Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Jared Kushner’s coronavirus response team, we learned this week, is fumbling because it’s largely staffed with inexperienced volunteers. Of course it is. It’s being run by one.

Kushner’s lack of experience and expertise has not been remedied in any way during his now three-plus years in the White House. After bungling many high-profile efforts to address various problems and often making them worse (see, Middle East, peace in), he keeps being handed more responsibilities with higher stakes. He has wasted taxpayer resources and endangered lives trying on policy roles usually reserved for the country’s top experts with the sophistication of a child playing dress-up, cavalierly discarding them when he can’t fit into them.

This is basically Kushner’s modus operandi, and it’s painfully familiar to me because he was my boss when I was the editor in chief of the New York Observer, which he had bought when he was 25. (I’ve written before about what he was like as a businessman.) One of the more memorable instances of this I witnessed was at a memorial service for a beloved longtime Observer staffer, Tyler Rush, who’d joined the paper well before Kushner bought it.

When it came time for Kushner to say a few words, he launched into a supercilious monologue crediting himself with finally getting the paper published on time after what he described as chaos when he arrived. He also told an anecdote about Rush approaching him when he bought the paper to note that his staff was underpaid, which was true at the time, and true when I took the editor job years later. Kushner congratulated himself during the memorial for giving Rush and his production team the only raise that year because “unlike everyone else,” Rush hadn’t been lying to Kushner.

This line didn’t land the way Kushner hoped, because no one had been lying. Everyone was underpaid. But he didn’t like what he heard from the other staffers, so he proceeded to make his own assessment about what their experience and expertise were worth. This was not based on market comparables or the technical intricacies of a job, apparently, but his personal valuation of what a writer or a production manager or salesperson was worth — which always, at least in my conversations with him, seemed to be rooted in an idea that people who choose occupations that are not explicitly and primarily designed to make money were dilettantes of a sort, and essentially unserious.

Why would you choose to be a journalist when you could make so much more money as a commercial real estate developer? The conclusion he drew was that people who chose less remunerative career paths had not figured out how the world worked. To use a phrase he routinely deployed, they “didn’t get it.” And as such, they were disposable workers whose knowledge base could probably be replaced by a rigorous Google search. If their expertise was actually valuable, if they were so smart, they’d be monetizing it better.

The more grotesque and repulsive aspect of this incident was that Kusher thought this self-aggrandizing nonsense was an appropriate eulogy, but that, too, is in keeping with how he operates.

There have been no consequences. In any normal administration, an adviser with Kushner’s string of failures would be fired, but Kushner, like his father-in-law, keeps crediting himself with imaginary successes. Most recently, he declared the administration’s coronavirus response “a great success story,” a mind-boggling assertion that raises the question of what, if anything, Kushner thinks failure looks like. He has also continued to bash the actual experts, disputing their assessments and implying that they, not he, are the amateurs, and he is here to clean up their mess.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

BACK TO NORMAL
Back To Normal

In 2009, President Barack Obama expressed his opinion about an arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Republicans howled that the President of the United States shouldn’t stick his nose into situations like this and should just let the legal system play it out. How dare he.

What happened in Cambridge was the arrest of a college professor trying to get into a house. It was his house. He also happens to be black.

Back when an American president spoke honestly and with clarity, President Obama said, “I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

In 2012, after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a wannabe Rambo for walking outside at night while being black and wearing a hoodie, President Obama said, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Guess who got upset over that comment? White Republicans.

But you know what Obama never did? He never called the arresting officers or prosecutors “scum.”

Donald Trump, who unfortunately is the President (sic) of the United States, called the FBI officers involved in the Michael Flynn case, “human scum.” He also accused them of treason for pressing charges against a guy who was violating the Logan Act and attempted to thwart American foreign policy with a hostile nation that had just attacked our election. Michael Flynn was secretly talking to the Russian ambassador during the transition period between presidents. He was manipulating U.S. foreign policy. Then, he lied about it.

Are conservatives screaming for Trump to stay out of the case? Are they upset he called law enforcement “human scum?” These questions are rhetorical.

Michael Flynn is guilty. Like I wrote before, don’t take my word that he’s guilty. Take his. He pleaded guilty twice.

Two white men can kill a black man in Georgia, and not be charged until a video of the incident goes viral. The current president (sic) doesn’t have any comment on that but he has plenty to about the injustice being leveled at one of his treasonous goons. He said so much that his other goon, the Attorney General, drops all charges against the first goon who, let me remind you again, pleaded guilty twice.

With this pandemic, everyone wants the nation to get back to normal. For the two different justice systems we have in this nation, one for whites and one for blacks…it’s already there. In fact, it never changed.

Yesterday, Donald Trump called someone to crow about the Justice Department dropping charges against Flynn. He told the person on the other end of the phone call, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks.

Who was Donald Trump talking to? Vladimir Putin.

Welcome to the new normal.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

It was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.”

But communications over several days with senior agency officials — including Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response — left Bowen with the clear impression that there was little immediate interest in his offer.

“I don’t believe we as an government are anywhere near answering those questions for you yet,” Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that same day.

Bowen persisted.

“We are the last major domestic mask company,” he wrote on Jan. 23. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

In the end, the government did not take Bowen up on his offer. Even today, production lines that could be making more than 7 million masks a month sit dormant.

Bowen’s overture was described briefly in an 89-page whistleblower complaint filed this week by Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Bright alleges he was retaliated against by Kadlec and other officials — including being reassigned to a lesser post — because he tried to “prioritize science and safety over political expediency.” HHS has disputed his allegations.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]