Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

A chaotic scene of sickness and filth is unfolding in an overcrowded border station in Clint, Tex., where hundreds of young people who have recently crossed the border are being held, according to lawyers who visited the facility this week. Some of the children have been there for nearly a month.

Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.

Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.

“There is a stench,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, one of the lawyers who visited the facility. “The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

NO SOAP FOR YOU
No Soap For you

The accusation that detention centers holding migrant children are concentration camps doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being compared to Nazi death camps. But, there are definitely some soap Nazis among Customs and Border Protection.

In fact, this week, the Trump administration went to court to argue that migrant children detained at the U.S.-Mexico border do not require basic hygiene products like soap and toothbrushes in order to be held in “safe and sanitary” conditions. Hell, they even argued that forcing minors to sleep on cold concrete floors in crowded cells, CELLS, with low temperatures also fulfilled the “safe and sanitary” requirement.

News broke this week that there are not enough diapers for the babies currently held by the Trump administration (which would make sense if the big orange baby requires them all). Also, children are being forced to care for toddlers. There are toddlers sitting around in urine-soaked onesies. There is a lack of toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap. Showers and baths are extremely rare for the children detained by Donald Trump.

In addition to all that, the government is doing all it can to prevent the public from discovering what it’s like inside these detention centers. The press and even elected representatives have been barred from entering many of the facilities.

But, we’re not supposed to call them “concentration camps.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the GOP’s current favorite punching bag because she’s liberal, young, smarter than them, female, brown and from New York City, is catching a lot of heat for describing the detention centers as “concentration camps.” She’s not backing down. She shouldn’t.

Not all concentration camps were death camps. During World War II, the term “Internment” was used for the camps holding American citizens of Japanese descent, but they were concentration camps.

Many of Trump’s defenders argue that these detention centers don’t meet the requirement for the tag of “concentration.” They argue that most concentration camps are under dictatorships, meanwhile, Trump threatened to jail a reporter yesterday for taking a picture.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “concentration camp” as “a camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”

If that description doesn’t fit these centers, then I don’t know what does.

The fact is, they are concentration camps. The problem is, most Americans don’t want to live in a country that allows them, so they will never admit they exist. Problem. The United States of America under Donald Trump has concentration camps and they’re full of babies.

For what it’s worth, the Nazis never told their citizens about their concentration camps either. They just handed them the soap.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“Thank you very much for coming. These four very courageous women have asked to be here and it was our honor to help them. And I think they’re each going to make just an individual, short statement. And then will do a little meeting, and we will see you at the debate.”

With https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/10/09/ahead-of-debate-trump-holds-news-conference-with-bill-clinton-accusers/?utm_term=.48d5ba278fe6 (those words), candidate Donald Trump kicked off a news conference just hours before the second presidential debate on Oct. 9, 2016. The brainchild of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, the gathering was an effort to blunt the impact of the now-notorious “Access Hollywood” tape, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.8fea549a12e6 (unearthed two days before), on which Trump had boasted of grabbing women by their genitals and doing “anything” to them that he liked.

Sitting with Trump were four women, three of whom claimed to have been subjected to Bill Clinton’s unwelcome sexual advances. One, in particular, was sitting just to Trump’s right.

Her name was Juanita Broaddrick. And she made an accusation of criminal sexual assault.

“Mr. Trump may have said some bad words,” she said, “but Bill Clinton raped me.”

...

But today there’s another woman with a similar allegation, against a different powerful man. Her name is E. Jean Carroll.

She, too, says that she was raped — by Donald Trump.

She, too, tells a story about how she was alone with a man. How in 1995 or 1996 that man, Trump, allegedly forced himself upon her. How she tried to fight back. How she tried to push him away and tried to stomp on his foot. How he penetrated her. How she ran out the door. How she told friends. How she didn’t tell the police. Trump also https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/magazine-columnist-accuses-trump-of-sexual-assault-more-than-two-decades-ago-an-allegation-he-denies/2019/06/21/2afc6f12-945a-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html?utm_term=.0e3f3ff15895&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1 (denied the accusations), calling them “fake news” and adding, “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”

But Trump called Broaddrick “courageous,” and if Broaddrick was courageous, then certainly Carroll is as well. For Carroll’s story is at least as compelling as Broaddrick’s — if not more so.

And that is because Carroll’s claim, for a number of reasons, actually rests upon a significantly stronger foundation than Broaddrick’s.

For one thing, before she went public with her story, Broaddrick had repeatedly denied that Clinton had assaulted her, even under oath: In an affidavit she had submitted in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against Clinton, Broaddrick had https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/pjones/docs/janeaff033098.htm (sworn) that the allegations “that Mr. Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward me in the late seventies … are untrue,” that the press had previously sought “corroboration of these tales,” but that she had “repeatedly denied the allegations.” (Disclosure: I provided behind-the-scenes pro bono legal assistance to Jones’s lawyers.)

...

Finally, no controversy involving Trump would be complete without at least one utterly brazen, easily disprovable Trumpian lie. In his statement denying the rape allegation, he added the claim that “I’ve never met this person in my life.”

If Trump had even bothered to glance at Carroll’s published account, he would have seen a photograph of himself and his then-wife, Ivana, from 1987 ― in which he was amiably chatting with Carroll and her then-husband. By making the absurd and mendacious assertion that he never even met Carroll, Trump utterly annihilates the credibility of his claim that he didn’t assault her.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Donald Trump is wrapping up the first week of his official re-election campaign by trolling his Twitter followers with a joke that he’ll stay in office long after the constitutional maximum of two terms.

On Friday, Trump, 73, shared a video meme to his personal Twitter account, based on the October 22, 2018 cover of TIME Magazine, suggesting that he would be president “forever.”

In the animation clip, set to the tune of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, Trump’s future campaign signs are all featured, beginning at the year 2024 until 2048 — just like the cover was designed.

As the video slowly zooms in on each year, however, it temporarily pauses at 2048 in the top left corner, where a GIF of the president has been photoshopped in above the campaign sign.


The years on the sign below Trump then begin to flash before the viewers’ eyes in four-year intervals until it reaches 90,000.

In a final note, Trump included “EEEEEE” — a reference to eternity — before finishing with one last statement about how long he intends on staying in office. “TRUMP 4EVA,” the sign reads. The White House did not immediately reply to PEOPLE’s request for comment.



But — in a reaction presaging the challenges for him to win a second term — The Orlando Sentinel announced the same day as the kickoff that it was endorsing anyone but Trump for the presidency. The local newspaper has a history of supporting Republican candidates.

“Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. A similar hashtag, #anybodybuttrump, cropped up on Twitter.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

China has the strength and patience to withstand the trade war, and will fight to the end if the U.S. administration persists with it, China’s state-run People’s Daily said in an editorial Saturday. People’s Daily Online Commentary: Will China lose the trade war? - People's Daily Online

The U.S. must drop all tariffs imposed on China if it wants to negotiate on trade, and only an equal dialogue can resolve the issue and lead to a win-win, the newspaper said.

The paper, a mouthpiece for China’s ruling Communist Party, said the U.S. had failed to take into account the interests of its own people, and they are paying higher costs due to the trade dispute. “Wielding a big stick of tariffs” also disregards the condition of the U.S. economy and the international economic order, according to the editorial.

 

[Michael Scally MD]