Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Cartoonists Overseas Take on Donald Trump
Cartoonists Overseas Take on Donald Trump

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[Published prior to last evening's debacle.]

Donald Trump’s baffling explanation for violence at his campaign rallies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/11/donald-trumps-baffling-explanation-for-violence-at-his-campaign-rallies/?tid=sm_tw (Donald Trump’s baffling explanation for violence at his campaign rallies)

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Trump supporters in St Louis: how 'midwestern nice' became a sea of rage
Trump supporters in St Louis: how 'midwestern nice' became a sea of rage

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Donald Trump.

It's fun. Laughing at his corn on the cob 'hair' and his penis anxieties and his miniature orange fingers.

It's amusing.

Laughing at his supporters, like extras from Deliverance, clinging to their racist signs and confederate flags like security blankets.

It's hilarious.

The idea that a born-rich business man who is enmeshed in the financial system that fucked over poor Americans, is now using the anger this created to his own ends. It is genuinely genuinely funny. The way that he still says he wants to unify America. When he has managed to spew so much hatred he has alienated women, Mexicans, Muslims, the mentally ill (who he blames for gun crime and calls 'sickos'), and even his fellow Republicans. The idea that he can create peace when his own rallys become mini civil wars. And we are encouraged to laugh, because - underneath - we think he CAN'T become President. And even if he did, then, we are told, he's just an opportunist. Ted Cruz is worse, they say, because he actually has a belief system.

But wait. Wait wait wait. And wait again.

First, Donald Trump could be the next president. Ask any depressive and they will tell you that the worst case can become the scenario. Winston Churchill was depressed enough to understand where the Third Reich could sink to. Being depressed can be useful. We need to be collectively pessimistic. And besides, with Trump securing over twice as much media coverage as Bernie and Hilary put together, it's not pessimism. It's realism. ('Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', said George Santayana.)

Second, he is not JUST an opportunist. He may have flipped and flopped on planned parenthood and the Iraq War but he has always been consistently racist. In the seventies, we now know, thanks to the Daily Beast, his real-estate business was the subject of a lawsuit after it was found to discriminate against African Americans (a C for coloured was put down on application papers to ensure they wouldn't get a property). Also, there is increasing evidence that his father Fred Trump, was the Fred Trump from Queens in the 1920s who got arrested for being part of the KKK. And when you see old interviews of Donald from the 80s almost every time he will talk with anger about Japan or Russia ripping off the American people. That classic sign of a racist. Always thinking the natives are getting ripped off by the outsiders, or at least stirring up that narrative. So, when he talks about Mexicans being rapists and when he talks about a wall or when he conflates 'Islam' with 'Islamic extremism' or when he is slow to distance himself from the KKK or he talks about China being 'cunning' he is being opportunistic, yes absolutely, but also consistent.

Third, it really doesn't matter. Obvioulsy it would be worse if he became president but even if he didn't, he's already done damage. Not just in America but across the world. He has allowed the international league of closet racists to step out of their little wardrobes of hate. He has legitimised ignorance. He has shown that if the world watches The Apprentice for too long instead of reading books it slowly loses empathy and the power of critical thought. He has taken the legitimate torrents of anger of poor white people and managed to channel it downstream to the even more marginalised, rather than up river where it belongs. This new Emperor Nero, who makes Saddam Hussein's taste in interior design look understated, has shown how you really can't underestimate an electorate. He, with his vulgar Vegas towers and his golf courses and his shrugged-off hypocrisy, has shown the west that mad rulers don't just belong in totalitarian regimes. They can belong in the west. Because democracy means little when it becomes another reality TV show.

It might be the end of the world. But we still can't switch to another channel.

Matt Haig - Donald Trump. It's fun. Laughing at his corn... | Facebook

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Ex-Breitbart spokesman: ‘Donald Trump makes me embarrassed to say that I’m a Republican’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/12/ex-breitbart-spokesman-donald-trump-makes-me-embarrassed-to-say-that-im-a-republican/ (Ex-Breitbart spokesman: ‘Donald Trump makes me embarrassed to say that I’m a Republican’)

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Trump Wants to Make Government Huge Again
Why Trump Wants to Make Government Huge Again

…

A vote for Trump is a vote for action. For a wall along the southern border: 35 feet tall. No, 40 feet. Is Mexico complaining? Add another 10, and hand them the tab. There’s nothing cost-effective about megalithic structures, which is their whole point. There are cheaper ways to constrict the flow of migrants across the border. Instead, Trump backs a big-government project. A yuuuuge government project. And the crowds are eating it up.

