Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

Like most Americans, I woke up the morning after Thanksgiving and thought first about atonement. How to work off all of that stuffing?

Also like most Americans, I thought next about Ivanka. What was her holiday like? More specifically, what was her holiday “tablescape” like?

That gilded neologism appeared in a story that was published shortly before Thanksgiving on her company’s website, promoted by its Twitter handle and exquisitely emblematic of her approach to her self-appointed role as heroine to and model for working women the world over. It recommended festooning the terrain around the turkey with Waterford crystal, Astier plates ($300 and up for a single place setting) and driftwood gathered from the shore. In Ivanka’s world, the shore is never far, the driftwood is always photogenic and there’s time aplenty, because there are servants galore, to forage for it.

Can Ivanka’s “tablescape” coexist harmoniously with her papa’s “populism”? I’m skeptical, but Ivanka coexists harmoniously with Louise Linton, most recently seen drooling over a sheet of freshly minted dollar bills at a U.S. Treasury plant. They bore the name of her husband, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, so she gripped them with an elegantly gloved hand and displayed them triumphantly for the camera, an image that understandably went viral.

“Who could fail to be moved, at least a little, by the sight of Louise Linton photographed with the love of her life?” asked Kevin Williamson in National Review.

“Steven Mnuchin was also in the picture,” Williamson added. “Portrait of a marriage, right there.”

Portrait of an administration, really.

If Donald Trump wants to keep insisting that he’s some scrappy watchdog keeping the corrupt elites at bay so that the little people have their day, then I want to keep pointing out what an utter crock his supposed populism continues to be. If you can produce for me an administration that has showcased as much unabashedly, unrepentantly regal behavior as his, then I’ll personally collect and supply the driftwood for your Thanksgiving tablescapes for the next three decades. I’ll throw in a few clamshells and pinecones, too.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs — at Trump-branded properties — while working-class parents see their children’s dreams of affordable college go up in smoke. This brings me to tax reform, which has taken shape in ways that hardly prioritize struggling Americans who are trying to climb the economic ladder a rung or two.

 

[MassTurk]

right, but I like to hear the specifics of which races were the most impacted. why issue a report and not get into any specifics at all? that just seems weird to me a totally incomplete report of hate crimes. if we knew which races were most impacted maybe there something that could be done, ya think, chump?

I will do so good sir
A little background on you if you don’t mind.
R you a white middle aged male living in the states sir?

 

[Swiper]

I will do so good sir
A little background on you if you don’t mind.
R you a white middle aged male living in the states sir?

i’m white in my late 30’s, live in the USA. my parents came to this country as immigrants, legally. I’m first-generation born in the USA. my mother came from Austria and my father from Poland. i only know english. was raised all American. my parents have always loved this country, the people and the culture.

why you ask?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Big_paul]

In a Saturday night tweet, Trump attacked CNN, saying the network’s international division “represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly.” A few minutes later, Trump tweeted an alternative: MagaPill.com.

The name MagaPill is a riff on “red pill,” a term popular with white nationalists and others on the far right. A metaphor based on a plot line from The Matrix, it refers to the process of normalizing extreme views. MagaPill is also active on Gab, a social network favored by white nationalist and banned from the Google app store violating its hate speech policy.

But while Trump presents MagaPill as the antidote to “fake news,” the site regularly traffics in unhinged conspiracy theories.

A few years ago I would have thought it I'm possible to have openly racist pres. Trump gives an okay to hate.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Among the many Twitter hashtags that have sprung up over the past year mocking Donald Trump, none is more cutting or insightful than one that appeared over the Thanksgiving weekend. Referring to Trump’s Make American Great Again (MAGA) campaign slogan and retweeted with varying punctuation, its essential message is: “MAGA=#MuellerAin’tGoingAway.”

I nearly choked with laughter when I spotted the subversive tweet on Black Friday. I quickly realized, however, that this wasn’t just another hilarious Twitter punch line. It was also a spot-on observation, politically and legally. Indeed, for the president, who spends hours on end tweeting diatribes against real and imaginary enemies, the hostile takeover of the MAGA mantra is the stuff of catastrophe.

As much as Trump may wish that the Russia investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller III would just fade away, and as hard as he huffs and puffs that there was no collusion with Russia during the campaign and that he’s the target of a McCarthy-style witch hunt conducted by the nefarious “deep state,” the investigation is gathering steam. It now threatens to engulf his presidency. According to several reports, White House staffers and aides are walking around in fear, asking one another daily with thinly disguised gallows humor if anyone inside the Oval Office might be wearing a wire.

For once, the president’s renowned paranoia is grounded in reality. Trump and his minions have good reason to be afraid—not because the president is the innocent victim of a vast neoliberal dragnet, but because Mueller’s work has moved from the investigation stage to the prosecution phase. Heads are starting to roll.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Oregongearhead]

As a native American (Cherokee/Choctaw) I agree !!

