Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said on Thursday that people close to President Trump told him during the campaign that Trump has early stages of dementia.

During MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Scarborough said Trump is "completely detached from reality."

"You have somebody inside the White House that the New York Daily News says is mentally unfit," Scarborough said.

"That people close to him say is mentally unfit, that people close to him during the campaign told me had early stages of dementia."
Scarborough said the country is closer to war on the Korean peninsula than most Americans know.

"We heard this months ago, that we are going to have a ground war in Korea, they believe that inside the White House for a very long time," Scarborough said.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump has given final approval to the plan, but he has been said to have soured on Mr. Tillerson and in general is ready to make a change at the State Department.

John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, developed the transition plan and has discussed it with other officials. Under his plan, the shake-up of the national security team would happen around the end of the year or shortly afterward.

The ouster of Mr. Tillerson would end a turbulent reign at the State Department for the former Exxon Mobile chief executive, who has been largely marginalized over the last year. Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson have been at odds over a host of major issues, including the Iran nuclear deal, the confrontation with North Korea and a clash between Arab allies. The secretary was reported to have privately called Mr. Trump a “moron” and the president publicly criticized Mr. Tillerson for “wasting his time” with a diplomatic outreach to North Korea.

Mr. Tillerson’s departure has been widely anticipated for months, but associates have said he was intent on finishing out the year to retain whatever dignity he could. Even so, an end-of-year exit would make his time in office the shortest of any secretary of state whose tenure was not ended by a change in presidents in nearly 120 years.

While some administration officials initially expected him to be replaced by Nikki R. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Pompeo has become the White House favorite.

Mr. Pompeo, a former three-term member of Congress, has impressed Mr. Trump during daily intelligence briefings and become a trusted policy adviser even on issues far beyond the C.I.A.’s normal mandate, like health care. But he has been criticized by intelligence officers for being too politicalin his job.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

TrumpIdiots, TrumpTards, Trumplings, TrumPsychopath ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A Labour MP has branded Donald Trump "either racist, incompetent, unthinking or all three" during an urgent debate on the President's promotion of Britain First on Twitter.

And a Tory MP called on Twitter to delete the President's account.

It comes after the President shared videos posted by Britain First deputy leader Jayda Fransen with his 44 million Twitter followers.

Theresa May's official spokesman yesterday said Trump was "wrong" to share the videos, a sentiment echoed by Home Secretary Amber Rudd in the House of Commons this morning.

But she would not say the invitation to Trump for a state visit to the UK would be withdrawn, which she said had been "extended and accepted."

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Male Pattern Badness is a term I am happy to introduce into the public discussion. And while it is true that it is not exclusively men that suffer from it, let’s just say they are the most frequent victims. And when I say victims, I mean perpetrators, with everyone around them the actual victims.

Yes, something is wrong under that whirlwind confection of fine-spun gold cotton candy on his head, and I don’t mean a scalp condition. Go another layer or two down and something is truly amiss. I am not just talking about President Trump’s attitude toward women, which is demeaning and exploitative and self-entitled and cruel. This is a fairly widespread problem with powerful men, as we are seeing daily. The locker-room talk Trump spoke of is not exactly uncommon, and it is all too frequently followed by matching actions out on what is considered by some to be the playing field. Unfortunately, Trump has something still worse.

I am not a doctor, so I won’t say that Trump is a sociopath, and an editor would probably take that word out anyway. But that particular diagnosis aside, Trump is manifesting a pattern of behavior that is consistent and unusual, and it won’t get any better. The key phase from this brief analysis? “Trump seems more self-assured.” That’s right. In the relentless downward spiral that is the Trump presidency, from dysfunction to disgrace to dismal policy, Trump is buoyant and sunshiny. This is what makes him so dangerous. When normal people blunder, they notice and feel some measure of corrective self-doubt. It is the absence of this check that marks the unbalanced.

It is a state of mindlessness that never self-corrects. The only thing that slows Trump down is the chaos he manufactures around him. But being slowed is not the same as being stopped. Every day he survives in office is another day stronger. His chaos may slow him down, but it also clears a path of opportunity ahead of him. A path that wasn’t there before within the norms of our democracy. He is destroying the standards that impede authoritarianism. He also happens to have the backing of a political party willing to sell every principle and past practice to deliver tax cuts to their donors. Trump, if nothing else, can spot lackeys when he sees them. So who’s to stop him? No wonder he feels encouraged.

