Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Nearly a year into his presidency, Mr. Trump remains an erratic, idiosyncratic leader on the global stage, an insurgent who attacks allies the United States has nurtured since World War II and who can seem more at home with America’s adversaries. His Twitter posts, delivered without warning or consultation, often make a mockery of his administration’s policies and subvert the messages his emissaries are trying to deliver abroad.

Mr. Trump has pulled out of trade and climate change agreements and denounced the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. He has broken with decades of American policy in the Middle East by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And he has taunted Kim Jong-un of North Korea as “short and fat,” fanning fears of war on the peninsula.

He has assiduously cultivated President Xi Jinping of China and avoided criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — leaders of the two countries that his own national security strategy calls the greatest geopolitical threats to America.

Above all, Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the nation has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other nations chart their futures.

Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach “has moved a lot of us out of our comfort zone, me included,” the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said in an interview. A three-star Army general who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and wrote a well-regarded book about the White House’s strategic failure in Vietnam, General McMaster defined Trump foreign policy as “pragmatic realism” rather than isolationism.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A pair of Russian comedians appear to have successfully prank-called U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/people/nimrata-nikki-haley by posing as a Polish government official.

The two comedians, Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, posted a video over the weekend in which a woman identified as Haley believes she is speaking to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.

“Let me start with very much thanking you for the support we received on the vote today,” Haley says. “We will never forget it.”

Haley was referring to the U.N. vote last week to condemn President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Poland was one of 35 countries who abstained from voting on the resolution.

The man posing as Morawiecki then asks Haley about the fictional island of Binomo in the South China Sea.

"You know Binomo?" the man said, to which Haley replied “yes, yes.”

"They had elections and we suppose Russians had its intervention,” the man said.

"Yes, of course they did, absolutely," Haley replies. “We’ve been watching that very closely, and I think we will continue to watch that as we deal with the issues that keep coming up about the South China Sea.”

The man posing as Morawiecki asks Haley what the United States plans to do about the fictional island of Binomo.

"Let me find out exactly what our stance is on that, and what if anything the U.S. is doing or thinks should be done, and I will report back to you on that as well,“ she says.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Trump[FUCKING]Idiot ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Trump[FUCKING]Idiot ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

JUST GOT RICHER
https://claytoonz.com/2017/12/29/just-got-richer/

After Trump and Republicans gave a HUGE tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, he flew down to Mar-a-Lago and reportedly told a bunch of snooty rich guests, “you all just got a lot richer.”

Trump campaigned for the tax cuts on the basis it would help the middle-class and would actually hurt him and his gajillionaire asshole friends. As usual, he was lying.

The tax cut he gave to the middle class is smaller than both of the cuts Obama gave them. In return for that tax cut, voters took Congress away from him. Trump’s “tax cut” will actually raise taxes for some people, and increase other expenses in blue states.

As for this cut hurting Trump and his friends, no. The very first thing he did was fly down to the warm climate of Snooty McSnootsville, played a round of golf, and then told the bluebloods “you all just got a lot richer.” I do have some doubts about this claim. Trump said, “you all?”

This shows just where Trump and Republicans place their priorities. His first and only legislative achievement in 2017 was making the rich, including himself, richer. What about DACA which will keep immigrant children, brought to this nation by no fault of their own from being deported to lands that are not their homes? What about CHIP, the insurance program funded by states and the federal government for children in low-income families?

When Trump finally works on those two programs, he will need Democrats because many Republicans are less passionate for those than they are for billionaires. Trump will get a lot more bipartisan support for those programs, and infrastructure than Obama did. While many Republicans are also in favor of DACA and CHIP, they refused to work with Obama on anything. They put politics and billionaires over the health and wellbeing of children.

Have you seen that stupid commercial aimed at idiots where a consortium of goobers are thanking “President Trump” for rescuing our economy, making America safe, providing more money to the middle class, reminding us to stand for the national anthem, and “letting” us say Merry Christmas again? That commercial is really pissing me off because I know Trump’s base is actually stupid enough to buy that crap. I’m waiting for Trump to claim he invented toast, that we never had it in our entire lives until last January, and then Republicans will start thanking him for toast. Yeah toast!