The contrast between Trump and his three remaining rivals was on stark display at the Republican debate on Thursday night. “I will fight anyone who wants to expand government,” Marco Rubio vowed. In Ohio, “We shrunk the government,” John Kasich boasted. “Government is the problem!” insisted Ted Cruz. “Here's my philosophy. The less government, the more freedom. The fewer bureaucrats, the more prosperity.”

Trump has his quarrels with the federal government. He’s repeatedly vowed to do away with the EPA and the Department of Education. When moderators ask him how he’ll pay for his expansive program of government initiatives, he repeats “waste, fraud, and abuse” like a magical incantation to ward them off. He’s promised to end Common Core, to put government services out to bid, and to overhaul the tax code. He’s decried the food stamp program for keeping half of recipients “on the dole for nearly a decade,” and blamed Obama for handing out “welfare goodies” in exchange for votes.

But on issue after issue, Trump vows to use government as a tool to improve the lot of his supporters, and address their anxieties. He’d interfere in free markets, imposing tariffs to punish companies that move factories offshore, and countries with abusive trade practices. He’s pledged to preserve Social Security. He’s proposed, at various times, registering Muslims and banning them from entering the country.

There’s a common theme dividing the government initiatives Trump supports from the ones he opposes. He’s speaking to his core supporters: working-class whites who identify not by ethnicity, but simply as American. And he’s promising to defend their interests. He’ll protect their jobs from spotted owls and immigrants and offshoring; he’ll keep them safe by keeping terrorists abroad, and troops at home; he’ll buffer them against shifting economic fortunes with robust social-insurance programs.

…

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Violence Begets Violence -- Just the Way They Like It
Orcinus: Violence Begets Violence -- Just the Way They Like It

Watching http://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/trumps-chicago-rally-shut-down-protesters from Chicago and elsewhere, it became obvious that, largely as many of us have feared, Donald Trump is indeed leading the United States merrily down the path to an outbreak of actual, genuine fascism, all without himself being a hardened fascist ideologue, but rather a right-wing populist demagogue. But then again, the two phenomena are only degrees apart, and that is what we are now seeing on the streets of the American political landscape.

Of course, while it was fairly clear that the protesters were peaceful until attacked by the Trump rally-goers, the reality also was that fighting eventually broke out on all sides and there was violence all around. Naturally, that meant thathttp://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/hardball-guests-trots-out-both-sidesflogging their favorite "both sides do it" narrative.

Never mind, of course, that Trump has specifically encouraged the violence, telling reporters at a press conference that "we need a little bit more of that."
The story we'll be fed as at least "the other side" will be Trump's: that the leftist "thugs" were responsible for the violence. And we all can see where this is going: As justification for further and more intense violence.

There is a long history of this with the fascist and proto-fascist right. ...

 

[tenpoundsleft]

Violence Begets Violence -- Just the Way They Like It
Orcinus: Violence Begets Violence -- Just the Way They Like It

Watching http://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/trumps-chicago-rally-shut-down-protesters from Chicago and elsewhere, it became obvious that, largely as many of us have feared, Donald Trump is indeed leading the United States merrily down the path to an outbreak of actual, genuine fascism, all without himself being a hardened fascist ideologue, but rather a right-wing populist demagogue. But then again, the two phenomena are only degrees apart, and that is what we are now seeing on the streets of the American political landscape.

Of course, while it was fairly clear that the protesters were peaceful until attacked by the Trump rally-goers, the reality also was that fighting eventually broke out on all sides and there was violence all around. Naturally, that meant thathttp://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/hardball-guests-trots-out-both-sidesflogging their favorite "both sides do it" narrative.

