TRUMP is seriously dangerous

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 01, 2017 6:17 pm

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Renowned psychiatrist warns Americans: You have a duty to call out Trump as danger to others
Moyers & Company MOYERS & COMPANY
23 SEP 2017 AT 00:13 ET


There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial thanThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit?

As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same time, as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing rule that directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining silent outweighs the damage that could result from speaking about a public figure — “which in this case, could even be the greatest possible harm.” It is an old and difficult moral issue that requires a great exertion of conscience. Their decision: “We respect the rule, we deem it subordinate to the single most important principle that guides our professional conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and well-being as paramount.”

Hence, this profound, illuminating and discomforting book undertaken as “a duty to warn.”

The foreword is by one of America’s leading psychohistorians, Robert Jay Lifton. He is renowned for his studies of people under stress — for books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide(1986). The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination camps.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump will be published Oct. 3 by St. Martin’s Press.

Here is my interview with Robert Jay Lifton — Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers: This book is a withering exploration of Donald Trump’s mental state. Aren’t you and the 26 other mental health experts who contribute to it in effect violating the Goldwater Rule? Section 7.3 of the American Psychiatrist Association’s code of ethics flatly says: “It is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion [on a public figure] unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization.” Are you putting your profession’s reputation at risk?

Robert Jay Lifton: I don’t think so. I think the Goldwater Rule is a little ambiguous. We adhere to that portion of the Goldwater Rule that says we don’t see ourselves as making a definitive diagnosis in a formal way and we don’t believe that should be done, except by hands-on interviewing and studying of a person. But we take issue with the idea that therefore we can say nothing about Trump or any other public figure. We have a perfect right to offer our opinion, and that’s where “duty to warn” comes in.

Moyers: Duty to warn?



Lifton: We have a duty to warn on an individual basis if we are treating someone who may be dangerous to herself or to others — a duty to warn people who are in danger from that person. We feel it’s our duty to warn the country about the danger of this president. If we think we have learned something about Donald Trump and his psychology that is dangerous to the country, yes, we have an obligation to say so. That’s why Judith Herman and I wrote our letter to The New York Times. We argue that Trump’s difficult relationship to reality and his inability to respond in an evenhanded way to a crisis renders him unfit to be president, and we asked our elected representative to take steps to remove him from the presidency.

Moyers: Yet some people argue that our political system sets no intellectual or cognitive standards for being president, and therefore, the ordinary norms of your practice as a psychiatrist should stop at the door to the Oval Office.

Lifton: Well, there are people who believe that there should be a standard psychiatric examination for every presidential candidate and for every president. But these are difficult issues because they can’t ever be entirely psychiatric. They’re inevitably political as well. I personally believe that ultimately ridding the country of a dangerous president or one who’s unfit is ultimately a political matter, but that psychological professionals can contribute in valuable ways to that decision.

Moyers: Do you recall that there was a comprehensive study of all 37 presidents up to 1974? Half of them reportedly had a diagnosable mental illness, including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. It’s not normal people who always make it to the White House.

Lifton: Yes, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it’s more or less true. So people with what we call mental illness can indeed serve well, and people who have no discernible mental illness — and that may be true of Trump — may not be able to serve, may be quite unfit. So it isn’t always the question of a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s really a question of what psychological and other traits render one unfit or dangerous.

Moyers: You write in the foreword of the book: “Because Trump is president and operates within the broad contours and interactions of the presidency, there is a tendency to view what he does as simply part of our democratic process, that is, as politically and even ethically normal.”

Lifton: Yes. And that’s what I call malignant normality. What we put forward as self-evident and normal may be deeply dangerous and destructive. I came to that idea in my work on the psychology of Nazi doctors — and I’m not equating anybody with Nazi doctors, but it’s the principle that prevails — and also with American psychologists who became architects of CIA torture during the Iraq War era. These are forms of malignant normality. For example, Donald Trump lies repeatedly. We may come to see a president as liar as normal. He also makes bombastic statements about nuclear weapons, for instance, which can then be seen as somehow normal. In other words, his behavior as president, with all those who defend his behavior in the administration, becomes a norm. We have to contest it, because it is malignantnormality. For the contributors to this book, this means striving to be witnessing professionals, confronting the malignancy and making it known.

Moyers: Witnessing professionals? Where did this notion come from?

Lifton: I first came to it in terms of psychiatrists assigned to Vietnam, way back then. If a soldier became anxious and enraged about the immorality of the Vietnam War, he might be sent to a psychiatrist who would be expected to help him be strong enough to return to committing atrocities. So there was something wrong in what professionals were doing, and some of us had to try to expose this as the wrong and manipulative use of our profession. We had to see ourselves as witnessing professionals. And then of course, with the Nazi doctors I studied for another book — doctors assigned, say, to Auschwitz — they were expected to do selections of Jews for the gas chamber. That was what was expected of them and what for the most part they did — sometimes with some apprehension, but they did it. So that’s another malignant normality. Professionals were reduced to being automatic servants of the existing regime as opposed to people with special knowledge balanced by a moral baseline as well as the scientific information to make judgments.

Moyers: And that should apply to journalists, lawyers, doctors —

Professor Robert Jay Lifton, photographed at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo by Rick Friedman ©2003)
Lifton: Absolutely. One bears witness by taking in the situation — in this case, its malignant nature — and then telling one’s story about it, in this case with the help of professional knowledge, so that we add perspective on what’s wrong, rather than being servants of the powers responsible for the malignant normality. We must be people with a conscience in a very fundamental way.

Moyers: And this is what troubled you and many of your colleagues about the psychologists who helped implement the US policy of torture after 9/11.

Lifton: Absolutely. And I call that a scandal within a scandal, because yes, it was indeed professionals who became architects of torture, and their professional society, the American Psychological Association, which encouraged and protected them until finally protest from within that society by other members forced a change. So that was a dreadful moment in the history of psychology and in the history of professionals in this country.

Moyers: Some of the descriptions used to describe Trump — narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist — even some have suggested early forms of dementia — are difficult for lay people to grasp. Some experts say that it’s not one thing that’s wrong with him — there are a lot of things wrong with him and together they add up to what one of your colleagues calls “a scary witches brew, a toxic stew.”

Lifton: I think that’s very accurate. I agree that there’s an all-enveloping destructiveness in his character and in his psychological tendencies. But I’ve focused on what professionally I call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world. In that sense, he does what psychotics do. Psychotics engage in, or frequently engage in a view of reality based only on the self. He’s not psychotic, but I think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his removal from the presidency.

Moyers: What’s your take on how he makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and yet he just keeps on making them? I know some people in your field call this a delusional disorder, a profound loss of contact with external reality.

Lifton: He doesn’t have clear contact with reality, though I’m not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren’t, and that’s one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama’s birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality. In my investigations, I’ve found that people can believe and not believe something at the same time, and in his case, he could be very manipulative and be quite gifted at his manipulations. So I think it’s a combination of those.

Moyers: How can someone believe and not believe at the same time?

Lifton: Well, in one part of himself, Trump can know there’s no evidence that Obama was born in any place but Hawaii in the United States. But in another part of himself, he has the need to reject Obama as a president of the United States by asserting that he was born outside of the country. He needs to delegitimate Obama. That’s been a strong need of Trump’s. This is a personal, isolated solipsistic need which can coexist with a recognition that there’s no evidence at all to back it up. I learned about this from some of the false confessions I came upon in my work.

Moyers: Where?

Lifton: For instance, when I was studying Chinese communist thought reform, one priest was falsely accused of being a spy, and was under physical duress — really tortured with chains and in other intolerable ways. As he was tortured and the interrogator kept insisting that he was a spy, he began to imagine himself in the role of a spy, with spy radios in all the houses of his order. In his conversations with other missionaries he began to think he was revealing military data to the enemy in some way. These thoughts became real to him because he had to entered into them and convinced the interrogator that he believed them in order to remove the chains and the torture. He told me it seemed like someone creating a novel and the novelist building a story with characters which become real and believable. Something like that could happen to Trump, in which the false beliefs become part of a panorama, all of which is fantasy and very often bound up with conspiracy theory, so that he immerses himself in it and believing in it even as at the same time recognizing in another part of his mind that none of this exists. The human mind can do that.

Moyers: It’s as if he believes the truth is defined by his words.

Lifton: Yes, that’s right. Trump has a mind that in many ways is always under duress, because he’s always seeking to be accepted, loved. He sees himself as constantly victimized by others and by the society, from which he sees himself as fighting back. So there’s always an intensity to his destructive behavior that could contribute to his false beliefs.

