Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

Of Course ...

"John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, chaired a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory, an NBC News review found."

 

[Michael Scally MD]

American universities are losing out to colleges in other countries in the race to enroll international students, and they’re blaming President Donald Trump.

Foreign competitors are taking advantage of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, aggressively recruiting the types of foreign students and faculty who would have typically come to the United States for their higher education. The data already show that U.S. colleges are falling behind foreign competitors during the Trump era.

New foreign student enrollment in the U.S. dropped by 3 percent during the 2016-17 school year, and that decline is projected to double this school year, data show. At the same time, universities overseas are seeing increases as high as the double digits. The decline in foreign students enrolling in American colleges is just the latest evidence of Trump's immigration policies shutting doors in America. The U.S. is also granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world.

Trump is responsible for the decline in student enrollment, U.S. universities argue — especially his travel ban, which goes before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Dozens of higher education groups wrote in an amicus brief for that case that Trump's travel ban is a "clarion message of exclusion to millions" that harms universities' ability to enroll international students and recruit top faculty.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

GREAT DOTARD SUMMIT
https://claytoonz.com/2018/04/23/great-dotard-summit/

A few weeks ago, Rachel Maddow discussed how she may have inadvertently stumbled upon her sign-off. Walter Cronkite’s sign off, “and that’s the way it is,” is legendary and makes all others pale in comparison. But, the one Maddow half joked about may fit these times better. “That’s the way it is” is disputed by Trump sycophants on a daily basis, but “that’s weird” doesn’t just describe every instance of Trump chicanery, but his supporters as well. Let’s try it.

Trump and Republicans accuse former FBI Director James Comey of leaking his memos and that he should be criminally charged for it. When they finally received the rest of his memos from the Justice Department, they leaked them within an hour. That’s weird.

While former presidents George H.W. Bush, George, W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and First Ladies Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump were at the funeral for Barbara Bush, Trump was tweeting lies and insults. That’s weird.

Trump tweeted that he has never referred to Jeff Sessions as “Mr. Magoo” or Rod Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a day before he tweeted about “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd. That’s weird.

His press briefing at Mar-a-Lago resembled an infomercial for his resort more than information from the President of the United States. That’s weird.

From Comey’s memos, Trump could not stop talking about the pee pee tape, and even relayed how he and Putin talked about Moscow hookers. THAT’S WEIRD!!!

Perhaps the subject of Pyongyang hookers can be the ice breaker for the Trump/Kim summit. I seriously doubt it’ll be the three Americans currently being held prisoners by North Korea, whose release should have been a condition to talk about talks.

North Korea has suspended their testing of nukes and missiles, which appears to be a condition for the talks. Unfortunately, Trump believes suspending the tests is denuclearization. His ignorance on this shows we’re in deep danger he’s about to get played at the summit.

Maybe they’ll discuss how Trump is responsible for the success of the winter Olympics in South Korea. He has taken credit for it.

North Korea has made promises to the world before only to turn around and break them later. Now with Trump in office, what better time for the rogue regime to pull another fast one? While Trump probably thinks he’ll achieve world peace and win a Nobel Prize, the DPRK may be looking for a quick score.

Trump mentioned a few days ago that many people don’t know the Korean War is technically still in progress. When Trump says “a lot of people don’t know,” that means he just found out. This is the man we’re sending to negotiate with the most hostile regime on the planet.

Of course, this summit also hinges on North Korea getting there. North Korea has very old airplanes. They don’t have access to luxury travel benefits like Scott Pruitt. Kim Jong Un took a train to Beijing last week. He has to save face which means he’s not going to borrow a plane or fly commercial. This is a government that doesn’t have one ship that can travel from one of their coasts to the other (if you’re a Republican, North Korea is a peninsula which means it has two coasts. Look on a map. It’s near Japan, China, and Russia, which is in Asia. OK, have someone point it out to you).

Mongolia was ruled out as a location because of security concerns and nobody wants to go to Mongolia (it’s like Indiana with camels). It can’t be held in Japan because of the nasty history between them and both Koreas. Russia won’t work because it’ll look bad for Trump. China is too friendly to North Korea so that’s not exactly neutral territory. Neither is South Korea.