So in the midst of this worst of all presidencies, Trump is undeterred. Now, yes, please do take a moment to consider Trump if and when he feels truly empowered. Is there a reason under the sun to imagine he will check his impulses then?

Another noteworthy quote from this article: “No one who matters is doing anything but egging him on.” All that is needed for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to remain silent. No, we don’t remain silent. We egg him on.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

BRITONS HAVE RARELY been more divided than they are at present, over the headlong rush toward an exit from the European Union nearly half the electorate rejected. But on Thursday, the Kingdom was nearly united on one point: a widespread revulsion at Donald Trump for his decision to fold the far-right, racist fringe group Britain First into his warm Twitter embrace.

The condemnation of Trump from leading politicians across the spectrum, which began on Wednesday, accelerated on Thursday during a debate in Parliament on what was formally termed the “urgent question” of “the activities of Britain First, online hate speech and the sharing of inflammatory content online by the President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[RobertL]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

That was more than three decades before the collapse of the economy in 1929. The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).

Yet the plain fact that the trickle-down approach has never worked leaves Republicans unfazed. The GOP has been singing from the Market-is-God hymnal for well over a century, telling us that deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and the concentration of ever more wealth in the bloated accounts of the richest people will result in prosperity for the rest of us. The party is now trying to pass a scam that throws a few crumbs to the middle class (temporarily — millions of middle-class Americans will soon see a tax hike if the bill is enacted) while heaping benefits on the super-rich, multiplying the national debt and endangering the American economy.

As a historian of the Great Depression, I can say: I’ve seen this show before.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

That was more than three decades before the collapse of the economy in 1929. The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).

Yet the plain fact that the trickle-down approach has never worked leaves Republicans unfazed. The GOP has been singing from the Market-is-God hymnal for well over a century, telling us that deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and the concentration of ever more wealth in the bloated accounts of the richest people will result in prosperity for the rest of us. The party is now trying to pass a scam that throws a few crumbs to the middle class (temporarily — millions of middle-class Americans will soon see a tax hike if the bill is enacted) while heaping benefits on the super-rich, multiplying the national debt and endangering the American economy.

As a historian of the Great Depression, I can say: I’ve seen this show before.

It is true that this abhorrent, amoral trash dump of a "tax reform" bill is a depression-era playbook, but with even more grotesque twists. Let's not lose sight of the sneak effort to award "personhood" to fetuses, and give away tax exemptions for them - with, of course, no commensurate effort to revoke said claimed exemptions in the event of a miscarriage. There is the flat out assault upon the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - ANWR, one of our last spectacular wilderness areas which is home to countless endangered species of animals and fowl, and is a major migration route for many of them. The GOTP has no interest in tax reform, and doesn't care at all about "creating jobs," which this heinous heist will not do - on the contrary, it will cause even more offshoring of American jobs, and the folks at companies like Carrier - who supported His Fraudulence, will find that their lives have been further gutted by the folks for whom they voted. This is a reverse Robin Hood bill, designed to steal from the 99.9% and hand their meager paychecks over to the .1%, because the GOTP wants the latter's campaign contributions. His Fraudulence and his criminal Klan of traitors and grifters will handsomely profit from this - and all of the absolutely blind people who supported them will find trap doors opening under their feet. This is but the tip of the proverbial GOTP wet dream iceberg - next will be savaging of Medicaid, gutting of SCHIP and SNAP, privatizing of Social Security - in other words, handing it over to the crooks and criminals who destroyed our economy the last go-round; and slowly destroying Medicare by turning it into an ever-smaller voucher program. While we're all looking at this heist, the GOTP is also jamming the entire judiciary full of hard right wing ideologues who loathe government, hate the poor, hate women, and believe that consumer protection and safety regulations should be trashed. This nation may well never recover from the GOTP's destruction.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump has single-handedly done more to undermine the basic tenets of American democracy than any foreign agent or foreign propaganda campaign could.

“Trump is a political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy — for its norms, for its morality, for sheer human decency,” Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote by email:

So if Putin backed him, and if he did it to damage the United States, then he dropped one extremely smart bomb in the middle of Washington.

For the moment, let’s put aside the conclusion of “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. joint report that was released in January, which said that:

The Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin’s regime.

This determination, disputed by Trump and https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-zealots-mainly-democrats-have-become-a-major-threat-to-us-national-security/, pales in comparison to the ruinous record of Trump’s 10 months in office.

 

[Michael Scally MD]