Never mind, of course, that Trump has specifically encouraged the violence, telling reporters at a press conference that "we need a little bit more of that."
The story we'll be fed as at least "the other side" will be Trump's: that the leftist "thugs" were responsible for the violence. And we all can see where this is going: As justification for further and more intense violence.

There is a long history of this with the fascist and proto-fascist right. ...

Criminy, who is this looneytune? Fascist? Must live in San Francisco or Boston to be this removed from reality.

Trump isn't ideal, but compared to Bernie the Swedish Socialist Nutcase and Hillary the Criminal Despot Wannabee - he looks really good, even with his stupid hair and orange face.

 

[CdnGuy]

Looney tune tenpound???? Please tell me your referring to the people that have shown up at the recent trump rallies? He has single handedly turned Politics into the travelling Circus!!!

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump
Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump - The New Yorker

Confession being good for the soul, it is always a good thing to offer a confession for a bad part of one’s past. It is aggravating, though, if, having written a confession, you then go around insisting that everybody else sign it, too. The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”

It would be, as we used to say, funny if it weren’t so scary. The same people who have long scoffed, often with reason, at the “root causes” theory of terrorism or crime or whatever—emphasizing, instead, individual responsibility for whatever it is we choose to do— have now become full-fledged rootsers. It isn’t Trump or his followers who are really to blame for his rise; it’s the circumstances that produced them and the guys, chiefly liberals, who they think created those circumstances. Or else it’s said that there is a “systematic rot” in American politics, of which Trump is merely a symptom. But in this case there is not a systematic rot. There is a specific rot. The rot was in a party and movement that never actually took the trouble to seal itself off from its own extremists. Yes, of course, there are nuts on all sides, but 9/11 “truthers” play exactly zero role in liberal electoral politics; “birthers” played such a central role in the right that the biggest and most rancid birther of them all is now the leading Presidential candidate of the Republican Party.

Along with this urge to spread the skin around is the impulse to explain the rise of Trump in terms of a more general economic malaise, so granting a pathos and sympathy to his followers. And that there is economic anxiety is obvious. If this were a sufficient explanation, though, one would expect Trump’s own peculiar brand of Home Shopping Network crypto-fascism to track those anxieties, and one would expect the most marginalized and threatened among us to be most taken with it. But there seems to be only a very partial correlation between economic anxiety and Trumpism, and a much stronger one between his supporters and residual racial suspicions. Trump barely makes an effort to gesture toward economic reform, beyond his diffuse tirades about trade. If there’s one thing that economists, right and left, agree on, it is that, as Paul Krugman puts it, globalization “is not a problem we can address by lashing out at foreigners we falsely imagine are winning at our expense.” Trump’s supposed concern for the welfare state rests on things like his occasional remarks about not letting people die in the street, notable or meaningful only for the outrage of Ted Cruz, who apparently would want people to die in the street—or, actually, to die, as has often happened, after being admitted to an emergency ward, months or often years too late. Huey P. Long’s “Every Man a King” was a dubiously non-specific program of economic relief. But even that is different from “I’m a king, and that makes me the Man,” Trump’s real slogan.

Beneath all this is a larger historical current. There’s often a strong need on the part of progressive people to believe that all ailments are essentially economic and that, therefore, if there is a political program that isn’t economic in its emphasis it must be surreptitiously economic in its real purpose. It’s a little like Freudian analysis: since all neuroses are sexual traumas, then a sexual trauma will always be found. But one of the fundamental and tragic lessons of the last century is that nationalism can exist on its own as a cause and faith and belief attached to the most meagre shreds of any kind of economic project. That’s the way Mussolini worked, or, later, Berlusconi. People still identify—yes, let’s go there—Hitler’s rise with the currency inflation of the Weimar Republic. And yet that panic had already passed; Hitler’s appeal, as any reader of “Mein Kampf” can find, was very marginally about economic grievances, almost entirely to feelings of aggrieved identity and unavenged humiliation.

To imagine that Donald Trump is a sort of comb-over John the Baptist for some eventual progressive Jesus is a fiction we force on ourselves by faith, not by reading history. For most of the last century, progressives of various sorts were always convinced that nationalist self-assertion could be magically transmuted into progressivism. By “heightening the contradictions” or showing “capitalism with the gloves off,” authoritarian contempt for parliamentary democracy might be magically transmuted from the wrong kind of rage into the right kind of reform.

