Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Right-wing commentator and “cool kid’s philosopher” Ben Shapiro stormed out of a contentious BBC interview on Thursday after accusing the conservative host of being a “leftist” and bragging about how popular he is.

During the pre-taped interview with BBC interviewer Andrew Neil promoting his new book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, Shapiro quickly became perturbed when Neil—who is known for playing devil’s advocate in interviews—pressed him on recent attempts to roll back abortion rights, asking the editor-in-chief of clickbait rage factory The Daily Wire if those policies would take America back to the “Dark Ages.”

“You purport to be an objective journalist,” Shapiro sniped. “BBC purports to be an objective, down-the-middle network. It obviously is not, it never has been. And you as a journalist are proceeding to call one side of the political aisle ignorant, barbaric, and sending us back to the Dark Ages, why don’t you just say you’re on the left.”

This caused Neil, chairman of conservative magazine The Spectator, to chuckle and tell his guest: “If you only knew how ridiculous that statement is you wouldn’t have said it.”

In a bit of damage control, prior to the chat’s airing, Shapiro tweeted Thursday that he had taped an interview with Neil and “misinterpreted his antagonism as political Leftism,” acknowledging that it was inaccurate.

Shapiro, who is famous for saying “facts don't care about your feelings,” continued to grow frustrated and incensed throughout the 16-minute interview, snarling that Neil was playing “gotcha” by highlighting his old tweets and comments, such as claiming “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.”

...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“I miss the days when #athletes entertained us with the athletic ability, and didn’t bore us with their political opinions!”


Which days were these? When Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing license for refusing to go to Vietnam? When Jackie Robinson & Larry Doby broke the color line? When Hank Aaron endured death threats b/c he beat Babe Ruth’s homerun record?...

... Or when 1970 U.S. Open winner Arthur Ashe was barred by the apartheid govt from entering South Africa for the SA National Champiionship? When Lee Elder had to rent two houses to up his chances of surviving death threats to play in the Augusta Golf Championship in 1975?

Maybe when Jesse Owens, the most decorated American athlete of the 1936 Olympics who faced down Nazis to win at track & field, was not allowed to go visit FDR with the white Olympic sthletes when they returned home?

It was all so simple then. You could enjoy sports without thinking about the indignities endured by the men & women who dared to defy the ignorance, racism & meannness if so-called “fans.” They speak out now and they spoke then. You just weren’t listening.

One more. Yes the good old days of 1912 when one man - the heavyweight champ Jack Johnson - could help inspire passage of a federal law simply because he openly consorted with white women. He was prosecuted the year the Mann Act passed for taking his white gf across state lines.

What's crazy is that these examples were the ones I could think of off the top of my head w/i minutes of reading his tweet. It represents a fraction of the story.

Thread by @Sifill_LDF: "Which days were these? When Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing license for refusing to go to Vietnam? When Jackie Robinson & Larry […]"

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON — White House officials asked at least twice in the past month for the key witness against President Trump in the Mueller report, Donald F. McGahn II, to say publicly that he never believed the president obstructed justice, according to two people briefed on the requests.

Mr. McGahn, who was the president’s first White House counsel, declined, one of the people said. His reluctance angered Mr. Trump, who believed that Mr. McGahn showed disloyalty by telling investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, about Mr. Trump’s attempts to maintain control over the Russia investigation.

The White House made one of the requests to Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck, before the Mueller report was released publicly but after the Justice Department gave a copy to Mr. Trump’s lawyers to read. Reading the report, the president’s lawyers saw that Mr. Mueller had left out that Mr. McGahn had told investigators that he believed Mr. Trump never obstructed justice. Mr. Burck had told them months earlier that his client had shared that belief with investigators.

Mr. McGahn initially entertained the White House request. But after the report was released, detailing the range of actions Mr. Trump took to try to impede the inquiry, Mr. McGahn declined to put out a statement. The report also included comments Mr. Trump to aides about how he believed Mr. McGahn leaked to the media to make himself look good.

The episode shows the lengths the White House has gone to around the release of the Mueller report to push back on the notion that Mr. Trump obstructed justice. House Democrats have used the report to launch investigations into whether Mr. Trump abused his position to insulate himself from the investigations.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

On Tuesday, the New York Times scooped the world on the news that from 1985 to 1994, Donald Trump incurred the biggest business losses of any single taxpayer in American history. What was it like for him to lose more than $1 billion in a decade? Was he perpetually ashen-faced with fear? Or smirking at the thought of outwitting the IRS “for sport,” as he said in a Wednesday morning tweet?

