Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

― Groucho Marx [Duck Soup]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON —The warning signs were there, flaring up from Nicholas Giampa’s pseudonymous Twitter feed for over a year. The alt-right lingo and the swastikas. The advertisements of violence.

Giampa’s girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, and Scott Fricker, 48, were aware of the teenager’s burgeoning extremism. Kuhn-Fricker had found frightening tweets from Giampa on her daughter’s phone. Twitter was where Giampa, a Papa John’s employee and an anime enthusiast, let his malevolence run amok.

Kuhn-Fricker and Fricker had seen enough to say something. Days later, Giampa fatally shot them in their Virginia home, police say.

...

When Giampa first started tweeting from the @doctorpepper35 account in May 2016, he already espoused far-right views. An enthusiastic supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump, he often used racist slurs to attack Trump’s critics. In the summer of 2016, Giampa told one Twitter user to “go back to the gas chamber,” called another a “kike” and labeled several users whom he disagreed with as “cucks.” He talked about “globalist scum” and, a few weeks later, referred to a right-wing conspiracy theory about “how hillary has literally murdered people.”

Most of Giampa’s Twitter activity consists of retweets and replies to other Twitter users. He retweeted Trump in July when the president called for a ban on transgender people serving in the military.

During the first several months Giampa tweeted under @doctorpepper35, he was closely focused on the ongoing civil war in Syria, frequently tweeting in support of President Bashar Assad, a strongman who has slaughtered his own people throughout the conflict. Although Giampa did not yet openly associate with white nationalist groups on Twitter at the time, his defense of Assad gave him a common cause with the far-right community. White nationalists have https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/13/syrias-assad-has-become-an-unexpected-icon-of-the-far-right-in-america/?utm_term=.d25d105a6dd1 (lionized the brutal leader as a hero) who stands up to Zionists in Israel and purges Islamic terrorists from his country. (In reality, Assad has targeted anyone who opposes his rule — including peaceful protesters.)

For unknown reasons, Giampa’s Twitter activity all but stopped from November 2016 to June 2017. He didn’t tweet about Trump’s electoral victory or when the president ordered airstrikes targeting the Assad regime in April, a move that was heavily criticized by his alt-right fans. During the first six months of 2017, the teenager tweeted only one time.

Kuhn-Fricker seemed to have become concerned about Giampa’s ideology soon after he started dating her daughter, The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/teen-charged-with-killing-girlfriends-parents-they-had-worried-he-was-a-neo-nazi/2017/12/23/e2102894-e761-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.fdc3ad20c595 (reported). Over the summer, her daughter told her that Giampa was good at history and had asked her, “Did you know that Jews are partly to blame for WWII?”

When Giampa returned to Twitter this past summer, around the time he started dating the daughter of Kuhn-Fricker and Kuhn, his tweets were vicious. On July 26, the same day Trump announced the transgender military ban, Giampa fired off a series of threatening tweets targeting gay and transgender people.

“I’ve already talked 1 tranny into suicide and I’m working on another 2 ,” he bragged. Then he posted a rainbow lynching image, encouraging gay and transgender people to commit suicide. “#transrightsarehumanrights is an oxymoron because trannies aren’t ‘people,’” Giampa tweeted that day.

Giampa retweeted Trump’s announcement of the transgender military ban, but he appeared to have been wavering in his overall support for the president. “I don’t even support trump lol I just think it’s funny how easy it is for him to piss people off,” he tweeted on July 26, months after Trump’s airstrikes against the Assad regime.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

"You Can’t Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House by Michael Wolff

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/trumpconversation.jpg of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

No.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[master.on]

Doctor pct, did you already build or buy your doomsday shelter?

Nuclear bunker PICTURED: Shelter built to withstand war with Kim Jong-un’s North Korea

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Discovery ... TrumpTard, TrumpIdiot, TrumPOS ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding the Obama-era policy that had paved the way for legalized marijuana to flourish in states across the country, two people with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press. Sessions will instead let federal prosecutors where pot is legal decide how aggressively to enforce federal marijuana law, the people said.

“I wouldn’t do that, no,” Trump said. “I think it should be up to the states, absolutely.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Discovery ... TrumpTard, TrumpIdiot, TrumPOS ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Until recently, the debate over our president’s mental health has focused on questions of psychological pathology: Do Donald Trump’s flamboyant narcissism, hedonism, and self-delusions add up to a malignant personality — or a malignant personality disorder?