Moyers: Do you remember when he tweeted that President Obama had him wiretapped, despite the fact that the intelligence community couldn’t find any evidence to support his claim? And when he spoke to a CIA gathering, with the television cameras running, he said he was “a thousand percent behind the CIA,” despite the fact that everyone watching had to know he had repeatedly denounced the “incompetence and dishonesty” of that same intelligence community.

Lifton: Yes, that’s an extraordinary situation. And one has to invoke here this notion of a self-determined truth, this inner need for the situation to take shape in the form that the falsehood claims. In a sense this takes precedence over any other criteria for what is true.

Moyers: What other hazardous patterns do you see in his behavior? For example, what do you make of the admiration that he has expressed for brutal dictators — Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq, even Kim Jong Un of North Korea — yes, him — and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who turned vigilantes loose to kill thousands of drug users, and of course his admiration for Vladimir Putin. In the book Michael Tansey says, “There’s considerable evidence to suggest that absolute tyranny is Donald Trump’s wet dream.”

Lifton: Yes. Well, while Trump doesn’t have any systematic ideology, he does have a narrative, and in that narrative, America was once a great country, it’s been weakened by poor leadership, and only he can make it great again by taking over. And that’s an image of himself as a strongman, a dictator. It isn’t the clear ideology of being a fascist or some other clear-cut ideological figure. Rather, it’s a narrative of himself as being unique and all-powerful. He believes it, though I’m sure he’s got doubts about it. But his narrative in a sense calls forth other strongmen, other dictators who run their country in an absolute way and don’t have to bother with legislative division or legal issues.

Moyers: I suspect some elected officials sometimes dream of doing what an unopposed autocrat or strongman is able to do, and that’s demand adulation on the one hand, and on the other hand, eradicate all of your perceived enemies just by turning your thumb down to the crowd. No need to worry about “fake media” — you’ve had them done away with. No protesters. No confounding lawsuits against you. Nothing stands in your way.

Lifton: That’s exactly right. Trump gives the impression that he would like to govern by decree. And of course, who governs by decree but dictators or strongmen? He has that impulse in him and he wants to be a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, “Only I can fix it!” That’s a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it’s central to Trump’s sense of self and self-presentation. And I think that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or courts.

In the case of Putin, I think Trump does have involvements in Russia that are in some way determinative. I think they’ll be important in his removal from office. I think he’s aware of collusion on his part and his campaign’s, some of which has been brought out, a lot more of which will be brought out in the future. He appears to have had some kind of involvement with the Russians in which they’ve rescued him financially and maybe continue to do so, so that he’s beholden to them in ways for which there’s already lots of evidence. So I think his fierce impulse to cover up any kind of Russian connections, which is prone to obstruction of justice, will do him in.

Moyers: I want to ask you about another side of him that is taken up in the book. It involves the much-discussed video that appeared during the campaign last year which had been made a decade or so ago when Trump was newly married. He sees this actress outside his bus and he says, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” and then we hear sounds of Tic Tacs before Trump continues. “You know,” he says, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait.” And then you can hear him boasting off camera, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the…. You can do anything.”

Lifton: In addition to being a strongman and a dictator, there’s a pervasive sense of entitlement. Whatever he wants, whatever he needs in his own mind, he can have. It’s a kind of American celebrity gone wild, but it’s also a vicious anti-female perspective and a caricature of male macho. That’s all present in Trump as well as the solipsism that I mentioned earlier, and that’s why when people speak of him as all-pervasive on many different levels of destructiveness, they’re absolutely right.

Moyers: And it seems to extend deeply into his relationship with his own family. There’s a chapter in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump with the heading, “Trump’s Daddy Issues.” There’s several of his quotes about his daughter, Ivanka. He said, “You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody, and I helped create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s 6 feet tall. She’s got the best body.”

Again: “I said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Ivanka was 22 at the time. To a reporter he said: “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married — and, you know, her father…”

When Howard Stern, the radio host, started to say, “By the way, your daughter —” Trump interrupted him with “She’s beautiful.” Stern continued, “Can I say this? A piece of ass.” To which Trump replied, “Yeah.” What’s going on here?

Lifton: In addition to everything else and the extreme narcissism that it represents, it’s a kind of unbridled sense of saying anything on one’s mind as well as an impulse to break down all norms because he is the untouchable celebrity. So just as he is the one man who can fix things for the country, he can have every woman or anything else that he wants, or abuse them in any way he seeks to.

Moyers: You mentioned extreme narcissism. I’m sure you knew Erich Fromm —

Lifton: Yes, I did.

Moyers: — one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He was a Holocaust survivor who had a lifelong obsession with the psychology of evil. And he said that he thought “malignant narcissism” was the most severe pathology — “the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.” Do you think malignant narcissism goes a long way to explain Trump?

Lifton: I do think it goes a long way. In early psychoanalytic thought, narcissism was — and still, of course, is — self-love. The early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include the most fierce and self-displaying form of one’s individual self. And in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Trump, you can really see someone who’s destructive to any form of life enhancement in virtually every area. And if that’s what Fromm means by malignant narcissism, then it definitely applies.

Moyers: You said earlier that Trump and his administration have brought about a kind of malignant normalcy — that a dangerous president can become normalized. When the Democrats make a deal with him, as they did recently, are they edging him a little closer to being accepted despite this record of bizarre behavior?

Lifton: We are normalizing him when the Democrats make a deal with him. But there’s a profound ethical issue here and it’s not easily answered. If something is good for the country — perhaps the deal that the Democrats are making with Donald Trump is seen or could be understood by most as good for the country, dealing with the debt crisis — is that worth doing even though it normalizes him? If the Democrats do go ahead with this deal, they should take steps to make clear that they’re opposing other aspects of his presidency and of him.

Moyers: There’s a chapter in the book entitled, “He’s Got the World in His Hands and His Finger on the Trigger.” Do you ever imagine him sitting alone in his office, deciding on a potentially catastrophic course of action for the nation? Say, with five minutes to decide whether or not to unleash thermonuclear weapons?

Lifton: I do. And like many, I’m deeply frightened by that possibility. It’s said very often that, OK, there are people around him who can contain him and restrain him. I’m not so sure they always can or would. In any case, it’s not unlikely that he could seek to create some kind of crisis, if he found himself in a very bad light in relation to public opinion and close to removal from office. So yes, I share that fear and I think it’s a real danger. I think we have to constantly keep it in mind, be ready to anticipate it and take whatever action we can against it. The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination.

Moyers: One of your colleagues writes in the book, “Sociopathic traits may be amplified as the leader discovers that he can violate the norms of civil society and even commit crimes with impunity. And the leader who rules through fear, lies and betrayal may become increasingly isolated and paranoid as the loyalty of even his closest confidants must forever be suspect.” Does that sound like Trump?

Lifton: It’s already happening. We see that it’s harder and harder to work for him. It’s hard enough even for his spokesperson to affirm his falsehoods. These efforts are not too convincing and they become less convincing from the radius outward, in which people removed from his immediate circle find it still more difficult to believe him and the American public finds it more difficult. He still can appeal to his base because in his base there is a narrative of grievance that centers on embracing Trump without caring too much about whether what he says is true or false. He somehow fits into their narrative. But that can’t go on forever, and he’s losing some of his formerly loyal supporters as well. So he is becoming more isolated. That has its own dangers, but it’s inevitable that it would happen with a man like this as his falsehoods are contested.

Moyers: You bring up his base. Those true believers aren’t the only ones who voted for him. As we are talking, I keep thinking: Here we have a man who kept asking what’s the point of having thermonuclear weapons if we cannot use them; who advocates using torture or worse against our prisoners of war; who urged that five innocent young people here in New York, black young people, be given the death penalty for a sexual assault, even after it was proven someone else had committed the crime; who boasted about his ability to get away with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity and power; who urged his followers at political rallies to punch protesters in the face and beat them so badly that they have to be taken out on stretchers; who suggested that maybe some of his followers might want to assassinate his political rival, Hillary Clinton, if she were elected president, or at the very least, throw her in prison; who believes he would not lose voters if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone. And over 63 million people voted to elect that man president!

