Why Do The Brits Hate Trump? You've Got To Read What One Englishman Said

I found this item on a British forum where the ugliness of Trump was being discussed. A man named Mr. White posted this in response to the prompt, "Why Do The British Dislike Donny the Turd." It is as eloquent as it is cheeky. It has gone viral, and I am sharing it here for my readers.

“A few things spring to mind…

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll.

And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

rump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think

‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy. ’

is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form;

He is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit.

His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.”

Secretly, the Brits have always thought of Americans as boorish bullies, crass and classless Troglodytes. Trump epitomizes these qualities, and for once the Brits have every right to look down their noses at us for electing this monster.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Prominent Americans Call For Reinvestigation of 1960s Political Assassinations

On the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a group of over 60 prominent American citizens, calling itself The Truth and Reconciliation Committee, is calling upon Congress to reopen the investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Signers of the joint statement include Isaac Newton Farris Jr., nephew of Reverend King and past president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., a close collaborator of Reverend King; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, children of the late senator. Other signatories include G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which determined in 1979 that President Kennedy was the victim of a probable conspiracy; Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas who tried to save President Kennedy's life and saw clear evidence he had been struck by bullets from the front and the rear; Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower who served as a national security advisor to the Kennedy White House; Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and a leading global authority on human rights; Hollywood artists Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner and Oliver Stone; political satirist Mort Sahl; and musician David Crosby.

Several noted historians, authors and journalists have also called for new investigations and the release of all government records in accordance with public disclosure acts. Specifically, the JFK Records Act, which called for the full disclosure of all documents by 2017 which has been defied by Trump and all relevant government agencies.

According to a statement in OpEd News, "The Truth and Reconciliation Committee views its joint statement as the opening of a long campaign aimed at shining a light on dark national secrets. As the public transparency campaign proceeds, citizens across the country will be encouraged to add their names to the petition. The national effort seeks to confront the forces behind America's democratic decline, a reign of secretive power that long precedes the recent rise of authoritarianism."

Historian James Douglass, author of "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," issued this statement, "The organized killing of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin, and RFK was a mortal attack on our democracy. We've been walking in the valley of the dead ever since. Our campaign is all about recovering the truth embodied in the movement they led. Yes, the transforming, reconciling power of truth will indeed set us free."

As a lifelong JFK assassination researcher, I have waited over 55 years for such a movement. Will this forceful resolution finally move us closer to an honest and complete public disclosure of the full truth? I'll have to see it to believe it. In the meantime, for those of you who want an immediate glimpse at what really transpired in Dallas in 1963, you can read my book "JFK and the End of America: Inside the LBJ/Allen Dulles Plot that Killed Kennedy."

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

There are more Children in Trump's Concentration Camps than Previously Reported. Time for Kirstjen "Eva Braun" Nielsen to be Fired.

A new government report indicates that the kidnapping, separation and detention of children is worse than we thought. Which raises two questions: why would we ever believe anything Trump says, and how does Kirstjen Nielsen still have a job?

While the administration said that more than 2,500 children had been kidnapped under in 2018, the Office of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General has confirmed that officials were separating families long before that. "How many more children were separated is unknown by us and HHS,” the OIG said Thursday. According to NBC News, “some may have been released to family or nonrelative sponsors, but it is not known how many have been reunified.”

Newly empowered House Democrats weighed in on this humanitarian disaster. “I have been seeking information that would help reunify these children since last year, but the Trump administration refuses to comply,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who now leads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “As Chairman, I will do everything in my power to obtain the documents I’ve requested to ensure the administration is held accountable for this callous and immoral policy.”

What is unknowable is how the long-term emotional and psychological damage will affect the victimized children. At least there is not a demented Mengele-type doctor performing sadistic experiments on twins, right? The terrible thing is, I wouldn't put it past Herr Gropenfuhrer.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Robert Reich Predicts Trump Will Be Impeached After Mueller Report

Here is a hopeful article that appeared in a recent edition of Daily Kos. It is a conversation between economist Robert Reich and a Republican friend of his who used to serve in Congress: I have copied it here verbatim:

(ME is Robert Reich; HE is the Republican.)


"ME: So, what are you hearing?

HE: Trump is in deep sh*t.


ME: Tell me more.


HE: When it looked like he was backing down on the wall, Rush and the crazies on Fox went ballistic. So he has to do the shutdown to keep the base happy. They’re his insurance policy. They stand between him and impeachment.


ME: Impeachment? No chance. Senate Republicans would never go along.