Of course, it can’t be in the U.S. because we’re already giving Kim legitimacy by meeting our president, even if it is Trump. No way in Hell would we agree to have it in Pyongyang.

Neutral sites would be in Switzerland and Sweden, but both European destinations are probably too far for Kim’s choo-choo. There’s speculation the summit could be held in either Vietnam or Singapore. Maybe Kim can take an Uber.

This won’t be the first time someone who has traded insults with Trump has sat down with him. But, this is no Mitt Romney and it’s probably going to take more than a plate of frog legs to decrease the tension. Does Kim like meatloaf? Kim Jong Un issued an official statement referring to Trump as a “dotard” so it’s no secret there’s very little respect for Trump and his cognitive abilities. By the time the summit actually happens, Trump will have probably looked up the definition of “dotard.”

Both leaders have a lot in common. Born to privilege, bad hair, desire to rule with complete authority, prone to insults, extremely sensitive to criticism, no fans of a free press, etc. But, is Kim as stupid as Trump? Let’s hope so.

The summit could actually create a peaceful environment on the Korean peninsula, if were actually sending people who know diplomacy. It could make matters worse. Or, Trump and Kim can become BFFs.

That’ll be weird.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Around the country, Republicans embroiled in tough primaries are increasingly emulating President Trump — by echoing his xenophobia, his veiled racist appeals, his attacks on the news media, and even occasionally his calls for imprisoning his political opponents.

Meanwhile, all indications are that Trump is heading for a serious confrontation with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein over the Russia investigation.

So how long until multiple GOP primary candidates begin seriously running on the message that the Mueller probe is part of an illegitimate Deep State coup that justifies Trump shutting it down by any means necessary — that is, on a message of unabashed authoritarianism?

Two new articles — one in the New York Times, the other in National Journal — illustrate what’s happening in many of these GOP primaries. The Times piece, by Jeremy Peters, reports that in West Virginia, GOP Senate primary candidate Don Blankenship is running an ad that says: “We don’t need to investigate our president. We need to arrest Hillary … Lock her up!”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A single 2017 incident — in which 6 perpetrators threw tree branches, rocks and bottles at 7 BP agents — counted as 126 "assaults" in DHS data. Conventional LE accounting would have counted it as 7.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[F]light records obtained by Bloomberg provide to-the-minute details, from wheels down to departure. Combined with existing accounts and Trump’s own social-media posts, they capture a mere 45 hours and 43 minutes that, nearly five years later, loom large in the controversy engulfing the White House and at the heart of the Comey memos, which the Justice Department turned over last week to Congress.

Neither the White House nor Trump Organization immediately responded to requests for comment.

According to Comey’s accounts of his 2017 meetings with the president, Trump said the Moscow trip was so quick that his head never hit a pillow -- even for one night. Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Doerr S, Gissler S, Peydro J, Voth H. 'From Finance to Extremism: The Real Effects of Germany's 1931 Banking Crisis'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3146746

Do financial crises radicalize voters?

For identification, we analyze the canonical case of Germany in the 1930s exploiting a large bank failure in 1931 caused by fraud, foreign shocks and political inaction. We use detailed bank-firm connections on banks that (unlike the US) served the whole country. We provide causal evidence from banking crisis to economic distress and extreme radical voting, while the literature in general has found no clear effect of economic distress on Nazi Party support.

We show that, first, the failure of Jewish-led Danatbank induced a strong reduction in the wage bill for connected firms. This led to increasing city-level unemployment in cities with more Danat-connected firms. The effects are notably stronger in cities with a higher share of non-exporting firms, where local demand spillovers are higher. Second, Danat exposure significantly increased Nazi Party support between 1930 and 1933 elections, but not between 1928 and 1930 -before the banking crisis but after the start of the Great Depression and high unemployment.

