Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

TrumPsychopath ... TrumPOS ...



On Wednesday, President Trump was asked what he wanted the country to know about the failure of the mission in Niger that killed four Special Forces soldiers earlier this month.

“Well, we’re going to look at it,” Trump replied, saying that the soldiers were there to battle the Islamic State, a “dangerous business.”

Did he authorize this mission, a reporter asked.

“No, I didn’t. Not specifically,” Trump said. “But I have generals that are great generals. These are great fighters. These are warriors.”

So you gave them authority to do this mission, another reporter asked.

“I gave them authority to do what’s right so that we win,” Trump replied.

If that sounds a lot like a commander in chief hinting that he doesn’t bear blame for the soldiers’ deaths, there’s a good reason for that: That’s what’s happening. Again. When a Navy SEAL was killed in Yemen earlier this year, the White House suggested that the plan had been drawn by the Obama administration. In other words, that it wasn’t Trump’s fault.

The “I alone can fix it” candidate has evolved into the “I didn’t do it” president. And no group is more likely to be blamed by Trump for missteps or problems than Congress — even members of Congress from his own party.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Student anxiety and hostility on public high school campuses has worsened since Donald Trump became president and is affecting student learning, according to a new UCLA report.

More than half of public high school teachers in a nationally representative school sample reported seeing more students than ever with “high levels of stress and anxiety” between last January, when Trump took office, and May. That’s according to the study, “Teaching and Learning in the Age of Trump: Increasing Stress and Hostility in America’s High Schools,” by John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“I’ve never been in a school year where I’ve had so many kids, kind of on edge,” the report quoted Utah social studies teacher Nicole Morris as saying.

And nearly 80 percent said some students had expressed concern for their well-being because of the charged public conversation about issues such as immigration, health care, the environment, travel bans and LGBTQ rights, it said. Furthermore, 40 percent said concerns over key issues — such as Trump’s ban on travelers from eight countries, most with Muslim majorities; restrictions on LGBTQ rights; and health care — are making it harder for students to focus on their studies and making them less likely to come to school.

“I had students stand up in the middle of class and directly address their peers with racial slurs,” the report quoted Ohio social studies teacher Aaron Burger as saying. “This is not something I have seen before.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

On an unseasonably warm October day recently, Donald Trump’s CIA director and national-security adviser appeared one after another at a conference in the nation’s capital. They soberly assessed the world’s greatest threats below the gentle light of chandeliers in a hotel ballroom. In between their remarks, D.C.’s cognoscenti spilled into an adjoining courtyard to conduct their own threat assessments over wraps and caesar salad. All was normal in Washington—except that two of the president’s top aides were signaling, with deadly seriousness, that conflict could soon erupt between two nuclear-weapons powers.

...

But as North Korea’s nuclear program has rapidly advanced, and as the Trump administration has sounded the alarms about that progress, such talk is creeping back into public discourse in Washington and beyond. The president and his advisers have avoided explicit discussion of nuclear war. Yet they’ve spoken increasingly openly—and with remarkable stoicism—about the potentially catastrophic toll of a U.S.-North Korean conflict, not only because both countries possess nuclear weapons but because North Korea has formidable non-nuclear arms and shares a heavily militarized peninsula with South Korea.

At the October conference, which was organized by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, CIA chief Mike Pompeo noted that North Korea may be just months away from developing the capacity to place a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile that can reach the United States. The North Koreans are so close, in fact, that U.S. policymakers should “behave as if we are on the cusp of them achieving that objective,” he said. As for what behavior he had in mind, Pompeo stressed that Trump would rather use peaceful tactics—economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure—to deny North Korea this capability. But the president is determined to keep Kim Jong Un from holding America hostage with nukes, he added, even if that requires taking military action against the North Korean leader.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Much has been made this week of reports that the Clinton campaign paid for the so-called “dossier” about Trump that was compiled by a former British intelligence agent. One important point is sometimes lost in the discussion. The dossier itself played absolutely no role in the coordinated intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in our election. That assessment, which was released in unclassified form in January but which contained much more detail in the classified version that has been briefed to Congress, was based entirely on other sources and analysis.