Lifton: Yes, that’s a deeply troubling truth. And I doubt the people who voted for him were thinking about any of these things. What they were really responding to was a call for change, a sense that he was connecting with them in ways that others never had, that he would express and represent their interests, and that he would indeed make this country one dominated again by white people, in some cases white supremacists. But as you say, these people who embraced that narrative unquestioningly are a lesser minority than the ones who voted for him. And of course, he still didn’t win the popular vote. But it’s true — something has gone wrong with our democratic system in electing a man with all these characteristics that make up Donald Trump. Now we have to struggle to sustain the functional institutions of our democracy against his assault on them. I don’t think he’ll succeed in breaking them down, but he’s doing a lot of harm and it’ll take a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people to sustain them and to keep the democracy going, even in its faltering way.

Moyers: He still has the support of 80 percent of Republican voters — 4 out of 5. And it seems the Republican Party will tolerate him as long as they’re afraid of the intensity of his followers.

Lifton: Yes, and that’s another very disturbing thought. Things there could change quickly too. What I sense is that the whole situation is chaotic and volatile, so that any time now there could be further pronouncements, further information about Russia and about obstruction of justice, or another attempt of Trump to start firing people, including Mueller, and that this would create a constitutional crisis which would create more pressure on Republicans and everybody else. So even though that is an awful truth about the Republicans’ hypocrisy in continuing to support him, that could change, I think, almost overnight if the new information were sufficiently damning to Trump and his administration.

Moyers: Let’s talk about the “Trump Effect” on the country. One aspect of it was the increase in bullying in schools caused by the rhetoric used by Trump during the campaign. But it goes beyond that.

Lifton: I think Trump has had a very strong and disturbing effect on the country already. He has given more legitimacy to white supremacy and even to neo-fascist groups, and he’s created a pervasive atmosphere that’s more vague but still significant. I don’t believe that he can in his own way destroy the country, just as he can’t eliminate climate awareness, but he can go a long way in bringing — well, in stimulating what has always been a potential.

You mentioned Erich Fromm. I met him through [the sociologist] David Riesman. David Riesman was a close friend, a great authority on American society. He emphasized how there’s always an underbelly in American society of extreme conservatism and reactionary response, and when there’s any kind of progressive movement, there’s likely to be a backlash of reaction to it. Trump is very much in that backlash to any kind of progressive achievement or even decent situation in society. He is stimulating feelings that are potential and latent in our society, but very real, and rendering them more active and more dangerous. And in that way, he’s having a very harmful effect that I think mounts every single day.

Moyers: Some people who have known Trump for years say he’s gotten dramatically worse since he was inaugurated. In the prologue to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Dr. Judith Lewis Herman writes this: “Fostered by the flattery of underlings and the chants of crowds, a political leader’s grandiosity may morph into grotesque delusions of grandeur.” Does that —

Lifton: That’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. And for anyone with these traits — of feeling himself victimized, of seeking to be the strongman who resolves everything, yet sees truth only through his own self and negates all other truth outside of it — is bound to become much more malignant when he has power. That’s what Judith Herman is saying, and she’s absolutely right. Power then breeds an intensification of all this because the power can never be absolute power — to some extent it’s stymied — but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.

Moyers: But suppose that if Donald Trump is crazy, as some have said, he’s crazy like a fox, which is to say all this bizarre behavior is really clever strategy to mislead, distract and deceive others into responding in precisely the manner that he wants them to.

Lifton: I don’t think that’s quite true. I think that it’s partly true. As I said before, Trump both disbelieves and believes in falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding and perhaps most egregious falsehood — the claim that Obama was not born in the United States — he’s crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it gave him his political entrée onto the national stage — and also, incidentally, was not rejected by many leading Republicans. So he was crazy like a fox in that case. But it’s more extreme even than that. In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them in some extent. And that’s why we simplify things if we say that Trump either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us like a fox or he completely believes them. Neither is true. The combination of both and his talent as a manipulator and falsifier are very much at issue.

Moyers: You may not remember it, but you and I talked l6 years ago this very week — a few days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. ll — and PBS had asked me to go on the air to talk to a variety of people about their response to those atrocities.

Lifton: I haven’t forgotten it, Bill.

Moyers: And in our discussion, we talked about your book, Destroying the World to Save It, about that extremist Japanese religious cult aum shinrikyo that released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo subways, you compared their ideology to Osama bin Laden: “He wanted to destroy a major part of the world to purify the world. There was in this idea, or his ideology, a sense of renewal.” We saw it in that Japanese cult. So the issue I am getting at is that such an aspiration can take hold of any true believer — the desire to purify the world no matter the cost.

Lifton: It is a very dangerous aspiration, and it’s not absent from the Trump presidency, although I don’t think it’s his central theme. I think it’s a central theme in Steve Bannon, for instance, who is an apocalyptic character and really wants to bring down most of advanced society as we know it, most of civilization as we know it, in order to recreate it in his image. I think Trump has some attraction to that, just as he had attraction to Bannon as a person and as a thinker, and that influence is by no means over. He’s still in touch with Bannon. So there is this apocalyptic influence in the Trumpean presidency: The world is destroyed in order to be purified and renewed in the ideal way that is projected by a Steve Bannon. And there is a sense of that when Trump says we’ll make America great again, because he says it’s been destroyed, he will remake it. So there is an apocalyptic suggestion, but I don’t think it’s at the very heart of his presidency.

Moyers: So our challenge is?

Lifton: I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our existing institutions, so we have to really be careful about who we vote for and examine carefully our institutions and what they’re meant to do and how they’re being violated. I also think we need movements from below that oppose what this administration and administrations like it are doing to ordinary people. And for those of us who contributed to this book — well, as I said earlier, we have to be “witnessing professionals” and fulfill our duty to warn.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/renown ... to-others/



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbpOfMBO6Y



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N0gkxQ7X6w




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xze1DtXUQeU
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously lunatical

Postby Cordelia » Fri Oct 06, 2017 4:18 pm

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 11, 2017 8:29 am

Report: Trump Told Officials He Wanted Significant Increase In Nuclear Weapons

President Donald Trump listens as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Tuesday, May 16, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Evan Vucci/AP
By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published OCTOBER 11, 2017 7:18 AM
During a July meeting with top national security advisers, President Donald Trump said that he wanted to significantly build up the United States’ nuclear arsenal, NBC News reported Wednesday morning, citing three unnamed officials in the room.

Trump said that he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in the country’s nuclear capabilities after seeing a presentation that showed how the U.S. has steadily worked to shrink the nuclear arsenal, according to NBC News. The officials in the room told Trump that it would be very challenging to build up the nuclear arsenal and explained that the U.S. is in a stronger military position than it was when the nuclear stockpile was larger, according to NBC News.

Officials told NBC News that there are no plans to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Some officials in the room told NBC News that they did not interpret Trump’s wish for more nuclear weapons as an order to build up the arsenal and said that the President also said during the meeting that he wanted a general military build-up with more troops and other equipment.

It was after this meeting on July 20 that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was overheard calling Trump a “moron,” per NBC News. However, it’s not what what exactly prompted Tillerson to label Trump a moron, according to NBC News.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... ar-arsenal





President Trump’s temper tantrums are coming at an accelerating pace

Play Video 2:29

A list of senators who have questioned Trump’s temperament

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) called the White House “an adult day care center,” but he isn’t the only senator who has questioned President Trump’s temperament. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As the curator of the Trump-as-toddler Twitter thread, I was dubious that John F. Kelly would be able to make President Trump act like a big boy while he was in power. But after Stephen K. Bannon was no longer inside the White House to rile up the president, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts did start to wonder whether some degree of normality could be achieved.

Silly staff.

The past week definitively revealed the mirage of a maturing president. The first thing that set off the president was the spectacle of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson trying to swat down well-sourced stories that he had called Trump a “f***ing moron.” Alas, Dexter Filkins’s New Yorker profile of Tillerson just made both the secretary of state and the president look worse.

Then this weekend the floodgates opened after the president went after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Twitter. Which led to this:


And this:

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”….

All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.

“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

The aftershocks of Corker’s claim about the vast majority of other Republicans feeling the way he did probably will be felt for as long as reporters can ask other members of Congress. But it also triggered a raft of stories about how other key political actors have had a similar reaction to the president.

For example, there’s the diplomatic corps, as my Washington Post colleagues Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe report:

After nearly nine months of the Trump administration, many of America’s closest allies have concluded that a hoped-for “learning curve” they thought would make President Trump a reliable partner is not going to happen.

“The idea that he would inform himself, and things would change, that is no longer operative,” said a top diplomat here.

Instead, they see an administration in which lines of authority and decision-making are unclear, where tweets become policy and hard-won international accords on trade and climate are discarded. The result has been a special kind of challenge for those whose jobs are to advocate for their countries and explain the president and his unconventional ways at home.