The financial crisis increased support for the Nazi party the most in areas with both deep-seated historical anti-Semitism, and more net savers than borrowers. Not only did the banking crisis help the Nazis rise to power, but cities with higher Danat exposure saw fewer marriages between Jews and gentiles after the banking crisis. Also, after 1933, there were more attacks on Jews and their property in Danat-exposed cites, and deportation rates were higher.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[OA] Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains The 2016 Presidential Vote

This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes).

Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past.

Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012.

Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.

Mutz DC. Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2018. Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Late last January, at a private White House dinner attended only by Donald Trump and Jim Comey, the president steered the conversation to a sensitive topic: “the golden showers thing.” He wanted the then-FBI director to know, Comey later wrote in a memo, that not only did he not consort with hookers in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, it was an impossibility. Trump “had spoken to people who had been on… the trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn’t stay over night in Russia for that," Comey recalled.

Trump made the same claim a second time, telling Comey in a later Oval Office meeting "that he hadn’t stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip,” as Comey wrote.

But flight records obtained by POLITICO, as well as congressional testimony from Trump's bodyguard and contemporaneous photographs and social media posts, tell a different story—one that might bring new legal jeopardy for the president, legal experts say.

In fact, Trump arrived in Moscow, where he attended the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned at the time, on a Friday. He left in the early morning hours the following Sunday—spending one full night and most of a second one in the Russian capital—in contradiction to the recollections of Comey, who wrote about his early 2017 meetings with Trump minutes after they concluded.

A conscious effort by Trump to mislead the FBI director could lend weight to the allegation—contained in a largely unverified private research dossier compiled by a former British spy in 2016—that Trump engaged in compromising activity during the trip that exposed him to Russian government blackmail.

It has also likely caught the eye of special counsel Robert Mueller, legal analysts say. False statements to Comey about the trip could demonstrate that Trump has “consciousness of guilt,” according Pete Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who worked for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of national security-related leaks during the George W. Bush administration.

That could bolster a legal case against Trump. Although many analysts doubt that Mueller has the legal authority to indict a sitting president, Trump's assertions could factor into any written report from Mueller that might draw conclusions about whether Trump sought to obstruct justice or colluded with the Kremlin, and which could be transmitted by the Justice Department to Congress.

Prosecutors “would argue that it shows he’s afraid of the truth,” Zeidenberg said.

He suggested that investigators could also probe whether Trump had in fact conferred with others who “reminded” him he did not stay the night in Russia, as he apparently told Comey he did.

“It’s very likely there would be no corroboration for that story, which makes the whole thing look like a big fat lie,” Zeidenberg said.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

On Monday morning, Michael Flynn Jr., the son of President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, tweeted something very, well ... interesting.

"American Patriot @GenFlynn did not lie to Pence (or anyone else in the admin) about his perfectly legal and appropriate conversations w Russian AMB Kislyak in Dec 2016," Flynn Jr. tweeted. "Why would a highly decorated military intel officer lie about something legal? Been a MSM lie from day 1."

...

So...

Flynn Jr. is now saying his father never lied to Pence about his interactions with Kisylak. Which, if he is telling the truth, would mean:

1. Pence, who has said he had no knowledge of the conversations Flynn was having with Kisylak and other Russian officials, actually did know.
2. Trump's reason for firing Flynn doesn't hold water since the former national security adviser didn't lie to Pence.
3. Flynn chose to lie to the FBI about his dealings with the Russians during the transition but told the truth to the incoming vice president about those same interactions.

It's that third point that makes Flynn Jr.'s tweet about his father's veracity questionable. Why would Flynn tell Pence the truth but then lie to the FBI? The former might be a fireable offense but the latter is a crime. What would make him purposely do that?

Then there is the fact that Flynn Jr. has a past history of just saying stuff. One example: He was removed from the Trump transition team after he sent a series of tweets fomenting the so-called "Pizzagate" conspiracy.

Add it all up and the most likely scenario here is that Flynn Jr. was just talking on Twitter without any real evidence to back up his claims about his dad.

But man oh man, if Flynn is willing to say under oath that he in fact never did lie to Pence, then the vice president would have some explaining to do.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[OA] Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains The 2016 Presidential Vote

This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes).

Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past.

Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012.

Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.

Mutz DC. Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2018. Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote