in February — and not instead instantly run with banner headlines that the president has been cleared, you’ve been living in a dreamland.

If you think that America’s drift toward authoritarianism under Trump — not just the stuff that Mueller investigated but the rank corruption and the increasingly brown-shirted cruelty toward refugees — will eventually cause the masses to rise up, when the young people who are typically the vanguard of any revolution have been raised in the cocoon of the soma of cyberspace and resume-driven parenting to worry about different things than you do, then you’ve been living in a dreamland.

And if you think that an independent judiciary is going to ultimately save the day the way Sirica and a unanimous Supreme Court preserved the rule of law during Watergate, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his minions https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/02/mitch-mcconnells-never-ending-quest-make-merrick-garland-sick-his-stomach/?utm_term=.55850fe86553 (shredded the Constitution) to gain control of the Supreme Court and are now ramming through an army of right-wing judges for the next 30-40 years, then ... maybe it’s time to wake up.


Donald Trump is not going to be impeached, and it boggles my mind that anyone even suggests that a cabinet handpicked for its Trumpian loyalty would consider the 25th Amendment, no matter how much the president https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/04/course-windmills-cause-cancer-thats-why-everyone-holland-is-dead-trump-mocked-his-wind-energy-attack/?utm_term=.e617bcc29185 (unravels in public). In fact, Trump won’t even be denied a second term unless something changes the status quo — 40 percent whose hatred of the media and fear of a diverse America trumps anything that happens in this White House, the 6 percent who’ll be peeled off by the Democrats’ endless civil wars and Facebook manipulation, and an Electoral College created to preserve slavery that, in a perverse way, still is.

The irony is that the Barr cover-up somehow managed to reveal the one thing every American needs to know. That the dreamland of a working democratic system — in a landscape populated by an empowered, truth-seeking Congress, honest judges, and investigative reporting that can change public opinion — died a long, long time ago. Knowing that is both terrifying and empowering. Because the real, radical work of waking up can finally begin.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

As President Donald Trump roils the capital over illegal immigration, his influential aide Stephen Miller is playing a more aggressive behind-the-scenes role in a wider administration shakeup.

Frustrated by the lack of headway on a signature Trump campaign issue, the senior White House adviser has been arguing for personnel changes to bring in more like-minded hardliners, according to three people familiar with the situation — including the ouster of a key immigration official at the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, announced on Sunday that she is resigning.

Miller has also recently been telephoning mid-level officials at several federal departments and agencies to angrily demand that they do more to stem the flow of immigrants into the country, according to two people familiar with the calls.

The pressure comes as Trump, who forced a government shutdown over his demand for a Mexican border wall, is again making immigration the central theme of his presidency; last week, Trump backed off his threats to shut down the border entirely.

The officials at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State, who each handle different parts of the immigration process, were initially surprised that a high-ranking White House official like Miller would call them directly, rather than contact their bosses.

“It’s intimidation,” one of the people who was briefed on the calls told POLITICO. “Anytime you get a call like this from the White House it’s intimidation ... Under normal circumstances, if you were a deputy in one of these agencies, it would be very unusual.”

“There’s definitely a larger shakeup abreast being led by Stephen Miller and the staunch right wing within the administration,” said a person close to Nielsen, who resigned Sunday after months of pressure from a president who felt she was not tough enough on illegal immigration. “They failed with the courts and with Congress and now they’re eating their own.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.

The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Ms. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.” Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Ms. Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.

She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. Last May, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/were-closed-trump-directs-his-anger-over-immigration-at-homeland-security-secretary/2018/05/24/4bd686ec-5abc-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html?utm_term=.888508cd2e03 (stories surfaced)about Mr. Trump publicly berating her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. Ms. Nielsen was said to have drafted a resignation letter at the time.

In her resignation letter released on Sunday, Ms. Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”

This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.

Sadly, Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.

“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border,” she said on Twitter last June. “Period.” She repeated as much to Congress as recently as March.

Nor was immigration the only issue on which Ms. Nielsen floundered. On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Mr. Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

SELL CRAZY SOMEPLACE ELSE
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/08/sell-crazy-someplace-else/

In 1939, the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying around 900 Jews was turned away by the United States because they didn’t have the proper paperwork. They were forced to return to Europe where half the passengers were murdered during the Holocaust. You could say that America was arguing it was full.

Last weekend, Donald Trump stood before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas and continued his war against immigration and amnesty. He told the Jewish Republicans, “Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.”

Trump made the argument during his visit to the border on Friday, then repeated it Saturday, and then again on Sunday. Somehow, Stephen Miller must have gotten the terminology stuck in his head. The comments were celebrated by the white nationalist movement in Germany. They argued that their country is full too.

In 1939, Germans who believed their country was “full” followed Adolph Hitler. Today, racist Germans believing their country is full follow Donald Trump. “Our country is full” is fascist talk.

John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post, “The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately. The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.” Leave it to Donald Trump to go before a Jewish group and talk like a Nazi.

And, yeah. I know we’re not supposed to compare today’s Republicans to Nazis because the Nazis were truly horrible and terrible people who did atrocious things. But, it’s really hard not to compare Republicans to Nazis when they talk like Nazis.

Trump has argued in the past that he wants legal immigration and to bring in the most talented. The argument he made last weekend goes against that. Though, when he argues for legal immigration and bringing in the most talented, he’s talking about white people. When he argues “America is full,” he’s talking about brown people. You know, people from “shithole countries.”

America is not just the United States. America extends from Canada to Chile and Argentina (look it up, Republicans). America is not full and neither is the United States. When people are in trouble, our nation should help them when it can…and right now, we can. We shouldn’t demonize them, rip their families apart, throw their babies in jail and lose track of them, all because it feeds a xenophobic base.

According to inside sources, Trump is becoming “unhinged” over immigration. Yesterday, Trump fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen after Stephen Miller made the case to can her. Those same sources claim Miller is gunning for the heads of additional DHS officials. Trump and Miller won’t be satisfied until everyone at DHS is goosestepping.

By the way, if there’s a plaque with Donald Trump’s name on it on a newly constructed section of the border wall that was appropriated BEFORE he came into office…then his proposed wall is nothing more than a vanity project. Why does his name have to be on it? What’s next? Putting a plaque bearing his name on the Hoover Dam?

In the film, As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson (he was being a jerk) told a woman, “Go sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.” The Trump base is full of nuts, crazies, paranoids, racist, deplorables, and the very worst of America…all of the Americas. They are full up but if you wanna sell crazy there, they’re still buying.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The United States has designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, effective Monday. The group, formed by an order of Ayatollah Khomeini, is a branch of Iran's Armed Forces founded after the 1979 Revolution.

President Trump said in a statement that the move, led by the Department of State, is an "unprecedented step" that "recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft."

He added, "The IRGC is the Iranian government's primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign." The White House emphasized on Monday that the action "sends a clear message to Tehran that its support for terrorism has serious consequences."

"We will continue to increase financial pressure and raise the costs on the Iranian regime for its support of terrorist activity until it abandons its malign and outlaw behavior," the president said.

The designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as a foreign terrorist organization, according to the White House, and will expand the scope and scale of the administration's maximum pressure campaign on the Iranian regime.