It doesn’t happen like that. In truth, nationalism sufficiently strident can get by with an eclectic or completely vague economic program both in promise and in practice. Fascism may have appealed to the economically insecure, but it did not appeal by giving them an economic answer. It appealed by giving them an enemy. As in France, or throughout Europe now, the extreme right flourishes not because there is insecurity but because they have an answer for insecurity: blame the Muslims (they’ve also blamed the Jews, though they’re quieter about that right now). Or: blame the Muslims and the Mexicans. They work, in the classic manner, not by providing answers to insecurity but by blurring the lines between genuine anxieties and imaginary fears and then by offering an imaginary solution—the Jews/Muslims/terrorists/Commies who are coming—to the imaginary fears as though that would alleviate the real anxieties.

Grievances alone are not social goods. Marine Le Pen’s voters have grievances; George Wallace’s voters, God knows, had grievances. But one can recognize the grievance without entering into a sentimental view of the aggrieved. This is, again, the curious reversal that has left all of us in need of some of the classic conservative lessons: that root causes are not all-purpose explanations, much less alibis; that economics are not everything, or even the major thing; that irrational ideology and identity count far more in human affairs. And that democratic societies are more fragile, and more easily broken, than their continuities can often make them seem.

 

[tenpoundsleft]

Looney tune tenpound???? Please tell me your referring to the people that have shown up at the recent trump rallies? He has single handedly turned Politics into the travelling Circus!!!

Come, you can't even vote here.

Want us to start harping on your mini-Bernie Trudeau.

Also, you missed my point entirely, I'm NOT praising Trump - try to pay attention - I'm saying that compared to Bernie and Hillary he smells like roses.

 

[tenpoundsleft]

Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump
Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump - The New Yorker

Confession being good for the soul, it is always a good thing to offer a confession for a bad part of one’s past. It is aggravating, though, if, having written a confession, you then go around insisting that everybody else sign it, too. The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”

It would be, as we used to say, funny if it weren’t so scary. The same people who have long scoffed, often with reason, at the “root causes” theory of terrorism or crime or whatever—emphasizing, instead, individual responsibility for whatever it is we choose to do— have now become full-fledged rootsers. It isn’t Trump or his followers who are really to blame for his rise; it’s the circumstances that produced them and the guys, chiefly liberals, who they think created those circumstances. Or else it’s said that there is a “systematic rot” in American politics, of which Trump is merely a symptom. But in this case there is not a systematic rot. There is a specific rot. The rot was in a party and movement that never actually took the trouble to seal itself off from its own extremists. Yes, of course, there are nuts on all sides, but 9/11 “truthers” play exactly zero role in liberal electoral politics; “birthers” played such a central role in the right that the biggest and most rancid birther of them all is now the leading Presidential candidate of the Republican Party.

Along with this urge to spread the skin around is the impulse to explain the rise of Trump in terms of a more general economic malaise, so granting a pathos and sympathy to his followers. And that there is economic anxiety is obvious. If this were a sufficient explanation, though, one would expect Trump’s own peculiar brand of Home Shopping Network crypto-fascism to track those anxieties, and one would expect the most marginalized and threatened among us to be most taken with it. But there seems to be only a very partial correlation between economic anxiety and Trumpism, and a much stronger one between his supporters and residual racial suspicions. Trump barely makes an effort to gesture toward economic reform, beyond his diffuse tirades about trade. If there’s one thing that economists, right and left, agree on, it is that, as Paul Krugman puts it, globalization “is not a problem we can address by lashing out at foreigners we falsely imagine are winning at our expense.” Trump’s supposed concern for the welfare state rests on things like his occasional remarks about not letting people die in the street, notable or meaningful only for the outrage of Ted Cruz, who apparently would want people to die in the street—or, actually, to die, as has often happened, after being admitted to an emergency ward, months or often years too late. Huey P. Long’s “Every Man a King” was a dubiously non-specific program of economic relief. But even that is different from “I’m a king, and that makes me the Man,” Trump’s real slogan.