 

[Michael Scally MD]

After more than two months without a missile launch, North Korea did a middle-of-the-night test (3:17 am local time) today that appears to be its longest yet.

Reports are saying that the missile test was highly lofted and landed in the Sea of Japan some 960 km (600 miles) from the launch site. They are also saying the missile reached a maximum altitude of 4,500 km. This would mean that it flew for about 54 minutes, which is consistent with reports from Japan.

If these numbers are correct, then if flown on a standard trajectory rather than this lofted trajectory, this missile would have a range of more than 13,000 km (8,100 miles). This is significantly longer than North Korea’s previous long range tests, which flew on lofted trajectories for 37 minutes (July 4) and 47 minutes (July 28). Such a missile would have more than enough range to reach Washington, DC, and in fact any part of the continental United States.

We do not know how heavy a payload this missile carried, but given the increase in range it seems likely that it carried a very light mock warhead. If true, that means it would not be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to this long distance, since such a warhead would be much heavier.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.

That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.

Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy. He was able to interview Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier attempting to detail Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin, and who describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive.”

“Collusion” doesn’t purport to solve all the mysteries of this alleged conspiracy. There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and the precise nature of it, remains opaque. Harding makes a strong case for Steele’s credibility, but Steele reportedly said that the raw intelligence in his dossier is only 70 percent to 90 percent accurate, so it’s hard to know which parts of it to believe.

But Harding’s book is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle. He suggests, convincingly, that Russia may have been cultivating Trump since the 1980s. At that time, Harding writes, the K.G.B. was working to draw “prominent figures in the West” — as the K.G.B. described them — into collaboration. According to Harding, a form for evaluating targets asked, “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”

Last week, The Times reported that many Russian critics of Putin deplore America’s fixation on Moscow’s role in the election, since it reinforces Putin’s image of himself as an “ever-victorious master strategist” controlling world affairs. The article quoted Ivan Kurilla, a Russian historian and America expert: “American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life. They try to portray him as something created by Russia.”

As one of those American liberals, I don’t think this is quite right. Trump, the gaudy huckster who treats closing a sale as the height of human endeavor, is a quintessentially American figure. His campaign of racial and religious grievance drew on the darkest currents of American history. At most, Putin appears to have recognized an opportunity that American political dysfunction created.

It’s a sign of how deep that dysfunction goes that the substantial evidence that the president is not a patriot hasn’t caused more of a political earthquake. America, stunned and divided, appears incapable of metabolizing all we’re learning about the man in the White House. Yes, we have investigations, but the business of government plods on; right now the Senate is working on the Roy Moore of tax bills, a piece of legislation that magnifies right-wing pathologies into a cartoonish grotesque.

It wasn’t Putin who fashioned a Republican Party willing to tolerate something close to treason if it’s the price of corporate tax cuts. Even if all the Republicans in Congress read Harding’s book, they probably wouldn’t act. But at least they’d know what they’re abetting.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The most dramatic story Monday, at least for those of us who work at The Washington Post, was a botched attempt to “sting” this news organization with a bogus scandal story to show how we publish only fake news to damage Republicans.

It was a highly instructive episode in how news-gathering works and what the difference is between that and baseless assertions of nonsense. If The Post, or anyone else, were in the business of making up news, it wouldn’t need someone to come and peddle it to them. It is perfectly easy to make up stories without any help. For example, President Trump did not need any help in saying his inauguration crowds were the biggest in history. He just thought it up and said it.

It is also instructive to note that not only did The Post (lo and behold!) bother to check to see if there was any corroborating evidence to this story, but there was also extensive background checking to see exactly who was making these charges, who she might work for and whether the way she represented herself was accurate.

This is the part of journalism that the public rarely sees. It’s not especially glamorous, it takes time, and often it is just a tough slog. It also costs money, for those who have a predisposition to insist that someone should provide all their information for free. Sometimes you get exactly what you pay for. I have had the privilege of working with real journalists my whole life, and I’ve seen a lot of this day-in-day-out grind of trying to get the facts right. It’s what real journalists do, and it stands in stark relief to what Trump does when he makes an assertion or an accusation. I won’t say from where he pulls his information, but it’s safe to say it’s not a well-illuminated place.

This is why is it so viscerally insulting and damaging to have the president infecting the public discourse with his “fake news” meme. “The media is really, the word, one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with, is ‘fake,’ ” he said in his broken syntax that could also use a professional copy editor. Professional journalists do sometimes make mistakes. But when you watch the linked video, don’t just enjoy the scene of a comeuppance of a bad actor. Notice the care and diligence shown and referred to, and think about how reliable your news will be if the enterprise of American journalism gets successfully tarred as fictitious, or is driven out of business altogether by people who have no interest in anything but substituting propaganda.

The assault on facts ought to be viscerally insulting to everyone.