Scores of psychiatric professionals say the latter. Some of their peers — and a large number of laymen — have insisted that the matter can only be settled by a psychiatrist who has personally, privately evaluated the president. That argument has always struck me as nuts.

There is no diagnostic blood test or brain scan for narcissistic personality disorder; there’s just a list of observable traits. A mental-health professional simply studies a patient’s modes of reasoning and patterns of behavior, and assesses whether they fit the checklist of symptoms for NPD. It’s absurd to believe that a psychiatrist who has spent a couple of hours talking to a patient in an office is qualified to make this diagnosis — but one with access to hundreds of hours of a patient’s interviews and improvisatory remarks, along with a small library’s worth of biographical information and testimonials from his closest confidants — is not. To insist otherwise is to mystify psychiatric practice; it’s to pretend that there is some shamanistic knowledge that mental-health professionals can only access once you provide them with a co-pay.

Further, whether we choose to label any given psychological profile a “disorder” is always, on some level, a value judgement about what it means to function healthily in our society. If an inability to concentrate on tests can qualify one for psychological dysfunction, then it’s hard to see why Trump’s manifest incapacity to subordinate his hunger for affirmation and attention to basic social norms would not. If a middle-school boy displayed Donald Trump’s level of impulse control in the classroom, there is little question that he would be considered psychologically unhealthy.

Regardless, in recent weeks, concerns about the commander-in-chief’s cognition have turned to the more mundane, and objectively determinable, question of neurological decline. The president’s slurred speech when announcing his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; the exceptional incoherence of his most recent interview with the New York Times; and increasingly erratic (and Freudian) tweets all brought our president’s frontal lobe to the forefront of public discourse.

And then Michael Wolff started telling us what he’d learned while hanging around the West Wing last year. Having won the administration’s trust (possibly with the aid of these horrendous, anti-anti-Trump think pieces) the reporter was given extraordinary access to the president’s closest advisers. On Thursday in the Hollywood Reporter, he added a few new details to the emerging portrait of our president’s mental state:

Everybody [in the White House] was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.

… Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States waters, it announced Thursday. The plan would give the energy industry broad access to drilling rights in most parts of the outer continental shelf, including Pacific waters near California, Atlantic waters near Maine and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The proposal lifts a ban on drilling, imposed by President Barack Obama in his final days in office, that protected more than 100 million offshore acres along the Arctic and Eastern Seaboard. Such a reversal deals a serious blow to Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy and signals that the Trump administration is nowhere near done unraveling the environmental restrictions of its predecessor in an effort to promote domestic energy production.

The drilling plan comes on the heels of a separate proposal to repeal offshore drilling safety regulations that were put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, as well as a decision by Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

“We’re embarking on a new path for energy dominance in America, particularly on offshore,” Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, said Thursday as he unveiled the plan. “This is a clear difference between energy weakness and energy dominance. We are going to become the strongest energy superpower.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

We already know the alarming truth about Trump. Michael Wolff’s book just confirms it.

How many Republicans are genuinely concerned about where this broader unfitness to serve could end up taking the country, even if privately?

A just-published excerpt from Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury,” should make that question more urgent. While there has been much focus on Stephen K. Bannon’s claim that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting in Trump Tower was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” the book also paints a vivid picture of a president who is surrounded by people who know he does not temperamentally belong in that office.

The excerpt paints a White House in chaos, riven by factional warfare among aides, with even his loyalists denouncing him as wholly uninterested in, or unable to keep pace with, the substantive details of the job. And there’s this:

Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn’t have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on “Fox & Friends” or an Oval Office photo opp. “I want a win. I want a win. Where’s my win?” he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, “like a child.”

Wolff’s conclusion after talking to numerous people close to Trump: “My indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

But we’re here to unpack a small aside that, although it was tossed out to underscore the dynamics between first daughter Ivanka Trump and her father, actually gets to a central mystery surrounding POTUS himself. Namely, what’s up with his hair?

There’s been much speculation about the president’s signature orange-tinted, gravity-defying swoop. But Wolff’s account purports to be the real deal. So let’s hear, as Wolff writes, how Ivanka Trump explains it:

“She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]