Donald Trump is a lunatic #25thAmendment- #impeachTrumpagain

As a registered nurse, I have repeatedly called on Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, to require for Donald Trump to receive a cognitive assessment and psychiatric consultant's opinion about his ability to function.  

Echo report published in the Des Moines Register, by Donnelle Eller

Donald Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly told a Des Moines audience Tuesday that his former boss can’t admit to making a mistake because “his manhood is at issue here". (Maine Writer- oh....paaaazeeeze! There's no "manhood", just look at the size of his hands, IMO.)

“I don't understand it, although I had to deal with it every day," said Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general who served as Trump’s top aide from July 31, 2017, until his Jan. 2, 2019, resignation.

His comments came in a conversation led by Anthony Scaramucci, who had served just 10 days as White House communications director in July 2017 when Kelly fired him after Scaramucci made accusations against other top White House staffers. The two have been carrying on a dialogue as featured speakers at various events since early in 2019, after making amends.

Their appearance Tuesday was a highlight of the Peoples Co.'s annual Land Investment Expo, at the Iowa Events Center. 

Kelly said that he supported using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, after Trump supporters violently breached the U.S. Capitol and five people died, including a Capitol police officer.

The violence followed a rally where the president repeatedly made false claims that the election had been stolen from him and called for his supporters to fight back as Congress moved to confirm the Electoral College vote for Democrat Joe Biden.

In Des Moines, IA, Kelly said Trump needs to appeal to Americans for peace, as top law enforcement officials express growing concern about the potential for violence, leading up to Biden's Jan. 20th inauguration.

The president "should make an appeal to every American, I don't care what the issue is, that you have an absolute right to protest, an absolute right to say what you want, but you have no right to break things, to destroy things," Kelly said. "You have absolutely no right to do violence."

Moreover, Kelly said he believes the U.S. will have enough National Guard troops and law enforcement officers on hand to protect Biden and those who attend his inauguration.

"But we have to, as Americans, take a breath here, and say, 'Why is this happening?' and start talking with each other," he said.

Donald Trump speaks fake words - "locked and loaded" for what?

"Trump drew a red line. And with that line, he painted himself into a corner."- The Las Vegas Sun editorial 

This is an excellent editorial!

Stupid Donald Trump spends time telling lies about what he actually says, as though people who hear his fake words have faulty auditory nerves in our ears and brains. I can't figure out how anybody with integrity can possibly work for him. Moreover, because the international community has figured out how vulnerable Donald Trump is to his own bad judgement, the world leaders are either laughing their asses off behind closed doors every time he speaks or, like the Iranian leader, Hassan Rouhani, they continue to test his stupidity, to prove his incompetence.

"Locked and Loaded" is another example of how Donald Trump uses fake words and, in so doing, continues his idiotic streak.

When will Republicans wake up to Donald Trump's ignorance?

This editorial was published in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper:

Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019

The White House has tried to walk back Donald Trump’s “locked and loaded” tweet after this past weekend’s attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, but the damage is already done.

Trump drew a red line. And with that line, he painted himself into a corner. Now, he’s left with no good options for moving forward.

Take military action? Trump repeatedly has stated disdain at getting the U.S. into another prolonged conflict, and there’s little appetite for it in Congress or even in Trump’s base. Yet if he doesn’t take action after making his reckless tweet, it will signal to Iran that it can get away with the kind of aggression it apparently carried out in the Saudi attacks.

This lose-lose situation for the U.S. is the direct culmination of the chaos of the Trump administration and the instability of Trump himself.

This is a president who acts on impulse, has no understanding of geopolitics and no interest in learning, disdains opinions that differ from his own and is motivated by self-interests. 

Also, he appeared happy to be manipulated by the Saudis, which became clear after the slaying of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and with his approval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia over a bipartisan uproar in Congress.

Jamal Khashoggi (1958-2018)

Then came Trump’s tweets after the attacks, in which he made his foolish “locked and loaded” comment and announced that the White House was waiting to hear from the Saudis “under what terms we would proceed.”

This is a dark hour. The U.S. can’t let the attacks on oil resources go unchecked, but Trump long ago demolished the crucial structure for determining how such a response is determined. In its place is a culture where staff appeases the erratic president like a petulant tyrant and even bends reality to meet his twisted version of it, as proven most recently in the Sharpie incident.