Senior diplomats and officials from nearly a dozen countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia expressed a remarkable coincidence of views in interviews over the past several weeks. Asked to describe their thoughts about and relations with the president and his team as the end of Trump’s first year approaches, many described a whirlwind journey beginning with tentative optimism, followed by alarm and finally reaching acceptance that the situation is unlikely to improve.

And then there’s Trump’s White House staff, as Politico’s Josh Dawsey reports:

Interviews with ten current and former administration officials, advisers, longtime business associates and others close to Trump describe a process where they try to install guardrails for a president who goes on gut feeling – and many days are spent managing the president, just as Corker said.

“You either had to just convince him something better was his idea or ignore what he said to do and hoped he forgot about it the next day,” said Barbara Res, a former executive in the Trump Organization.

Trump, several advisers and aides said, sometimes comes into the Oval Office worked into a lather from talking to friends or watching TV coverage in the morning. Sometimes, a side conversation with an aide like Stephen Miller on immigration or a TV host like Sean Hannity would set him off.

Then, staffers would step in to avert a rash decision by calming him down.

My Post colleagues Robert Costa, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker note that the Tillerson and Corker kerfuffles seem to be driving Trump to distraction, and not in a good way:

Frustrated by his Cabinet and angry that he has not received enough credit for his handling of three successive hurricanes, President Trump is now lashing out, rupturing alliances and imperiling his legislative agenda, numerous White House officials and outside advisers said Monday….

Trump in recent days has shown flashes of fury and left his aides, including White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, scrambling to manage his outbursts. He has been frustrated in particular with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was reported last week to have earlier called the president a “moron.” Trump’s Sunday morning Twitter tirade against Corker caught staffers by surprise, although the president had been brooding over the senator’s comment a few days earlier about Trump’s “chaos” endangering the nation.

One Trump confidant likened the president to a whistling teapot, saying that when he does not blow off steam, he can turn into a pressure cooker and explode. “I think we are in pressure cooker territory,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

And there is the focal point between Trump’s raw emotions and the rest of the world: Kelly. The chief of staff will also have to cope with the new distractions that Trump’s sojourns to Mar-a-Lago might create, according to Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair:

When his staff has tried to manage him, he has seemed to take it as a point of pride to thwart them. So it’s only natural that his relationship with Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who is attempting to impose discipline on Trump’s freewheeling West Wing by starkly curtailing access to Trump, would be fraught. But now there are signs that the rift between Kelly and his boss may be irreparable. The beginning of the fall season at Mar-a-Lago, later this month, is liable to be a crucial period in the relationship. The White House declined to comment on the record, but privately an official disputed these characterizations.

According to conversations with four prominent Republicans close to the White House, Trump has grown frustrated with Kelly in recent weeks at what he sees as Kelly’s highhandedness….

The next few weeks will surely test Trump and Kelly’s relationship. As Kelly seeks to revive Trump’s stalled tax plan, prevent the Iran nuclear deal from falling apart, and avoid war with North Korea, he’ll also face the challenge of having to manage Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to two sources, Kelly has developed a Mar-a-Lago strategy to prevent Trump from soliciting advice from members and friends. (In February, Trump turned his dinner table into an open-air Situation Room when North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile.) Sources briefed on Kelly’s plans said he will attempt to keep Trump “out of the dining room.”

Finally, Trump’s interview with Forbes’ Randall Lane came out, and it contains gems like this one:

Over the course of a nearly one-hour interview in the Oval Office, President Trump stays true to the same Citizen Trump form that Forbes has seen for 35 years.

He boasts, with a dose of hyperbole that any student of FDR or even Barack Obama could undercut: “I’ve had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that’s ever served. [He hasn’t — Spoiler Alerts] We had over 50 bills passed. I’m not talking about executive orders only, which are very important. I’m talking about bills.”

He counterpunches, in this case firing a shot at Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who reportedly called his boss a moron: “I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

Let me stress that each of the excerpted stories above broke in the past 48 hours. The pace is quickening.

What’s next? Ordinary toddlers eventually tire out after throwing a tantrum. But this is when the analogy breaks down. Full disclosure: Trump is not really a toddler, but an overindulged plutocrat who has never had to cope with political failure. With each negative shock or story he faces, his behavior worsens, and that just leads to a new cycle of negative press and disaffected GOP officials. The political effects of this is to weaken his historically weak presidency, making it harder for him to do anything that would counteract this trend. This doom loop means that his behavior is only going to get worse.

That is great for my Twitter thread. It is awful for America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 2ab8b004a6
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 11, 2017 4:05 pm

Houston, We Have a Problem. LA, Chicago, STL, ATL, NYC, You Guys Too

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, center, poses for a group photo with Senior Military leaders and spouses in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 5, 2017. Trump was hosting the dinner for the group this evening. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 11, 2017 10:38 AM

Last night on Chris Hayes’ show, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman suggested retired Generals Mattis and Kelly were discussing what they would do if President Trump made a “lunge” for the nuclear football. Would they tackle him? Restrain him. Sherman said he’d met with a “very prominent” Republican.

The sourcing on this is at a minimum murky. If you watch closely, what Sherman says is that this senior Republican told him he “imagined” these conversations were taking place. Later when Chris Hayes pressed Sherman on this point, Sherman said “these are the conversations that they have very good authority are taking place inside the White House. I would say this Mar-a-Lago strategy is a sort of emblematic of how general Kelly does not want the president to be out of his sight.” In other words, on his second account, Sherman suggested ‘imagined’ was a turn of phrase and that he had sources that knew these conversations were happening.

.@gabrielsherman: GOP source says Kelly & Mattis discuss what to do if Trump lunges for the nuclear football #inners https://t.co/porBwgBB2V

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) October 11, 2017

This comes after broadly similar comments from Senator Bob Corker, President Trump’s latest sparring partner, who said: “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him … As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine.”

Then there’s news about what prompted Rex Tillerson to call President Trump a “f—king moron”. According to NBC, at a meeting last summer with top national security officials, President Trump said he wanted a tenfold increase in the size of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Apparently Trump was shown a chart something like this.



As you can see, the size of the US arsenal has declined dramatically since its high in the 1960s. The reasons for that, which President Trump had apparently never heard of, are several. Major reductions came into effect through the late 60s and 1970s, in part tied to a series of arms limitations treaties with the USSR. There was a major drop at the end of the Cold War, codified in other treaties, and another significant reduction early in this century.

The nuclear weapons of today are significantly more advanced than the ones we had in the 1950s and 1960s. We also have agreements which keep key adversaries (specifically Russia) capped at rough parity with the US at the five or six thousand level. There are debates about modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Hardly anyone thinks we should go back to having thirty or thirty five thousand nuclear weapons. It serves no purpose (you can destroy a lot of the world with 6,000), it is highly destabilizing and costs astronomical sums of money. It’s the kind of comment you’d expect from an ignorant and aggressive clown looking at a chart he knows nothing about.

Some of these reports seem squishy. But the sum total of them suggests that the worst we could have imagined of what’s going on in the Trump White House is probably true. It may be worse than we thought.

There’s endless debate about what impeachment is for and what it is. At the end of the day, it’s really not about criminal infractions or which misdeeds might be impeachable. The ultimate reason is that the architects of the constitution wanted a path to avoid what we would now call a coup. I believe Franklin referred to it more brutally as assassination. You need a constitutional framework – not acts outside the constitution or legality – by which a President who is clearly dangerous to the Republic or not capable of filling the job can be removed. The odds of this happening any time soon or any time during Trump’s term seem close to nil. But this is the kind of President it was designed for.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hou ... re-1088478


Trump’s Nuclear Meltdown

Only this president could think 4,000 nukes aren’t enough.

By Fred Kaplan
US President Donald Trump speaks during an event honoring the 2017 Stanley Cup Champions, The Pittsburgh Penguins, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 10, 2017.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event honoring the 2017 Stanley Cup champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins, on Tuesday.
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Now we know why and when Rex Tillerson called Donald Trump a “fucking moron.”

According to NBC News, the secretary of state muttered the remark to colleagues on July 20 right after a meeting in the Pentagon—a review of U.S. military forces and operations worldwide—attended by Trump, his main advisers, and the top brass.