HE (laughing): Don’t be so sure. Corporate and Wall Street are up in arms. Trade war was bad enough. Now, you’ve got Mattis resigning in protest. Trump pulling out of Syria, giving Putin a huge win. This dumbass shutdown. The stock market in free-fall. The economy heading for recession.


ME: But the base loves him.


HE: Yeah, but the base doesn’t pay the bills.


ME: You mean …


HE: Follow the money, friend.


ME: The GOP’s backers have had enough?


HE: They wanted Pence all along.


ME: So …


HE: So they’ll wait until Mueller’s report, which will skewer Trump. Pelosi will wait, too. Then after the Mueller bombshell, she’ll get 20, 30, maybe even 40 Republicans to join in an impeachment resolution.


ME: And then?


HE: Senate Republicans hope that’ll be enough – that Trump will pull a Nixon.


ME: So you think he’ll resign?


HE (laughing): No chance. He’s fu*king out of his mind. He’ll rile up his base into a fever. Rallies around the country. Tweet storms. Hannity. Oh, it’s gonna be ugly. He’ll convince himself he’ll survive.


ME: And then?


HE: That’s when Senate Republicans pull the trigger.


ME: Really? Two-thirds of the Senate?


HE: Do the math. 47 Dems will be on board, so you need 19 Republicans. I can name almost that many who are already there. Won’t be hard to find the votes.


ME: But it will take months. And the country will be put through a ringer.


HE: I know. That’s the worst part.


ME: I mean, we could have civil war.


HE: Hell, no. That’s what he wants, but no chance. His approvals will be in the cellar. America will be glad to get rid of him.


ME: I hope you’re right.


HE: He’s a dangerous menace. He’ll be gone. And then he’ll be indicted, and Pence will pardon him. But the state investigations may put him in the clinker. Good riddance."

My reaction: I'll believe when I see it, and I don't like the Orange Menace getting pardoned. I want this bastard to serve hard prison time for what he has put the country through. Fuck this lying, sadistic sociopath and his stupid, greedy family.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Trump is Diagnosed as a Sadist by Prominent Psychiatrist

In a recent interview with Salon magazine, Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist, warned America that there is a monster in the White House and that this is not going to end well for the country. All reasonable people know that Trump is a bonafide narcissist, but Dr. Gartner says it's much worse. Why? Because Trump has a uniquely malignant form of narcissism--he is sadistic narcissist, one who is not only incapable of empathy but who actually enjoys inflicting pain on others. And when he is threatened, he will viciously lash out with whatever means he has, no mater how violent, harmful, or destructive those means are. Do I have to remind you he has the nuclear codes?

Dr. Gartner put it this way: “When I first started talking about Trump as a malignant narcissist, people could see the narcissism, the paranoia and the antisocial element. But the fourth component of malignant narcissism is sadism.

"You see it in everything he does, from the separating of the children at the border to how Trump tortures anyone who doesn't give him what he wants. There's a way in which he takes a kind of manic glee in causing harm and pain and humiliation to other people.

“Malignant narcissists deteriorate. When they gain power, they become more inflamed in their grandiosity and in their paranoia. They also become more unrestrained in their sadism and in their will to [maintain] power. Malignant narcissists like Trump are antisocial and have a willingness to do anything to get and keep power. The noted psychologist Erich Fromm actually argued that such personalities then begin to verge on psychosis at that point, becoming so grandiose and paranoid that they really live on the boundary of psychosis and reality.”

As Trump is emboldened by fellow sadists (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, "Gym" Jordan, Steve King, etc.), his condition is exacerbated because his enablers give him a pass. He feels like he can get away with anything. (For his entire life, Trump has never been held accountable for any of his atrocities.) And as Trump grows older and dementia kicks in, the danger he poses becomes much worse.

"Cognitive deterioration only goes in one direction. It doesn't stand still and it doesn't get better. No, Trump is not ready for the nursing home. But that doesn't mean he's capable of managing the White House. What if there is a global crisis like a war? What if Trump refuses to step down, if he is impeached and convicted? Once you factor in nuclear weapons the possibilities are truly horrific."

There you have it America. It's going to end like Stanley Kubrick predicted it would in Dr. Strangelove. "We'll meet again. Don't know where; don't know when..."

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

"Mother" Tucker Carlson's Vulgar, Racist Rant is Just a Projection of His Own Deep Psychological Trauma

Night after night on FNC (Fascist News Channel), Tucker Carlson (think O'Reilly with more venom and hate to spew) vomits out of his vile mouth the ugliest, most hateful sewage of anyone on his despicable channel. And that's saying something. Take the other night....here's the transcript of his monologue:

"Our [Democratic] leaders demand that you shut up and accept [immigration]. We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.

