Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Jeremiahflex]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump's presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.

In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.

They described a micro-manager who sprints from one West Wing meeting to another, inserting himself into conversations big and small and leaving many staffers feeling as if he’s trying to block their access to Trump. They vented about his determination to fill the administration with his political allies. And they expressed alarm at what they say are directionless morning staff meetings Priebus oversees that could otherwise be used to rigorously set the day’s agenda and counterbalance the president’s own unpredictability.

The finger-pointing further complicates life in an already turmoil-filled West Wing, one that has been hobbled by dueling power centers and unclear lines of command.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

@CdnGuy

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON — It began at 6 p.m. Thursday as a conspiratorial rant on conservative talk radio: President Barack Obama had used the “instrumentalities of the federal government” to wiretap the Republican seeking to succeed him. This “is the big scandal,” Mark Levin, the host, told his listeners.

By Friday morning, the unsubstantiated allegation had been picked up by Breitbart News, the site once headed by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Less than 24 hours later, the president embraced the conspiracy in a series of Twitter posts accusing his predecessor of spying on him, setting in motion the latest head-spinning, did-he-really-say-that furor of Mr. Trump’s six-week-old presidency.

Previous presidents usually measured their words to avoid a media feeding frenzy, but Mr. Trump showed again over the weekend that he feeds off the frenzy. Uninhibited by the traditional protocols of his office, he makes the most incendiary assertions based on shreds of suspicion. He does so without consulting some of his most senior aides, or even agencies of his own government that might have contrary information. After setting off a public firestorm with no proof, he then calls for an investigation to find the missing evidence.

To his adversaries, Mr. Trump’s bomb-throwing seems like a calculated strategy to distract from another story he wants to avoid. In this case, they said Sunday, he clearly wanted to turn the conversation away from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself last week from any federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia in response to reports that he had met with Russia’s ambassador during the presidential race. Instead of what Mr. Sessions did or did not do, the Sunday talk shows were dominated by discussion about what Mr. Obama did or did not do.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Even by the surreal standards set during his early weeks in office, President Trump's tweets over the weekend marked a potentially dangerous turn in the course of American democracy. On Saturday morning, Trump took to his favorite social media platform and fired off a series of angry tweets aimed at former president Barack Obama, accusing him of tapping Trump Tower phones during last year's election campaign.

The charges are not supported by any evidence. On Sunday, former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said there was no order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the "FISA court" after the law that created it) to monitor the Trump campaign's communications. That categorical denial contradicted the sketchily sourced claims made by a number of right-wing outlets — some stories also ran in British media — that a White House aide forwarded to The Washington Post's Fact Checker when asked to account for Trump's explosive claims.

...

"We know exactly why President Trump tweeted what he tweeted," Earnest told The Post. "There is one page in the Trump White House crisis management playbook, and that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal. And the bigger the scandal, the more outrageous the tweet."

Earlier this year, George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, crafted a "taxonomy" of how Trump uses Twitter to shift the conversation from unwelcome reports and subsume the news cycle with his own agenda.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Ultimatepip]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda
Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

The 2016 Presidential election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”

We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Why the White House Worries About Trade Deficits [By Peter Navarro]
An imbalance imperils economic growth—and could put U.S. national security in jeopardy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-white-house-worries-about-trade-deficits-1488751930


The guy running Trump's trade policy just wrote a seriously troubling op-ed in The Wall Street Journal
http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-navarro-trade-op-ed-wall-street-journal-2017-3

 

[Michael Scally MD]