At one point in the meeting, a briefer showed the president a graph tracking the dramatic reduction in U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons over the past several decades. That reduction is widely interpreted as a success story about arms-control treaties, the end of the Cold War, and the declining dependence on weapons of catastrophic destruction. But Trump viewed it with alarm, telling the group that he wanted more nukes. Pointing to the graph’s peak year, 1969, when the U.S. had 32,000 nuclear weapons, Trump said he wanted that many nukes now.

Various officials talked him down, according to the NBC report, noting the legal and practical restrictions and the fact that the roughly 4,000 weapons in our current strategic arsenal are better able to carry out their missions than the much larger force of a half-century ago.

As the NBC report dryly put it, Trump’s “comments raised questions about his familiarity with the nuclear posture and other issues, officials said.” Those “other issues” included, well, nearly every issue and continent brought up, from Korea to Afghanistan and everywhere in between. Pentagon officials, the report continued, were “rattled” by the president’s lack of understanding on all fronts—though the meeting took place a full six months after he’d taken office.

This should have come as little surprise. Throughout the 2016 election campaign, Trump evinced both a thorough ignorance of national security policy and a cavalier boasting of his “good instinct for this stuff.” Hence his claims that he knew more than the generals about ISIS and that he knew a lot about “nuclear” because his uncle was a physicist at MIT. (This latter claim was particularly bizarre; my cousin is Argentina’s most celebrated choreographer, but that doesn’t mean I know a thing about modern dance or speak Spanish.)

32,000 was the largest number of nuclear weapons that a president ever had, and Trump wasn’t going to be outgunned.
All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.

The message is thus clearly sent out to all aides: This president is not interested in learning. To argue your case, find a way to align your views with his buttons, then push them unashamedly. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, reportedly persuaded him to send more troops to Afghanistan in part by showing him a photo from the 1970s of women in Kabul wearing miniskirts. (See, he seemed to suggest, Afghans can be just like us.) Maybe Tillerson, McMaster, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis are figuring out other paint-by-numbers games for keeping Trump in their lane on other matters, too.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of NBC’s story is what it reveals about Trump’s attitude toward military force. His idolatry of military officers is well-known, but less noted is his idolatry of big guns for their own sake. He wanted to hold a military parade in honor of his inauguration (until he was told it would tear up the streets of downtown Washington). He ordered a huge increase in the military’s budget but seems averse to defending allies or to fighting any sort of war, except for those that he thinks can be won by bombing terrorists or tyrants. The weapons used for fighting those kinds of wars—drones, smart bombs, small units of special forces, coastal patrol boats—don’t cost much. What costs a lot of money are aircraft carriers, planes, tanks, and personnel. What is Trump’s rationale for spending more on those? He hasn’t said because—this should be obvious—he doesn’t know.

He just wants bigger, shinier, costlier. He wants military parades as a show of strength. He told his aides he wanted 32,000 nuclear weapons because that was the largest number of nuclear weapons that a president ever had, and he wasn’t going to be outgunned by any other president. Forget about how the budget should be allocated, what America’s role in the world should be, or why on earth we need to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons again. (U.S. Strategic Command officers already have a hard time explaining, when pressed, why they even need the 4,000 nukes they have.) Those things, in his mind, aren’t important.

Sen. Robert Corker said in his New York Times interview over the weekend that Trump views the White House as the set of a reality-TV show—not an original insight but a searing one, given that it came from the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But what’s often overlooked in this observation is that Trump takes this view not only on the White House but on the whole world. It’s the only view he knows, after all—hence his obsession with Nielsen ratings, poll numbers, Twitter followers, and IQ scores (some of them fictitious) as the prime measures of value.

It is a hair-raising fact that though few Republicans have seconded Corker or Tillerson’s appraisals of Trump, still fewer have spoken out in their president’s defense. The day after Corker’s interview in the Times, CNN staffers phoned all 52 Republican senators to see if any of them would come on Wolf Blitzer’s show to discuss politics that day. Not one assented. They chose not to protest that one of the party’s leaders in the Senate likened Trump to a patient in an “adult day care center.” They don’t seem to mind that the nation’s top diplomat called Trump a “fucking moron.” And no one has as yet rebutted the latest report on Trump’s appalling cluelessness about nuclear weapons. The Republicans don’t deny any of these indictments, yet they do nothing about them; they do nothing to address the clear and present danger.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... moron.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Oct 11, 2017 4:48 pm

“I Hate Everyone in the White House!”: Trump Seethes as Advisers Fear the President Is “Unraveling”
In recent days, I’ve spoken with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president that seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods.

by Gabriel Sherman

October 11, 2017 2:40 pm

Image

At first it sounded like hyperbole, the escalation of a Twitter war. But now it’s clear that Bob Corker’s remarkable New York Times interview—in which the Republican senator described the White House as “adult day care” and warned Trump could start World War III—was an inflection point in the Trump presidency. It brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.”

The conversation among some of the president’s longtime confidantes, along with the character of some of the leaks emerging from the White House has shifted. There’s a new level of concern. NBC News published a report that Trump shocked his national security team when he called for a nearly tenfold increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal during a briefing this summer. One Trump adviser confirmed to me it was after this meeting disbanded that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.”

In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”

According to two sources familiar with the conversation, Trump vented to his longtime security chief, Keith Schiller, “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!” (A White House official denies this.) Two senior Republican officials said Chief of Staff John Kelly is miserable in his job and is remaining out of a sense of duty to keep Trump from making some sort of disastrous decision. Today, speculation about Kelly’s future increased after Politico reported that Kelly’s deputy Kirstjen Nielsen is likely to be named Homeland Security Secretary—the theory among some Republicans is that Kelly wanted to give her a soft landing before his departure.

One former official even speculated that Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have discussed what they would do in the event Trump ordered a nuclear first strike. “Would they tackle him?” the person said. Even Trump’s most loyal backers are sowing public doubts. This morning, The Washington Post quoted longtime Trump friend Tom Barrack saying he has been “shocked” and “stunned” by Trump’s behavior.

While Kelly can’t control Trump’s tweets, he is doing his best to physically sequester the president—much to Trump’s frustration. One major G.O.P. donor told me access to Trump has been cut off, and his outside calls to the White House switchboard aren’t put through to the Oval Office. Earlier this week, I reported on Kelly’s plans to prevent Trump from mingling with guests at Mar-a-Lago later this month. And, according to two sources, Keith Schiller quit last month after Kelly told Schiller he needed permission to speak to the president and wanted written reports of their conversations.

The White House denies these accounts. “The President’s mood is good and his outlook on the agenda is very positive,” an official said.

West Wing aides have also worried about Trump’s public appearances, one Trump adviser told me. The adviser said aides were relieved when Trump canceled his appearance on the season premiere of 60 Minutes last month. “He’s lost a step. They don’t want him doing adversarial TV interviews,” the adviser explained. Instead, Trump has sat down for friendly conversations with Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee, whose daughter is Trump’s press secretary. (The White House official says the 60 Minutes interview is being rescheduled.)

Even before Corker’s remarks, some West Wing advisers were worried that Trump’s behavior could cause the Cabinet to take extraordinary Constitutional measures to remove him from office. Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment—the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?” According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 12, 2017 11:02 am

Why You Really Should Be Terrified About Trump and Nuclear Weapons

The revelation that he wanted nearly ten times the number of nukes is just the start.

DAVID CORN

OCT. 11, 2017 1:57 PM

On Wednesday morning, NBC News provided sane people with more reason to be scared: at a private July 20 meeting with his top national security officials, President Donald Trump said he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in the US nuclear arsenal. He made this remark after being shown a chart that illustrated a steady decrease in the number of US nuclear weapons over the past 50 years. Trump responded by telling his most senior advisers, which included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he wanted the bigger number shown at the start of the downward slope, not the smaller amount at the end. Officials had to explain to Trump that the current level was lower due to years of successful arms treaties and that the nation’s overall military posture was now much stronger than in the days of a larger and bloated nuclear arsenal. It was at the end of this meeting—where other national security matters were discussed—that Tillerson apparently was overheard referring to Trump as a “moron.”

It is indeed worrisome that Trump seemed to adopt a simplistic and dangerous more-is-better approach to nuclear weapons. But what’s even more unsettling, as I have previously written, is that Trump has a history of making comments about nuclear weapons that both display his profound ignorance about this all-important subject and suggest he believes a nuclear conflict is inevitable and perhaps destined for the near future.