I happen to know, because from late 1988 to 1990, I was his ghostwriter, working on a book that would be called “Surviving at the Top.” Right in the middle of this period, I can tell you that the answer is that he was neither. Except for an occasional passing look of queasiness, or anger, when someone came into his Trump Tower office and whispered the daily win/loss numbers at his Atlantic City casinos, he seemed to be bored out of his mind.

I tend to see my time with him — the first part of it, anyway, before things started going bad in a hurry — as his “King Midas” period. I never said this to him; if I had, he probably would have thought I was suggesting he enter the muffler business. But there was a stretch of months when everything he touched turned into a deal. The banks seemed to accept the version of him depicted in his first book, “The Art of the Deal,” which we now know from his previous ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, was entirely invented.

They believed it over what they saw on his balance sheets or heard coming out of his mouth, and they never said no to his requests for more money. Often they came up with things he could say yes to before he could think of them himself. As a result, a failing real estate developer who had little idea of what he was doing and less interest in doing it once he’d held the all-important press conference wound up owning three New Jersey hotel-casinos, the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Airlines Shuttle and a 281-foot yacht.

A real go-getter, right? But Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling. It was true that the carpets and drapes at his properties needed to be refreshed frequently, and the seats on the renamed Trump Shuttle required occasional reupholstering.

But the main thing about fabric swatches was that they were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn’t. One of his aides once told me that every room at the Plaza could be filled at the “rack rate” (list price) every night, and the revenue still wouldn’t cover the monthly payment of the loan he’d taken out to buy the place. In other words, he’d made a ridiculous deal. Neither he nor the banks had done the math beforehand. Or perhaps Trump knew it because someone had told him, but didn’t want to think about it. The one thing he is above-average at is compartmentalization.

...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

JR
Jr

I can’t imagine Donald Trump being a hands-on father. I’m fairly confident the guy never did a 2:00 am feeding or changed a diaper in his life. He probably didn’t even know where the diapers were kept in his penthouse, other than the ones he has to wear himself. I definitely can’t see him playing catch with any of his kids. But maybe, if he and Jr go to prison together, they can form a little bonding time in the year.

Sometimes I wonder how Trump’s staff can’t prevent him from embarrassing himself, like when he publicly displays his lack of comprehension. Whoever read the Mueller Report to him didn’t do a good job of making him understand it.

After Donald Trump Jr was subpoenaed last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump griped to the media the unfairness of it all. He said the Mueller Report exonerated Trump Jr. It did not. In case you’re keeping score at home, Jr refused to give an interview to Mueller’s team. For some reason, they didn’t subpoena him.

While arguing the “exoneration” of Trump Jr, Daddy Trump referred to the report as “the Bible.” Again, he didn’t read the report as it contradicts not just Jr’s public statements about the Trump Tower meeting and having business interests in Russia, it contradicts his previous Senate testimony. In case you’re a Republican, that’s perjury. That can land Jr in prison. If the Mueller Report is “the Bible,” then Trumpy Jr should be going to prison.

Trump also argued that Jr shouldn’t testify again because he had already done so before the committee in private. That’s why he needs to testify again, because that first testimony was contradicted by the Mueller Report, you know, “the Bible.”

Donald Trump is an idiot and he passed it on to his idiot son.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

If we take a moment to pull ourselves away from the daily melodrama of President Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress a report that he claims exonerates him, we might notice that American foreign policy has spiraled completely out of control.

Our trade war with China continues, for no other reason than that the president does not understand how the international economy works. After two splashy but vacuous summits that never should have happened, the North Koreans continue to press ahead with their nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Trump’s clumsy ditching of the Iran deal has achieved the miracle of ceding the moral high ground to Tehran and making a terror-supporting regime seem like the aggrieved party. The Iranians are now threatening to resume parts of their nuclear program that would put them closer to potentially making a bomb — as the White House stares dumbfounded, with no second move for a contingency that anyone who can think more than 10 seconds ahead would have seen coming.

After a promise to restore America’s standing in the world, Trump has blundered into conflict with our competitors, insulted our allies, and generally made the United States into a laughingstock.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Why?

In recent days, the unanimous message that has blared forth from President Trump, his media propagandists and his Republican allies in Congress on the Mueller report is that it is now “case closed” on this whole story, as Mitch McConnell put it.

Countless Republicans have uttered the same talking point in every conceivable forum: No collusion, no obstruction. This is an entirely settled matter — total exoneration.

Yet at the same time, the full force of the administration’s legal resources — backed up by the Senate majority leader and virtually all congressional Republicans — has been marshaled against further fact-finding of any and all kinds, on just about every single remaining front where outstanding unknowns remain.

Why? Why is this massive effort to close down every last remaining line of inquiry necessary, if Trump has been totally exonerated?