What they should air is a commercial of jerky billionaires and trust-fund babies thanking President Trump for making them richer and providing tax deductions for private jets and yachts.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A storm is gathering, and there is every reason to believe that 2018 will be the most consequential political year of our lives.

The reckoning upon us follows a year mercifully drawing to a close this weekend. Over that horrid year, President Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/26/all-the-times-trump-personally-attacked-judges-and-why-his-tirades-are-worse-than-wrong/?utm_term=.90ec4a8f0e94 (has questioned the legitimacy) of federal judges, used Stalinist barbs to attack the free press and cast contempt on the rule of law, while https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/manafort-and-former-business-partner-asked-to-surrender-in-connection-with-special-counsel-probe/2017/10/30/6fe051f0-bd67-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html?utm_term=.37989664aa02 (his campaign manager), his https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michael-flynn-charged-with-making-false-statement-to-the-fbi/2017/12/01/e03a6c48-d6a2-11e7-9461-ba77d604373d_story.html?utm_term=.a4c92190e9f4 (national security adviser) and https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-adviser-pleaded-guilty-to-lying-about-russian-contacts/2017/10/30/d525e712-bd7d-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.945ef048ecad (a foreign policy aide) have been marched into federal courts. Those anti-democratic instincts were made all the more ominous by his praising of autocrats across the world as they were ruthlessly consolidating power in countries such as Russia, China and the Philippines.

It is difficult to pinpoint the nadir for a man who has savaged Mexicans, Muslims and Gold Star mothers while fat-shaming beauty queens and face-shaming female news hosts (disclosure: in the latter example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/06/29/trump-angrily-lashes-out-at-morning-joe-hosts-on-twitter/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.58568b61a870 (my own fiancee)). But the low moment in this presidency may have occurred four months ago, when Trump claimed https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/08/15/trump-again-blames-both-sides-in-charlottesville-says-some-counterprotesters-were-very-very-violent/?utm_term=.3fc604d497f3 (a moral equivalency) between neo-Nazis and those standing against them. Or perhaps it was three weeks ago, when the president told Americans https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/12/04/trump-we-need-republican-roy-moore-to-win-in-alabama/?utm_term=.b45ac563ba81 (to vote for an accused child molester) who had called our country the https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/08/roy-moore-america-was-great-in-era-of-slavery-is-now-focus-of-evil-in-the-world/?utm_term=.27654e84e5fd (focus of evil in the modern world) and once suggested opposition to the constitutional amendments that ended slavery and gave women the right to vote.

Others would surely consider the president’s malignant idiocy in foreign affairs to be the most damning legacy of his first year. World leaders continue to watch dumbstruck as the United States retreats from organizations that were created following the allies’ victory over Hitler. Those same alliances that Trump now undermines with reckless tweets and discarded treaties carried the United States to victory in the Cold War. But this is a White House that heaps contempt on history. And so, America’s dangerous retreat from the world continues.

“On the morrow of the Republican success isolationist conceptions prevailed,” Winston Churchill wrote in “The Gathering Storm.” The British prime minister believed Hitler’s rise proved, above all else, “how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics.” But this president is ripping apart the carefully woven fabric of U.S. foreign policy that bound administrations together from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, and across the American century.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039541055X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=039541055X&linkId=1d52a21273ae8fbd84a98124e141c842 (“The Gathering Storm”) is on my holiday reading list because of Republican strategist Steve Schmidt’s insistence to me that Churchill’s ominous warnings to future generations will be more relevant to 2018 than at any time since it was written in the years after World War II. While Trump’s eroding of U.S. prestige across the globe is disturbing, it is his administration’s undermining of democratic values that poses an even greater threat to our Constitution and country. Borrowing again from Churchill, America’s constitutional norms tremble in the balance as Trump unleashes furious attacks on First Amendment protections, independent counsels and law enforcement officers who refuse to be bullied. While the framers of the Constitution foresaw the possibility of a tyrannical president, they never let their imaginations be darkened by the possibility of a compliant Congress.

Again, Churchill: “The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous . . . They lived from hand to mouth and from day to day, and from one election to another . . . The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”

Schmidt is right. The storm is gathering. And how we respond in the months ahead may determine our fate for years to come.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Birds of a Feather ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

During impromptu 30-minute interview, Trump insisted 16 times that there has been "no collusion." Excerpts From Trump’s Interview With The Times

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]