Trump first demonstrated he knew little about nuclear weapons in the 1980s, when he repeatedly boasted to reporters that he would make a good nuclear arms negotiator and that the job would be easy. In a 1984 interview with the Washington Post, Trump, then a 38-year-old celebrity developer, said he hoped one day to become the United States’ chief negotiator with the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons. Trump declared he could negotiate a great nuclear arms deal with Moscow. Comparing crafting an arms accord with cooking up a real estate deal, Trump insisted he had innate talent for this mission. He claimed he would know exactly what to demand of the Russians—though he conceded his lack of experience in the technical field of nuclear weaponry. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles…I think I know most of it anyway,” he said. “You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation.”

A few months earlier, Trump had expressed the same sentiment to a New York Times reporter. The writer noted, “Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements—he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiations is an art, he says and I have a gift for it.” In 1986, Trump told Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who invented the defibrillator and who received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for joining with a prominent Soviet physician to promote nuclear arms reduction, that he could concoct a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union and end the Cold War in an hour.

Trump’s assertions that a nuclear deal could be quickly forged indicated he knew little of the subject. And during the 2016 presidential campaign, he uttered several troubling statements about nuclear arms that revealed he hadn’t learned much in the intervening decades At a Republican debate, he botched a question about the nuclear triad—America’s system of sea-, air-, and land-based nuclear weapons—a clear sign he did not understand the fundamentals of the structure of the US nuclear command. He babbled, “For me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” (At other times during the campaign, Trump said he would support allowing Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons and signalled he would be open to using such weapons against ISIS and in other conflicts.)

Over the years, Trump’s reckless and fact-free talk about nuclear weapons has been coupled with remarks showing he has a fatalistic approach and possibly believes a nuclear conflagration is unavoidable. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, Trump said, “I think of the future, but I refuse to paint it. Anything can happen. But I often think of nuclear war.” He explained:

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit…It’s like thinking the Titanic can’t sink. Too many countries have nuclear weapons; nobody knows where they’re all pointed, what button it takes to launch them.

Five years later, Trump was asked where he would be in five years. “Who knows?” he replied. “Maybe the bombs drop from heaven, who knows? This is a sick world, we’re dealing here with lots of sickos. And you have the nuclear and you have the this and you have the that.” Trump continued expressing the notion that nuclear annihilation could be on the horizon: “Oh absolutely. I mean, I think it’s sick human nature. If Hitler had the bomb, you don’t think he would have used it? He would have put it in the middle of Fifth Avenue. He would have used Trump Tower, 57th and Fifth. Boom. I mean, you have people that are sick and they are now having nuclear arsenals…I like to project for the future but really live very much for the present. And I like to learn from the past, but it’s very very fragile, life is so fragile.

In another Playboy interview—this one in 2004—Trump once more conveyed his nuclear despondency. He was asked, “Do you think Trump Tower and your other buildings will bear your name a hundred years from now?” Trump responded, “I don’t think any building will be here—and unless we have some very smart people ruling it, the world will not be the same place in a hundred years. The weapons are too powerful, too strong.”

So for decades, it seems, Trump has been haunted by the feeling that nuclear war may be inescapable. Now he is in a position to do something about the matter. But instead of taking steps to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, he has repeatedly discussed increasing the number of nukes within the US arsenal and abroad. (At the July 20 meeting, Trump essentially said he wanted the US nuclear stockpile to expand from about 4,000 to about 32,0000 weapons.) And the threats Trump has hurled at North Korea— it will face “fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before”—imply that he has considered the use of nuclear weapons against Kim Jong Un. (By the way, should Trump order a nuclear strike, it would be damn hard for anyone around him to stop it.)

There is much that is alarming about Trump’s nuclear posture. His attitude toward nuclear policy is cavalier. (Hey, this stuff is easy!) He lacks basic knowledge of nuclear matters. And he is reckless in issuing nuclear-ish threats. (During the 2016 campaign, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported that Trump had thrice asked a national security adviser why a president couldn’t use nuclear weapons.) But what renders this terrifying trifecta even more frightening is the nuclear fatalism Trump has voiced throughout the years. If he thinks nuclear war is inevitable, might he feel less restrained when it comes to unleashing weaponry that can destroy human civilization? Tillerson’s use of the m-word has received much media attention, justifiably. But the bigger story by far is that Tillerson’s “moron” is in command of the nuclear arsenal and years’ worth of evidence indicates that Trump wants it to grow, that he’s interested in putting it to use, and that he believes a nuclear catastrophe is bound to happen. That’s a prophecy his own actions and ignorance could well end up bringing about.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... r-weapons/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 19, 2017 12:11 pm

Image
please fast forward to 5:00 and listen


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osE7Bsm-ZeA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9K5sSjZ2I
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 20, 2017 7:02 am

DEADLY OVERCONFIDENCE: TRUMP THINKS MISSILE DEFENSES WORK AGAINST NORTH KOREA, AND THAT SHOULD SCARE YOU
ANKIT PANDA AND VIPIN NARANGOCTOBER 16, 2017


Could a president’s overconfidence in U.S. defensive systems lead to deadly miscalculation and nuclear armageddon? Yes. Yes, it could. Last Wednesday, referring to potential American responses to North Korea’s missile and nuclear program, President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time, and if you send two of them it’s gonna get knocked out.” If Trump believes — or is being told — that American missile defenses are that accurate, not only is he factually wrong, he is also very dangerously wrong. This misperception could be enough to lead the United States into a costly war with devastating consequences.

Here’s why: If Trump believes U.S. missile defenses work this effectively, he might actually think a first strike attempt to disarm North Korea of its missile and nuclear forces would successfully spare U.S. cities from North Korean nuclear retaliation. They probably wouldn’t. Believing that each ground-based midcourse missile defense (GMD) interceptor can provide anything close to a 97 percent interception rate against retaliation raises the temptation to attempt a so-called “splendid first strike” based on the assumption that missile defenses can successfully intercept any leftover missiles North Korea could then fire at the United States.

In this article, we first lay out the complexity of American missile defenses and explain why it’s way off the mark to believe U.S. ground-based missile defense interceptors are even close to as effective as Trump suggested. We then explain how overconfidence in national missile defense may tempt the president to consider a first strike with no actual guarantee that it can spare an American city — or multiple cities — from potential North Korean thermonuclear retaliation. For a president who has already expressed an inclination to visit “fire and fury” on Kim Jong Un and threatened to “totally destroy” his country, we’re obligated to take Trump’s misplaced confidence in GMD very seriously. His attraction to attempting a first strike will only grow if he is blind to an important gap in U.S. defenses. Not only might he still want to denuclearize North Korea by force, he might think it is actually possible to do so without putting the U.S. homeland at risk.

97 Percent of the Time, It Works Every Time

U.S. strategic missile defense efforts, dating back to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, have been colored by myth and overstatement. And if they don’t work now, it is always the fantasy of them working in the future that keeps the program going decades later.

If North Korea were to fire an ICBM — or multiple ICBMs — at the United States, there is only one system that could take a shot at it. That system is GMD, which would launch its Ground-Based Interceptors (GBI), based at Fort Greely in Alaska, to attempt to intercept and destroy the warhead outside the earth’s atmosphere in midcourse flight. (Contrary to common misconception, other missile defense systems such as THAAD and Aegis are in no position to take a shot at ICBMs; they’re designed for other classes of targets.) GMD has been in development for more than two decades in anticipation of precisely such a threat. $40 billion later, GMD remains an immature system, though it became nominally operational in 2004.

So, is GMD’s effectiveness anywhere near the number Trump mentioned? In short, no. In long, terms and conditions apply. There are two primary measurements of a missile defense system’s effectiveness. The first — and the most easily understandable — is the single-shot probability of kill (SSPK) for a given interceptor. Translated, this means just how likely a single U.S. GBI is to make contact with and “kill” an incoming ICBM warhead. Measuring this in itself is tricky. There’s a simple, but unsatisfying method: empirical success rate. In its 18 intercept tests to date, GBI has succeeded 10 times, giving it a roughly 56 percent SSPK.

There are a few caveats that may raise or lower the probability of successful interception. GMD has matured as a system over the course of its testing, but it has only been tested once against an ICBM-class target — and not in a realistic environment with little warning, countermeasures, or a trajectory that looks anything like a North Korean Hwasong-14. Acknowledging these limitations, last year the Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation was unable to assign a quantitative assessment of the system’s performance, but conceded it possessed a “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland” against IRBMs and ICBMs. On the other hand, the newer CE-II Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle at the core of today’s interceptors likely has a higher assumed SSPK than the older CE-I variant, though this number is not publicly known.

