Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The most serious betrayal of the United States by a senior pubic official since the Civil War took place in full view of the public and was confirmed by a thorough investigation. That is what history will see--a corrupt president betraying his country.

And our tortured semantic and process debates about how to handle this will seem absurd in the face of those facts. Some of that is due to efforts to pervert the narrative to protect the president. Some of that is due to institutionalism run amok. Some is just feckless.

But the facts won't change--whether the president acknowledges them in a Tweet or not, whether Robert Mueller floats hides an indictment behind a memo and punts the responsibility for acting on it. What remains open and will be closely scrutinized not only by history...

...but by would-be enemies and those with future designs to attack our system...is whether we respond to the facts of the case as they demand and hold the betrayers accountable or whether we sink into a self-indulgent if pious-sounding political debate to mask our inaction.

Right now, as someone who has lived and worked in Washington for over a quarter century, that is where it seems we are headed. No one will be held accountable. There will be no meaningful punishment for this egregious betrayal.

Our enemies will get what they wanted many times over. Their accomplices at the highest level of our government will get what they sought. Future attackers and their would be accomplices will get the green light to do it all again.

Cable television shows will get months and years of stem-winding debates. And politicians on both sides will get heaping portions of righteous indignation to channel into their next campaigns. Only justice, only what is right, will go unserved.

The powerful at home and abroad will prosper as they tend to do. Our institutions and hopes for them will be forever diminished. And if you do not think that is where we are headed right now, you are not paying attention.

It doesn't have to be so. But it would take great courage and an appetite for personal professional risk few seem to have to take it on and produce another outcome. No, there will be fig leaf investigations. There will be the illusion of action.

And then there will be elections and a call to "move on." Only we can never move on from damage of this sort unless its causes are acknowledged and reversed. That not only means holding wrong-doers accountable. It also means fixing what is broken in our system.

It means rejecting once & for all the very un-American conclusion that a sitting president cannot be indicted because that means if he or she is protected by politics from conviction in the Congress (it takes only 34 votes to do that) then that means presidents are above the law.

And if there is one shocking conclusion the case of Trump's betrayal of his country demands we see it is this: as of now, in the situation we are in & ones like it,the president is beyond the reach of justice. He is a king. He is what the American Revolution was fought to reject.

With his backdoor coronation comes the further empowerment of his courtiers and their close supporters, a new aristocracy who have already placed themselves above society and its rules in terms of their economic fortunes and who grab power and prerogatives daily.

It is an irony that as the GOP warns of the threat of socialism they usher in the liberty-sucking, justice-defeating realities of veiled monarchy and oligarchy. No doubt this too will produce a great deal of indignation and heated discussion on TV shows and Twitter.

& behind the scenes the scramble will be on to join the empowered & adjust to the new reality. & someday we will have enough perspective to see what we have lost & how our inaction killed it just as surely as did the greed, corruption and plots of our enemies and their enablers.

(Note: If you think I overstate when I refer to an oligarchy, I refer you to the past 40 yrs and a USA in which today the bottom 50% own 1% of the wealth and the top 10% own 70%...or the recent tax cut which benefitted only the rich and powerful...and on...and on.)

Thread by @djrothkopf: "The most serious betrayal of the United States by a senior pubic official since the Civil War took place in full view of the public and was […]"

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON — Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Donald Trump expressed bewilderment on Thursday at the prospect that House Democrats could even consider moving to oust him from office, calling impeachment a "dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

“I don't see how they can because they're possibly allowed although — I can't imagine the courts allowing it. I’ve never gone into it,” Trump told reporters of potential impeachment proceedings while leaving the White House Thursday. “I never thought that would even be possible to be using that word. To me it's a dirty word, the word impeach. It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON — Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Donald Trump expressed bewilderment on Thursday at the prospect that House Democrats could even consider moving to oust him from office, calling impeachment a "dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

“I don't see how they can because they're possibly allowed although — I can't imagine the courts allowing it. I’ve never gone into it,” Trump told reporters of potential impeachment proceedings while leaving the White House Thursday. “I never thought that would even be possible to be using that word. To me it's a dirty word, the word impeach. It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Since Justin Amash started laying out the necessity of impeachment and even more after yesterday’s Mueller press conference, the question of whether or not to start an impeachment proceeding against the President has picked up steam.

In my opinion, Democrats have to start that process, in part to have a ready response as Trump’s increasingly authoritarian approach to governing violates more and more foundational norms.

But I also wanted to point to two fairly recent developments that may change that calculus. This post will describe how Trump Organization did not comply with a GOP-issued Congressional subpoena that sustained a lie that Trump has since reiterated, under oath, to Mueller.

...

One more detail about Cohen makes his case a particularly apt case to impeach the President.