It’s true that then President-elect Trump was briefed on the allegations in the dossier. This was not, however, because the Intelligence Community had relied on it in any way, or even made any determination that the information it contained was reliable and accurate. Rather, after considerable thought and discussion, DNI Clapper and the heads of the FBI, CIA and NSA decided that because the dossier was circulating among Members of Congress and the media, it was important to warn the President-elect of its existence. Imagine his anger – which would have been fully justified – if the document had leaked and he learned that U.S. government agencies knew of it and did NOT warn him.

The Russian efforts to influence our election are an important crisis for our democracy. The salacious allegations in the “dossier” are a mere sideshow that should not distract from a comprehensive investigation of that crisis.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

What if Trump’s wall were solar powered?
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/02/10/2184028/what-if-trumps-wall-were-solar-powered/

Clearly, this is nonsense. A complete waste of time. It’s not our intention to suggest the US will pay for its Mexico border wall by putting solar panels along the south side. That’s definitely probably not going to happen. Though comic book supervillains might draft secret plans to harvest daylight from their enemies, the evidence that POTUS is a comic book supervillian is at best circumstantial. What we have here is a hypothetical.

Would it work, though?

…

Any proposal to incorporate renewables into the Wall’s construction, if one is ever to exist, would need to be informed by realism and practicality. Support from the campaigners and special-interest groups couldn’t be bluffed with grandiose plans, because everyone knows there’s no earthly reason to build a whole Wall out of solar panels. It’s a non-starter. Our working through of the mechanics of such a scheme is the opposite of fake news: factual nonsense.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Pity the professionals. In the past month, President Trump has sideswiped certification of the Iran nuclear deal, sandbagged his own secretary of state’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and even provoked the ever-careful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, to uncork his deepest fears in a series of bombshell interviews. “The volatility, is you know, to anyone who has been around, is to a degree alarming,” Corker told the Times earlier this month, revealing that many in the administration were working overtime to keep the president from “the path to World War III.” He doubled down on those comments a few weeks later, declaring that Trump, among other things, was “taking us on a path to combat” with North Korea and should “leave it to the professionals for a while.”

The professionals sure have their hands full. So far, the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy appears to consist of three elements: baiting adversaries, rattling allies, and scaring the crap out of Congress. The administration has injected strategic instability into world politics, undermining alliances and institutions, hastening bad trends, and igniting festering crises across the globe. “America first” looks increasingly like “America alone.” The indispensable nation is becoming the unreliable one. Even without a nuclear disaster, the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency won’t be undone for years, if ever.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

What’s also clear, however, is that the Trump campaign seems to have ample motivation to distance itself from Cambridge, a firm whose tactics have sometimes raised questions. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that shadowy billionaire and Trump supporter Robert Mercer is Cambridge’s main financial backer. Former Trump campaign manager and chief strategist to President Trump, Steve Bannon, also held a position on Cambridge's board. The company itself is an offshoot of the British firm, SCL, which has roots in government and military operations.

Now, Assange’s confirmation that Cambridge’s CEO wanted to join forces against Clinton has renewed suspicions about the company’s business tactics, suspicions that the Trump team would very much like to avoid in the face of ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the election.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

By now, it should be clear to anyone following the news that Russian intelligence made a formidable effort to approach the Trump campaign and assess the potential to manipulate its members. As a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, I can tell you that Russian security services would have been derelict not to evaluate the possibility of turning someone close to Trump. While the question of collusion remains open, it’s beyond dispute that Russia tried to get people around the president to cooperate. The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower is indication enough, but other encounters bolster the argument.

How do you get someone to do something they should not do?

Generally, an intelligence officer looks for a person’s vulnerabilities and explores ways to exploit them. It usually comes down to four things, which—in true government style—the CIA has encompassed in an acronym, MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. Want to get someone to betray his country? Figure out which of these four motivators drives the person and exploit the hell out of it.

It is important to note, too, that a person might not know he is doing something he shouldn’t do. As former CIA Director John Brennan testified in May, “Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.” Sometimes, such people make the best assets. They are so sure in their convictions that they are acting in their own best interest or in the best interest of their country that they have no idea they are being completely manipulated.

The Russians know all this, too.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]