Dissension with Trump is not tolerated by the White House. Just ask the parade of Cabinet members Trump has kicked out — James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, John Bolton, Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, etc.

Worse, all of his acting appointees in Cabinet and other key slots are now coming back to bite us — just when we need adults in the room, we have the withered losers Trump has gathered around him.

With this reality show approach, Trump eliminated the give-and-take that helps leaders see situations from all angles and make well-rounded decisions. His attacks on allies and praise for murderous dictators undermined America’s credibility as a global leader, and his war on facts crippled trust in the White House among Americans.

Now, with the Middle East on the verge of exploding in conflict, this is where the terrifying consequences of Trump’s election play out. The dreaded 3 a.m. call may indeed soon come.

If and when it does, it will be answered by a president who won’t or can’t even read a briefing paper. And unlike the situation with the hurricane maps, Iran won’t appease Trump’s bumbling of facts like his toady staff members did.

It is in times like these that the U.S. needs solid allies who trust our steadiness just as much as we trust theirs — and Trump has destroyed that too by savaging allies and cozying up to enemies.

If he’s not getting orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Saudis — or swooning in love with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un — he’s lost.

The Saudi attacks and Trump’s bumbling response were the outcome of tearing up the Iran agreement in the name of political theatrics and red-meat tweets to Trump’s base.

If and when the 0-dark-thirty call does come, someone — anyone — needs to make sure Trump doesn’t push the wrong button at the wrong time. Here’s hoping that situation doesn’t come to pass.

When voters go to the polls in 2020, it’s vital to remember moments like these!

Donald Trump's paranoia

Trump’s World- Donald Trump believes there's a coup. He's freaked by The New York Times, "anonymous" opinion and he's seeing "enemies everywhere", reports Gabriel Sherman* in Vanity Fair.

With "Anonymous" still on the loose and the “administrative state” unchecked, the last person Trump trusts is Stephen Miller (OMG - that's Joseph Goebbels reincarnated or Bela Lagosse's ghost).

As Hurricane Florence (September 2018) bears down on the Carolinas, Donald Trump’s West Wing is still struggling to recover from yet another deluge of horrible news.

On September 11, Bob Woodward’s publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Woodward’s new book, Fear, has sold more than 750,000 copies and is on its way to a ninth printing. A CNN poll released this week showed Trump’s approval rating plummeting to 36 percent. 

With the midterm elections less than two months away, the West Wing is girding for Republicans to lose the House and even the Senate, sources said. 

Ivanka Trump is even worried about impeachment, a source close to her told me. “It’s just horrible,” a former White House official said.

As the parade of former allies and employees who’ve turned on him gets longer, Trump is increasingly embittered. 

According to sources, Trump has been furious at former economic adviser Gary Cohn and staff secretary Rob Porter, for their apparent cooperation with Woodward’s book. 

“Trump thinks he took Gary in and gave him a job when he was going nowhere at Goldman,” a Trump adviser told me. According to the adviser, Trump let it be known to Cohn and Porter that he would attack them publicly if they didn’t disavow the book. (On Tuesday, they both did.) “The president has had it,” a former West Wing official said. “When books like this come out, he tends to shut down and calls up people he sees on TV saying good things about him.”

But Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. 

Sources told Gabriel Sherman that Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. 

His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. 

Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.

Besides family, one of the only people Trump continues to trust is Stephen Miller. “The op-ed has validated Miller’s view, which was also Steve Bannon’s, that there’s an ‘administrative state’ out to get Trump,” a Republican close to the White House said. “There is a coup, and it’s not slow-rolling or concealed,” Bannon told me. “Trump believes there’s a coup,” a person familiar with his thinking said. Trump’s relationship with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which was already strained, has become almost nonexistent, a former official said.

The West Wing is bracing for the climate to worsen. The increasing likelihood that Democrats will make big gains in the midterms is frustrating the White House’s efforts to get nominations confirmed in the Senate. 

According to a source, Johnny DeStefano,who’s in charge of personnel, has complained that Mitch McConnell’s staff will only focus on confirming judges before the midterms, leaving many important appointments, such as ones in the Export-Import Bank, unfilled. 

Ivanka and Jared Kushner, meanwhile, continue to agitate for Trump to replace Chief of Staff John Kelly with a more pliable manager. 

Ivanka recently asked a friend about Republican political adviser and former lobbyist Wayne Berman, a source briefed on the conversation said. 