The second measure — the one more commonly used by advocates of systems like GMD — is the overall effectiveness of the system, with some assumptions about its operational use. The United States is not expected to take on incoming ICBMs one-for-one — where one interceptor is assigned to destroy one Hwasong-14 warhead. Instead, taking into account the shaky testing record and higher acceptability standards, the United States would fire four interceptors at a single incoming ICBM. Trump’s 97 percent number is a more attainable figure here. System effectiveness for n interceptors against i targets with k SSPK per interceptor is calculated using the expression (1-(1-k)^n)^i). Assuming four interceptors, a single incoming ICBM, and an SSPK of about 57 percent, the odds of a successful intercept scenario thus rise to 97 percent. This calculation, however, ignores the possibility that each successive interceptor’s chance of successful kill might not be independent of the previous one, due to correlated factors such as design shortcomings, leading to a lower overall success rate.

Trump’s remarks, however, make it clear that he believes each interceptor has an SSPK of 97 percent (rather than 57 percent). Hence “if you send two of them it’s gonna get knocked out.” This is a wildly inflated — almost delusional — sense of how accurate the system is, and how many North Korean ICBMs it could potentially successfully intercept. Trump’s claim is almost correct if four interceptors are assigned per incoming warhead, not one. To get to “gonna get knocked out” (with >99 percent assurance), we would need to assign six interceptors per incoming warhead if each has an SSPK of 57 percent. No doubt the president heard either 96 or 97 percent effectiveness for homeland missile defense during a briefing, without realizing that this did not refer to the accuracy of each interceptor but to four against a single incoming ICBM.

While this may seem like statistical nitpicking, the United States does not possess unlimited GBIs. This year, the GBI inventory will be expanded from 30 interceptors to 44. Assuming the four-per-ICBM concept, successive North Korean ICBMs begin to pose real problems. For instance, let’s imagine a scenario where North Korea fires at least 11 ICBMs, the number needed to exhaust all 44 planned U.S. GBIs. Assuming the empirical SSPK of 56 percent (meaning four interceptors gives you a 96 percent chance of destroying each ICBM warhead), we quickly arrive at an overall system effectiveness of just 66 percent. That’s a one in three chance of a U.S. city absorbing a devastating nuclear strike.

Remember too that it will always be far cheaper — both in relative and absolute terms — for North Korea to add additional Hwasong-14s than it would be for the United States to add interceptors to the inventory or to improve the per-interceptor efficacy of the system. Eighteen Hwasong-14s would leave GMD in the realm of a coin-toss (an overall effectiveness of 50 percent). That means there’s a 50/50 chance that a North Korean thermonuclear payload would reach a U.S. city and kill millions. And this all assumes that North Korea does not employ penetration aids like decoy re-entry vehicles to effectively confuse they system into committing a large chunk of GBIs against dummies. This would leave fewer interceptors for an actual warhead, increasing the chance of a nuclear weapon penetrating the system.

And if that isn’t enough to scare you, this should: Even if U.S. missile defense gets lucky and takes out North Korea’s missiles, the tyranny of geography means U.S. salvo launches of GBIs against North Korean Hwasong-14s might ignite a nuclear war with Russia. Simply because of where the U.S. GBIs are located in Alaska and the trajectory a Hwasong-14 would follow from North Korea to a West Coast city, U.S. interceptors may have to make midcourse contact over the Russian Far East. The GBI kill vehicle, though similar in appearance to a ballistic missile, does not carry any explosive payload, nor is it designed to reenter the atmosphere toward the earth. But that’s something Russia’s early warning systems wouldn’t and probably couldn’t account for — and we can’t count on a calm Stanislav Petrov-type who’d been keeping his eye on Twitter to know that the United States and North Korea were at war, and’ that the United States hadn’t just launched missiles at Russia. Thus, as the United States attempted with mixed success to fend off nuclear attack from North Korea, it might well create a misunderstanding in Moscow that started a nuclear exchange with the world’s other nuclear superpower.

Why This Is So Dangerous

But aren’t missile defenses…purely defensive, you ask? Aren’t they designed to intercept North Korean ICBMs if Kim launches an unprovoked strike against the U.S. homeland? Well, that’s only half the story. Missile defenses have always been sold as defensive systems that are part of what are known as “damage limitation” measures. But here’s the dirty secret: Another purpose — indeed, probably their primary purpose — is to support offensive nuclear strategies and give the United States a so-called perfect or splendid first strike capability against an adversary. This fantasy of completely disarming an adversary in a first strike was dismissed by even Herman Kahn due to its infeasibility during the Cold War (but at times advocated by the likes of General Curtis LeMay against Cuba and the Soviet Union). Before missile defenses, if the United States were to attempt a first strike to disarm an adversary, it had to be sure it could account for, find, fix, and destroy every single nuclear system (or at least those capable of reaching the United States or its allies). If not, the remaining ones would certainly be used against the United States (or allies). It was a ridiculously impossible intelligence and logistical challenge, even against a small arsenal, since accounting errors alone exposed American cities to devastating retaliation.

But working missile defenses relieve the pressure to find all of those enemy forces. You can theoretically miss a few, and then employ missile defenses to intercept those residual forces. In concert, missile defenses with a counterforce capability resurrect the dream of a splendid first strike. Such a strike seems especially plausible against states with only a handful of ICBMs, since only one or a few would be left after the United States destroyed most of the force in the initial counterforce campaign. Although U.S. missile defenses can easily be saturated by many incoming ICBMs and countermeasures, the hope was always that it could be effective against a residual force of only several adversary ICBMs. The system is therefore less threatening to states with larger arsenals such as Russia or China. In North Korea’s case, though, American counterforce strategy coupled with working missile defenses could spell the end of its nuclear arsenal. But there are two significant problems with this thinking.

First, it doesn’t work! As we’ve shown, U.S. missile defense is not particularly effective even against a single incoming ICBM. Proponents of a “splendid first strike” may argue that no more than one or two Hwasong-14s would survive a U.S. strike on North Korea — perhaps hidden deep in unknown underground facilities. Therefore, the overall GMD math might appear acceptable. But even a 3 percent chance of catastrophic damage to a U.S. city should still be unacceptable to any president. Indeed, we tolerate far lower risks for more mundane matters like civil aviation.

The discrepancy between what Trump may believe to be the system’s efficacy and how well it actually works creates a very scary scenario. It increases his temptation to consider authorizing a first strike on the belief that, even if we cannot destroy every North Korean ICBM on the ground, GMD will surely be able to intercept what’s left for Kim to launch at the United States. It cannot. Overconfidence in the system makes it more likely that Trump may be tempted by a military option — a first strike attempt — that will very probably result in the United States losing one of its own cities to a North Korean nuclear retaliation.

Second, if North Korea thinks Trump may be attracted to such splendid first strike options, it incentivizes Kim to take survivability and penetration measures such as building as many missiles as fast as he can, hiding and moving them around, and developing decoy reentry vehicles and multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) to increase the number of targets that might confuse and penetrate missile defenses. And, most dangerously, it puts Kim back in first-strike instability mode with extreme “use it or lose it” pressures. If North Korea fears a surprise conventional or nuclear first strike might still be on the table and coming, Kim’s incentive is to launch all of his nuclear weapons preemptively. Pyongyang’s best shot of penetrating GMD is to fire everything it has — including all of its ICBMs — at the first sniff of a counterforce attempt so it can saturate the system and have some hope of getting a nuclear weapon past American defenses before they’re all destroyed.

But wait, Vipin and Ankit, you told us earlier that North Korea’s ICBM was a third-strike weapon to be held in reserve, not a first-strike weapon? Yes, in the event of a conventional invasion where Kim has to just try to slow down the cavalry. In this scenario, his strategy is likely to be limited nuclear use against regional bases, holding the ICBM in reserve to deter American nuclear retaliation. But the prospect of a disarming nuclear first strike against North Korean nuclear forces is very different. In that scenario, Kim has no choice but to go preemptively and massively, including with any ICBMs he can get off — he cannot hold anything in reserve because he has to fear nothing would be left once the U.S. counterforce attempt was through. Put simply, if he fears not just invasion, but that he is about to directly lose his entire nuclear force, he cannot afford to go second. The more Trump is tempted by a splendid first strike option, the more Kim has to consider preemptively firing every nuclear system in his inventory.

This is why Trump’s apparent overconfidence in American missile defense is so dangerous. The siren song of a “splendid first strike” may be too hard for him to resist. Trump’s beliefs about the likely success of a nuclear first strike against North Korea are especially important because he, and he alone, can singlehandedly order such a strike whenever he chooses. If he issues a valid launch order to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) via the “football,” there is literally no one who can stop him, and we need to assume that the strike would be carried out.