Beneath all this is a larger historical current. There’s often a strong need on the part of progressive people to believe that all ailments are essentially economic and that, therefore, if there is a political program that isn’t economic in its emphasis it must be surreptitiously economic in its real purpose. It’s a little like Freudian analysis: since all neuroses are sexual traumas, then a sexual trauma will always be found. But one of the fundamental and tragic lessons of the last century is that nationalism can exist on its own as a cause and faith and belief attached to the most meagre shreds of any kind of economic project. That’s the way Mussolini worked, or, later, Berlusconi. People still identify—yes, let’s go there—Hitler’s rise with the currency inflation of the Weimar Republic. And yet that panic had already passed; Hitler’s appeal, as any reader of “Mein Kampf” can find, was very marginally about economic grievances, almost entirely to feelings of aggrieved identity and unavenged humiliation.

To imagine that Donald Trump is a sort of comb-over John the Baptist for some eventual progressive Jesus is a fiction we force on ourselves by faith, not by reading history. For most of the last century, progressives of various sorts were always convinced that nationalist self-assertion could be magically transmuted into progressivism. By “heightening the contradictions” or showing “capitalism with the gloves off,” authoritarian contempt for parliamentary democracy might be magically transmuted from the wrong kind of rage into the right kind of reform.

It doesn’t happen like that. In truth, nationalism sufficiently strident can get by with an eclectic or completely vague economic program both in promise and in practice. Fascism may have appealed to the economically insecure, but it did not appeal by giving them an economic answer. It appealed by giving them an enemy. As in France, or throughout Europe now, the extreme right flourishes not because there is insecurity but because they have an answer for insecurity: blame the Muslims (they’ve also blamed the Jews, though they’re quieter about that right now). Or: blame the Muslims and the Mexicans. They work, in the classic manner, not by providing answers to insecurity but by blurring the lines between genuine anxieties and imaginary fears and then by offering an imaginary solution—the Jews/Muslims/terrorists/Commies who are coming—to the imaginary fears as though that would alleviate the real anxieties.

Grievances alone are not social goods. Marine Le Pen’s voters have grievances; George Wallace’s voters, God knows, had grievances. But one can recognize the grievance without entering into a sentimental view of the aggrieved. This is, again, the curious reversal that has left all of us in need of some of the classic conservative lessons: that root causes are not all-purpose explanations, much less alibis; that economics are not everything, or even the major thing; that irrational ideology and identity count far more in human affairs. And that democratic societies are more fragile, and more easily broken, than their continuities can often make them seem.

The New F-ing Yorker?

I actually have a subscription to that, which I'll let expire. Thought it would be interesting, but each issue is crammed full of pretentious, pseudointellectual posturing. All liberal up the wazoo. Smug little f-ers utterly devoid of the world around them.

 

[CdnGuy]

Come, you can't even vote here.

Want us to start harping on your mini-Bernie Trudeau.

Also, you missed my point entirely, I'm NOT praising Trump - try to pay attention - I'm saying that compared to Bernie and Hillary he smells like roses.

I was referring to you calling out Scally as a loonie tune. I was saying Trump supporters of late are the one's looking like the loonies. Try & pay attention TPOnce again Tenpound resorts to "'you can't vote here" thanks for stating the obvious GENIUS!!!! Gotta love the open forum and how anyone can voice their opinions. SO DEAL WITH IT SON!
Edit- if you wanna take shots at Trudeau have at errr sir! I encourage it actually lol

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[tenpoundsleft]

I was referring to you calling out Scally as a loonie tune. I was saying Trump supporters of late are the one's looking like the loonies. Try & pay attention TPOnce again Tenpound resorts to "'you can't vote here" thanks for stating the obvious GENIUS!!!! Gotta love the open forum and how anyone can voice their opinions. SO DEAL WITH IT SON!
Edit- if you wanna take shots at Trudeau have at errr sir! I encourage it actually lol

In the arena of politics, Dr Scalliwag is truly a looneytune. Nothing but a steady stream of rubbish. No analysis, nothing. Makes him look like quite the knee-jerk unthinking liberal. But I repeat myself.

Canada, wouldn't waste my time talking about your pathetic PM. Pointless nation.