Another name Ivanka has discussed is former federal prosecutor Matt Whitaker, who’s serving as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff (Axios reported Whitaker is also a candidate to replace White House counsel Don McGahn).

Cliche ~ those who ignore history are doomed to repeat

Laurel Leff, author of an essay published in The Conversation ~ Associate Professor of Journalism, Northeastern University

The result of racism

Holocaust historians’ first impulse is to reject comparisons between those dark decades and our present. We don’t want to be perceived as abusing history for political purposes, or engaging in overly emotional analyses.

But then comes a moment when it’s not possible to avoid parallels.

For me, that moment came two weeks ago.

I study the American response to the Holocaust. 

I was preparing to deliver a conference paper on U.S. officials’ false claim that the nation’s inflexible immigration laws gave them no choice but to deny visas to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in the 1930s and early 1940s – and historians’ repetition of this false claim. 

From every media outlet came Trump administration officials spewing similar hollow arguments.

Wrong minded ~ The law made me do it!

During the Nazi era, the claim was based on the 1924 immigration law that set annual worldwide quotas, as well as country-by-country limits, on the number of immigrants to be admitted to the United States.

The problem with the claim, and the idea that U.S. officials had no choice but to follow the law and limit immigration, is that the quotas were never even close to being filled from 1933 to 1945, the 12 years of the Nazi regime.

About 200,000 refugees from Nazi Europe were admitted during that period to the U.S., while at least another 200,000 could have been under existing quotas. The quota for Germans of about 26,000 was filled in just one year, in 1939. In every other year, the quota ranged from 7 percent to 70 percent filled.

The law didn’t prevent U.S. officials from admitting more refugees. Officials chose to interpret and implement the nation’s immigration laws so as to exclude as many refugees from Nazi Europe as possible.

Yet at the time, and in many historical accounts, officials consistently blamed the law. That includes Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who explained why his administration could not help European Jews in 1943.

“American immigration policy was expressed [solely] in the laws enacted by Congress, which the executive branch had no power to alter,” said Long.

I intended at the conference to try to explain why so many historians cling to “the law-made-me-do-it” narrative, assuming that that narrative was all history.

It wasn’t.
History repeats

As criticism of the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border ramped up in mid-June, U.S. officials trotted out their version of Long’s argument – though in less elevated language.

Asked why the administration adopted the “zero tolerance” policy, which led to criminal prosecutions of all those crossing the border seemingly illegally, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a Thursday press conference, “because it’s the law, that’s what the law states.”

Pressed again, Sanders said, “Again, the laws are the one, the laws that have been on the books for over a decade and the president is enforcing them.”

Sanders wasn’t the first Trump administration official to blame “the law” for immigration policy.

“We don’t deport anyone,” John Kelly declared, when he was still Homeland Security secretary. “American law deports people.”

Nor has Sanders been the last.

Kelly’s successor, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the president have all said at various times – and then taken it back – that they had no choice.

Jobs and security

The Trump administration has justified its anti-immigrant policy as a way to help unemployed Americans. So did the Hoover administration and then the Roosevelt administration.

Faced with the Great Depression, Hoover decided in 1930 to limit the number of immigrants allowed into the country, because – supposedly – they would take Americans’ jobs.

Hoover did it by changing the interpretation of a decades-old provision that enabled officials to deny visas to those who were “likely to become a public charge.” Under the new interpretation, almost every applicant was found likely to become a public charge with no guidance or consistency in what that meant.
Immigration dropped 90 percent in the first five months.

From 1933 to 1945, the Roosevelt administration continued to use this interpretation of the likely-to-become-a-public-charge clause and other provisions to keep immigration under what the law allowed, even after the economy picked up.

The Trump administration has claimed immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and to be national security risks, using unrepresentative anecdotes and amorphous fears to justify its policy.

So did the Roosevelt administration. One State Department lawyer maintained that officials should deny visas to those who had criminal tendencies, even if they have no criminal record.

Government officials during the Roosevelt administration also assumed a large proportion of immigrants, particularly Jewish ones, were communists determined to subvert democracy. They denied visas on that basis.

Officials also assumed German Jewish refugees would be spies for the Third Reich. That was based upon the flimsiest of evidence: a Cuban ambassador’s claim some Jewish refugees celebrated the fall of Paris to the Nazis and a former U.S. ambassador to France’s allegation that German Jewish refugees made up half the 200 spies the French Army arrested.