The sworn evidence in the case makes it very clear Cohen was willing to — and did — lie to Congress so long as he believed he’d be pardoned for those lies.

But as soon as it became clear that he could not expect a pardon, Cohen decided to start telling the truth.

(I’ll revisit and reconfirm this, but the record shows that a pardon was withdrawn (and Trump stopped paying Cohen’s legal bills) around the same time 1) Trump got to see all the paperwork and recording that might back Cohen’s claims against him 2) He saw that Cohen had recorded him agreeing to the Karen McDougal hush payment).

He told the truth about something implicating “Individual-1” as a co-conspirator.

And he told the truth about lying to Congress.

In other words, with Cohen, it will be very easy to show that Trump’s pardon offers led to a witness providing false testimony in response to a Congressional subpoena (false testimony made possibly only through parallel obstruction on the part of Trump’s business).

In other words, Cohen is a fairly strong case proving Trump successfully suborned perjury.

So with Cohen, there is all new evidence of Trump-related crimes: Trump’s sworn lies about Trump Tower Moscow to Mueller mirrored by Trump Organization’s defiance of a Republican issued Congressional subpoena on precisely that topic.

And Congress should be able to get proof of it.

This provides an opportunity to pitch impeachment in terms of GOP equities. That will surely not make a difference for Republicans, at first, but for any that want to find an excuse to come around to supporting impeachment, it may be useful down the road.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump just admitted that Russia helped elect him president. “I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist,” Trump rage-tweeted, adding that this again shows that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation was a “Witch Hunt Hoax.”

Trump then rushed to clarify matters. “Russia did not help me get elected,” Trump told reporters. “Russia didn’t help me at all.”

But here’s the thing: Russia did help Trump get elected. And Trump cannot make this fact disappear, even though he has spent more than two years trying.

Some will argue that Trump’s quicksilver views shouldn’t be taken seriously at any given moment. But Trump actually has spent much of his presidency suggesting the Russian attack on our political system on his behalf never happened at all (while occasionally admitting it has).

Mueller’s remarks concluding his investigation demolished this big lie with great clarity. But this has gotten lost in some of the media coverage, which has treated the argument over them as a spin war in which both sides are milking the comments for partisan purposes in equivalent fashion.

But that’s not what’s happening. In reality, Trump and Republicans are flatly falsifying what Mueller said, by widely sticking to the propagandistic lie that Mueller confirmed “no obstruction” and “no collusion.” By contrast, Democrats are mostly navigating internal disagreements over how to interpret what Mueller’s comments require of them, which has kept them far more oriented toward what he actually did say. There’s no equivalence here.

An objective, plain reading of Mueller’s comments should punch through this false-equivalency clutter, revealing some stark truths for all to see:

• Trump has been lying to the American people for more than two years about the circumstances of his ascension to the presidency, and Mueller has provided a forceful antidote to this lie.
• Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice were not merely about protecting himself from imagined unfair prosecution. Rather, they were about preventing those large truths from coming out.
• Trump and many top aides — with help from Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — are trying to duplicate those circumstances again, or at least are taking active steps that make this rerun more likely.

Let’s be as clear as possible: Mueller’s comments, read objectively, confirm many of the broad contours of this story.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

In Kendell Culp’s corner of northwest Indiana, the relentless rain began falling on his farm months ago, saturating the ground his family has nurtured for generations and delaying the kickoff of their planting season by more than a week.

It eased up briefly at the end of April, enough time to plant corn on about 350 of his 2,000 acres. Then the rain started falling all over again.

“There’s just not a lot you can do,” he said.

Nearly 90 percent of his corn crop is already growing, thanks to a few dry days and long, strategic hours in the fields. But he has yet to plant a single soybean. Last year, he was done planting everything by the first week of May.

“I’ve never had a yield where I couldn’t get my crop planted,” Culp said, noting that his father, who is in his 80s, recalled the same. “This is unprecedented what we’re facing.”

For months now, the Culps — and many farmers across wide swaths of the Midwest — have rarely seen days dry enough to work, leading to what agricultural experts are calling a historically delayed planting season that could exacerbate the economic and personal anxieties brought on by a multiyear slump in farm prices and the Trump administration’s trade war with China, the world’s largest soybean buyer.

For the past five years, the 18 states that produce the majority of America’s corn crop had an average of 90 percent of their fields planted by the end of May, according to data released Tuesday by the Agriculture Department. At the same point this year, 58 percent of the corn crop is in the ground. The outlook for soybeans is just as dismal, with 29 percent in the ground compared with 66 percent in years past.

In individual states, the gap is even more severe. Just 22 percent of the corn crop had been planted as of May 26 in Culp’s home state of Indiana. Soybeans stood at 11 percent.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]