Imagine that Kim tests a missile in the middle of Washington’s night and Trump is awake watching this unfold on Fox News. He thinks to himself, enough is enough. He opens the “biscuit” from his wallet, summons his military aide from the hallway and issues a valid order to target North Korea’s nuclear systems in a nuclear first strike. Any advisors that can talk him down are asleep. The NMCC transmits the authenticated launch order to STRATCOM and it is dutifully carried out as mandated. We have just initiated a nuclear strike and the survival of, for example, San Francisco, depends entirely on the U.S. missile defense system’s ability to intercept whatever Kim gets off in time. Is this scenario likely? Certainly not. Is there a chance it could happen, exactly like this? Yes.

One thing is for certain: There is nothing splendid or sterile about such an attempted strike. First, Kim’s incentive is to do whatever he can to saturate GMD by going first and going massively if he thinks the United States is coming after his nuclear forces. Second, even if we could shrink the force to just a few ICBMs, it is wishing on a prayer that GMD could successfully intercept the incoming warheads amidst any countermeasures. Make no mistake: A very plausible outcome would be an American city in ruins at the hands of a North Korean nuclear weapon.

It is time to stop fantasizing about denuclearizing North Korea by force — a fantasy spurred by excessive faith in missile defenses — and accept that there is no technological panacea for addressing North Korea’s nuclear and missile program. It is time to go back to tried and tested practices: diplomacy and deterrence. A denuclearized North Korea is not worth risking any American city on the deadly overconfidence that an untested missile defense system could save it from Kim Jong Un’s thermonuclear retaliation.
https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/deadl ... scare-you/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby norton ash » Tue Oct 24, 2017 1:31 pm

Trump having a bad day today. Can't even have a stress-free lunch. I think new freak-outs are imminent, and his cabinet knifes him via 25th Amendment soon.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 24, 2017 1:35 pm

did you see that guy yelling treason at trump and throwing the Russian flags on the floor

#AlertTheDaycareStaff ....is treading :D

I hear indictments are coming
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue Oct 24, 2017 1:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby norton ash » Tue Oct 24, 2017 1:37 pm

https://www.mediaite.com/online/protest ... -at-potus/

Protester ID’d self as Ryan Clayton from Americans Take Action got very close to Trump and threw these flags at him
1:08 PM - Oct 24, 2017
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 24, 2017 1:41 pm

excellent...that's a keeper
I'm gonna put that on youtube



Image

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby SonicG » Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:44 pm

Two very interesting immigration moves...Doing the bidding of China and Russia?

Trump sought dissident's expulsion after hand-delivered letter from China – report
Wall Street Journal says the US president called for Guo Wengui’s deportation after casino owner Steve Wynn brought letter from Beijing government

Donald Trump called for the deportation of a Chinese dissident living in the US, after receiving a request from Beijing hand-delivered by a casino owner with business interests in China, according to a US report.

The Wall Street Journal described a Chinese government attempt to put pressure on Guo Wengui, a real estate tycoon living in exile in New York, to halt his allegations of corruption in high places in China.


Guo Wengui, the maverick Chinese billionaire who threatens to crash Xi's party
Read more
A group of officials from China’s ministry of state security, who entered the US on visas that did not allow them to conduct official business, visited Guo in his New York apartment in May, and used veiled threats in an attempt to persuade Guo to stop his accusatory tweets, which have a wide following in China, and return home. Guo shrugged off the pressure and made a recording of his conversation with the officials, part of which he posted online.

After that visit, FBI agents confronted the Chinese officials at New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The Chinese visitors first claimed to be cultural diplomats and then admitted they were security officials. The agents warned them they were violating the terms of their visa and told them to leave the country.

However, two days later, just before leaving the country, the Chinese officials paid a second visit to Guo, triggering a debate within the administration over whether they should be arrested. FBI agents were posted at John F Kennedy airport ready to carry out the arrests before the officials boarded their flight, but they were not made, after the state department argued it could trigger a diplomatic crisis.

Guo has filed an application for political asylum in the US, which is pending. But according to the Journal’s account, Trump called for Guo’s deportation in a discussion on policy towards China, describing him as a “criminal” at an Oval Office policy meeting in June, on the basis of a letter from Beijing accusing him of serious crimes.

The report said the letter had been hand-delivered to him at a private dinner by Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino magnate and Republican National Committee finance chairman with interests in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau, for which Wynn relies on Beijing for licensing.

The marketing director for Wynn Resorts Ltd, Michael Weaver, told the Journal in a written statement: “[T]hat report regarding Mr Wynn is false. Beyond that, he doesn’t have any comment.”

Weaver did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on what part of the story was false and whether Wynn had ever delivered a letter from the Chinese government to Trump.

The Journal report said that aides tried to persuade Trump out of going ahead with Guo’s deportation, noting he was a member of the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. The aides later ensured that the deportation would not go ahead.

There was no immediate response from the White House or the state department to a request to comment on the report. A state department representative told the Journal: “Decisions on these kinds of matters are based on interagency consensus.”

A justice department representative said: “It is a criminal offense for an individual, other than a diplomatic or consular officer or attache, to act in the United States as an agent of a foreign power without prior notification to the attorney general.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... are_btn_fb


State Department Reportedly Revokes Visa Of Magnitsky Act Campaigner

The State Department has reportedly revoked a visa for British citizen Bill Browder, a hedge fund manager turned human rights activist responsible for the Magnitsky Act. The 2012 U.S. law is aimed at punishing Russian officials believed responsible for the death in a Moscow prison of Sergei Magnitsky, who was allegedly beaten and denied medical care.

The canceling of Browder's visa came on the same day that the Kremlin issued yet another international arrest warrant for him via Interpol.

The Magnitsky Act, which freezes the assets and bans visas for certain Russians, including those close to Vladimir Putin, "touched off a nasty confrontation with the Kremlin, and the two sides have been trying ever since to undermine the credibility of the other. Recently, however, Russian prosecutors have taken that effort to a remarkable new level, claiming that Mr. Magnitsky was actually murdered by Mr. Browder," according to The New York Times.

Browder, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, was once the largest private foreign investor in Russia. Magnitsky was his accountant and attorney. You can hear him here in a July interview with NPR, with a thorough take here by NPR's Miles Parks.

As NPR's Greg Myre reported in July:

"The Magnitsky Act re-emerged has a front-burner topic ... in connection with the investigations surrounding President Trump's campaign and possible links to Russian meddling in last year's presidential race.
"Russia has lobbied hard for repeal of the act. That's what Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya said she was doing when she met with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York."
EUobserver writes that as in the previous four "Red Notices" rejected by Interpol, the latest such notice exploits a loophole called a "diffusion notice."

According to the websites:

"Interpol rejected them all on grounds that they were politically motivated, but Interpol member states can file diffusions without any oversight.
"The diffusions, which are circulated to all members, often stay in national police databases even if Interpol later deletes them from its central system."
The latest move by Russia has angered defenders of Browder, including Michael McFaul, the ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama from 2012-2014.

McFaul tweeted "this is outrageous" and called on President Trump and the State Department to "fix this now."
McFaul's concern was picked up by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was fired earlier this year by President Trump. Bharara "seconded" McFaul in the retweet, adding in a subsequent tweet that Russia's allegation that Browder may have killed Magnitsky is a "farce."

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... campaigner
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Heaven Swan » Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:50 pm

Image


Image
"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 9:26 am

Image

Tell ICE to Close Rosa Maria's Deportation Case!


Dear DHS Acting Secretary Elaine Duke:

I write to ask that you administratively close Rosa Maria’s immigration deportation case. I understand that this child is now being held, away from her family, at a children's shelter in San Antonio. I ask that you immediately close Rosa Maria’s deportation case so that this family can focus on reuniting with their daughter.

This child, just 10, has Cerebral Palsy and has the mental age of a 5 year ol. On October 24th she was unjustly detained by CBP agents on her way to an emergency surgery. Instead of releasing her to her family, instead Customs and Border Protection has labeled her as a danger and a priority for deportation.

We demand that you now take action and immediately close this child’s immigration case. This family, who still lives in Laredo, Texas, will be detained if they try to cross the immigration check-point to take their child to immigration court. Rosa Maria should never have been placed into removal proceedings, we now ask that you administratively close her proceedings.

http://dreamactivist.org/national/rosamaria/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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