“I believe you should instruct our counter-espionage services of all sorts to keep an especially vigilant eye on the Jewish refugees from Germany,” William Bullitt, the ex-ambassador, wrote Roosevelt. “Sad, isn’t it?’”

Jewish refugees didn’t turn out to be spies. Of the 23,000 “enemy aliens” who arrived in 1940, for example, fewer than one-half of 1 percent were taken into custody for questioning. Only a fraction of those were indicted – for violating immigration regulations, not for espionage.

Denials of visas based on national security concerns and other reasons, however, meant that just 21,000 refugees entered the United States between Pearl Harbor and the war’s end, with quotas from Axis-controlled countries only 10 percent filled. Historian David Wyman estimates that the U.S. could have saved nearly 200,000 victims of the Nazis by allowing them to enter the country.
Who gets to be American

Based on my research for a chapter I wrote in “Allied Powers’ Response to the Holocaust,” a forthcoming book edited by Alexander Groth and Tony Tanke, I have concluded that U.S. government officials’ fears about refugees from Nazism being public charges, criminals or security risks were primarily pretexts for their real concern. That concern was that allowing in too many refugees would fundamentally alter the nature of American society.

Many decision-makers, particularly in the State Department, hailed from the WASP elite and perceived ambitious Jews as threatening their exclusive domains. The fewer Jews in the United States, the greater the chance of preserving the country as it had been and as they wanted it to continue to be. These officials justified any position and tolerated any cruelty, including refusing to change immigration policies once it was known the Germans were exterminating all of Europe’s Jews.

Roosevelt administration officials turned out to be both right and wrong in their fears.

They were right that the European refugees who came before, during and after the war, though small in number, reshaped the world of higher education, the arts and the sciences and contributed to the rise of the postwar meritocracy. That postwar meritocracy broke down the class-based system that kept Jews and Italians and eventually blacks and Latinos out of elite institutions.

But they were wrong that these changes undermined American democracy or changed the country’s spirit.

The nation was better off letting in 200,000 refugees between 1933 and 1945. It would have been even better off filling the quotas and allowing in the additional 200,000 refugees. And it would have been better off still had the country admitted anyone in need and tried to save all those who were imperiled as the Holocaust unfolded.

Some might object, probably under their breath, that these refugees were different. They were “good” refugees.

But that is not how they were perceived at the time. And that is exactly the point and precisely the parallel.

Donald Trump and unpopular Twitter storms

"Corker (Senator Bob Corker) calls White House ‘an adult day care center’ in response to Trump’s latest Twitter tirade"

Although the above headline, published in The Washington Post, was printed on October 8, 2017, it might just as well have been re-printed as equally relevant on January 3, 2018.  

Nothing has changed since Corker's brutally honest assessment about Donald Trump's bizarre behavior.

Somehow, Donald Trump was unsupervised (where was his supervisor, General John Kelly?) for a period of time overnight, into January 3, 2018. As result, Trump unleashed 17 Tweets, not one of them related to improving the human condition.

In fact, the Tweeter storm included a litany of childish, moronic and incendiary messages. They revealed, yet again, that Donald Trump is unqualified to be the leader of the United States. 

Moreover, he's a danger to himself and others.

In October, Senator Corker (R-Tenn.) tweeted, “It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” I suggest that Senator Corker "retweet" his message with tag @Washington Post.

Here is a fact website where @realdonaldtrump tweets are archived. His messages are embarrassing.  

Donald Trump's latest tirade even included a taunt about nuclear war with North Korea's equally unstable leader Kim Jong Un.  

It's beyond belief that a world leader would create such fear by writing incendiary messages on Twitter. Donald Trump must stop this behavior, because he is not making America great by continuing to look so stupid in the eyes of the world. Compounding this idiotic behavior, are the people who are following Trump like he is their pagan idol. They will all be brought down by their failure to stand up to him.  

Trump Says His ‘Nuclear Button’ Is ‘Much Bigger’ Than North Korea’s

These chaotic and dangerous Twitter headlines proves how nothing about Donald Trump is rational and Republicans must stop trying to pretend otherwise.

One unifying fact about Donald Trump is that everybody disapproves of his unpopular Tweeting, especially when he uses the messages to incite danger. Maybe, the US needs a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit our Presidents from using Twitter.