Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump was probably thrilled when he learned that aides sent reporters opposition-research-style bullet points about Anthony S. Fauci. After all, we’re told, Trump is a “counter-puncher,” and Fauci has made him look bad, so Fauci must be punched back — never mind that Fauci is Trump’s own leading infectious-disease expert amid the most dire public health emergency in modern times.

Yet all this has really accomplished is to unleash intensified media scrutiny of the tortured relationship between Trump and Fauci. The result: a spate of fresh reporting on that relationship — reporting that only illustrates Trump’s pathologies with new depth and vividness.

Over the weekend, The Post reported that Fauci is now “directly in the president’s crosshairs.” The White House has “moved to sideline Fauci" and released a “lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak." This was supposed to show that Fauci has been wrong and that his current urgency about spiking cases should be seen with skepticism.

Other news organizations have now followed up, with new reporting on what really drove that move. And it makes Trump look a whole lot worse.

Much of the discussion has been about how unusual it is that the White House would leak campaign-style oppo research about Trump’s own top health official. But less attention has focused on how deranged it is that Fauci has become the enemy — that is, the target for counter-punching — in the first place.

Fauci has become the enemy, of course, because he has prioritized his efforts to understand a pandemic that has killed nearly 135,000 Americans and sickened millions over the imperative of protecting Trump politically at all costs.

Fauci’s efforts may have been flawed at times, but by all appearances they were undertaken in good faith. And that’s the cardinal sin here: Since handling a public health emergency in good faith requires a sincere — if sometimes tactful — effort to inform the public about it, this has inevitably put him in Trump’s crosshairs, because it has reflected badly on Trump.

 

[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]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic father.

That’s in essence Mary Trump’s assessment in her ultra-anticipated instant bestseller that’s due out Tuesday—Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s a takeaway that’s not altogether unfamiliar. And the glut of books about Trump and his aberrant administration has contributed almost inevitably to a tendency to treat even the most hyped fresh releases as cash-grab ephemera to speed-read for damning tidbits and just as quickly forget amid the ruthless whirl of crises.

But hold up here for a sec—for the most devastating, most valuable and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump literature, this one is something new.

That’s because of the unprecedented access, and its pathos, which is because of the source—the president’s only niece, the 55-year-old daughter of his oldest brother, who died at 42 in 1981 in her estimation as a result of a pathological, decades-long destruction at the hands of his own twisted kin.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A judge has freed Mary Trump from a gag order, allowing the president’s niece to speak freely about her family and promote her hotly anticipated tell-all.

The book—Too Much Is Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which people close to the project say has already sold close to 1 million copies and is on its third print run—is due out on Tuesday.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Mary Trump’s attorney, Theodore Boutrous Jr. said, “The court got it right in rejecting the Trump family’s effort to squelch Mary Trump’s core political speech on important issues of public concern. The First Amendment forbids prior restraints because they are intolerable infringements on the right to participate in democracy. Tomorrow, the American public will be able to read Mary’s important words for themselves.”

The development comes as the man spearheading the complicated and time consuming legal effort to stop the book’s publication and enforce Mary’s gag order, her uncle Robert, was readmitted to the same intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on Thursday where he had spent 10 days in June in a serious condition, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]