Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

As you watch Trump’s defenders lie, deflect, and distract today and in the coming weeks, remember that they don’t care about being caught in obvious lies. Calling bullshit still means you’re talking about the bullshit, not the facts.

This is part of the “flood not dam” model. They want doubt. They can make up a dozen new lies and new distractions every day while there’s only one truth. Stop chasing them and keep repeating the facts.

Many thought it strange when Putin’s propaganda released many different “refutations” after Russian forces shot down MH17, some even on the same day. But they want to distract, not refute. To make it seem like the truth isn’t knowable.

They’ll attack the truth-tellers, accuse them of anything at all, because playing defense takes energy. They’ll use whataboutism to distract from their crimes. Keep following the money and repeating the truth.

Thread by @Kasparov63: "As you watch Trump’s defenders lie, deflect, and distract today and in the coming weeks, remember that they don’t care about being caught in […]"

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Thomas Homan, the Trump administration’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2017 to June 2018, helped to transform the agency into an arm of Donald Trump’s nativist agenda. During his 17 months, ICE escalated its terror tactics against immigrant communities, https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/human-rights-groups-allege-ice-private-detention-companies-provide-poor-care-to-lgbtq-migrants-and-those-with-hiv/2019/09/25/a4f3747c-dfc9-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html (tormented) thousands of individuals in ICE custody, and lied to federal courts.

On Thursday, asked to answer for his agency’s conduct and policies in a congressional hearing, he responded with a meltdown that perfectly captured a lawless organization’s rejection of any rules or authority that might limit its power.

Thursday’s https://judiciary.house.gov/subcommittees/immigration-and-border-security-116th-congress (hearing) before the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship focused on ICE detention centers, a hotbed of human rights abuses. More than 50,000 immigrants are currently being held in ICE custody, with private, for-profit prisons housing nearly three-fourths of them. Reports issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General in June 2019 and September 2018 found that ICE facilities are filthy, brutal, and dangerous.

Immigrants, including children, are routinely denied access to medical care. They are forced to live in filthy conditions, given food that is expired and unsafe, denied hygiene items like toothbrushes and soap, and denied recreation and visitation. Detainees are illegally placed in solitary confinement and strip-searched. At one facility, inspectors found nooses in 15 different cells. At least 24 immigrants have died in ICE detention under Trump.

...

These incidents demonstrate how ICE operated under Homan’s watch. Agents felt free to illegally detain immigrants, then deceive courts to secure their deportation. They treated their targets as legal nonpersons, in a crusade to detain and deport as many as possible. ICE has gone after lawful immigrants, too, attempting to revoke their green cards for no good reason.

Homan claimed he simply sought to enforce the laws on the books. But when state legislators began to limit local law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with ICE, Homan announced on Fox News that those lawmakers should be charged with crimes.

The first wave of coverage of Homan’s outburst Thursday came from right-wing media, praising his defiance. It was pure Trumpism, the elevation of culture war over the basic constitutional order. Thomas Homan does not recognize the authority of Pramila Jayapal or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He does not think he has to follow their rules. He does not believe that two women of color have any right to hold power over him.

“You work for me!” the former government employee screamed at an elected member of the government. He is a man who is used to wielding power against people who look like Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez. He is the embodiment of ICE under Trump, certain—as so many ICE officers are—that he answers to no one.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

There’s been a lot of failure in American politics these last four years, but has there been any more miserable and embarrassing than the alleged and, we now know, probably mythical “Resistance Inside The Trump Administration"?

Do you remember that? On Sept. 5, 2018 — barely a year ago, although it feels now like six or seven — a ranking member of the Trump administration published a remarkable, anonymous op-ed in the New York Times in which the author meant to assure the rest of America that — despite the downward-spiraling lunacy that we witness every day on our TV screen or in our Twitter feed — we should fear not because “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Some 389 endless days later, we still don’t know who the writer is, but there’s one thing we can say with utter confidence. He or she is a coward. So, too, are literally dozens of other so-called public servants — many obscure, but some with the nation’s highest medals of valor pinned near their feckless, quivering hearts — who went to work each morning and watched an American president shred the Constitution and betray our fundamental values and yet chose to say nothing.

It took the great courage of one person — and two-thirds of an out-of-control president’s disastrous term in office — to show us how deeply the stench of fear otherwise permeated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That one whistle-blower — maybe a CIA agent, but definitely an individual who did not check his or her moral compass at the White House front gate — has revealed Trump’s abuse of power, potential lawbreaking and casual willingness to solicit, and arguably extort, foreign election interference in his dealings with Ukraine. These revelations have brought Trump to the brink of impeachment and could topple the tottering Jenga of corruption that has been his administration.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“The Republicans are using this tactic heavily in defense of Trump right now.” — Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]