Previous leaders of our country committed sins -- we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans. That's the argument they make.

What is more predictable is how leaders of the caravan are starting to talk. Suddenly, they sound like community college professors from Long Beach. Entitled, cut off from reality, and highly aggressive.

Yesterday a group of leaders of the caravan marched into the U.S. consulate in Mexico, and demanded $50,000 to return to their own countries.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Nope, cynical shakedown artists who have been watching too much CNN.

No surprise there. When rich liberals tell you that America owes you a comfortable life, nobody should be shocked when you believe them.”

First of all, since when does $50,000 buy anyone a comfortable life? That piddly amount wouldn't even pay for Tucker's bowties. And what, exactly, does he mean by immigrants will make our country "dirtier?" Brown people are dirty? Or migrants who have traveled hundreds of miles trying to flee oppression, poverty, and corruption are beneath his privileged existence? No one is more entitled than Tucker who has never done anything productive or beneficial for society. Born into a rich California family, little Tucker was sent off to exclusive boarding schools where he learned that being white in America entitles him to superior status. Looking down his smug nose at those who weren't born with a silver foot in their mouths became a lucrative pastime for him.

But the seminal moment in little Fucker's--I mean Tucker's--life came when he was six years old. His liberal mom abandoned him to lead a "bohemian" life, in pursuit of artistic expression, humanism, and the betterment of society. Little Tucky never has recovered from that abandonment by mommy, and now he has devoted his life to taking out his vengeance on all liberals. That's also why many wags refer to Carlson as "Mother Tucker."

A sad and spiteful man, Mother Tucker now spends his days railing against those he imagines his mommy liked more than him; which, in essence, is everyone other than him. With this knowledge, one can read the obvious mommy (liberal) hate in his mean and filthy diatribes. For instance, let me interpret his above rant:

"Mommy demanded that I shut up and accept the well-being of someone besides myself. We have a moral obligation to help the world's poor she tells me, even if it makes me angry, foul-mouthed, and hateful. I have to atone for my sins.

Mommy committed sins, and I must pay the price for her abandonment by welcoming others into the country to have the same privileges and luxuries afforded me. That's the argument my Mommy made.

These dirty immigrants have no right to ask for asylum from oppression, poverty and corruption because Mommy abandoned me to help them. And I will always resent them for that.

I hate huddled masses yearning to be free, and I will shakedown gullible Fox News viewers for every penny I can. When Mommy told me I was entitled to a comfortable, well-adjusted life, she was lying."

That's Mother Tucker Carlson. A sick and twisted narcissist with a platform to spew hate on the most sick and twisted channel in America.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Now That the Endless Bush Eulogies are Finally Over, Here is Some Ugly Truth About 41 and His Connection to 11/22/63

In 1962 CIA asset and ex-Russian royalty George DeMohrenschildt met and befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. This odd pairing of an anti-communist aristocrat and a “Marxist” loner in the city of right-wing fanaticism is even more suspicious when one considers that DeMohrenschildt was well acquainted with George H.W. “Poppy” Bush. DeMohrenschildt’s nephew, Edward Gordon Hooker, roomed with Bush at Andover in their youths. Their eastern prep-school ties aside, Bush and DeMohrenschildt, were connected as oil entrepreneurs and CIA operatives in Texas and the Caribbean in the early 1960s. And many years after the assassination, when Bush was CIA Director and the House Select Committee on Assassinations sought to question DeMohrenschildt about his involvement with Oswald, the paths of the two Georges crossed again in a tragic way. DeMorhenschildt was found shot to death after writing a letter to Bush about his relationship with Oswald and its importance in the assassination.

From my book, JFK and the End of America:

“The Bush family-George DeMohrenschildt relationship screams JFK assassination connection. The two Georges knew one another from their days in the Texas oil business, but after 11/22/63, H.W. appears to have cut ties with DeMohrenschildt. When Bush was appointed head of the CIA by Gerald Ford in 1976, DeMohrenschildt made an unwelcome return to Bush’s life. As the HSCA was gearing up to re-investigate the Kennedy assassination, DeMohrenschildt’s name resurfaced. The CIA under Bush, naturally, would want to suppress the Bush-DeMohrenschildt-Oswald link, but DeMohrenschildt got nervous and went public when he got spooked by mysterious government agents who began pressuring him. He got so fed up with it that he took the extraordinary measure of writing a letter to his old pal Bush. The letter, dated September 5, 1976, is written in intelligence-coded language that both Georges would have understood quite well. It contains the tone of a desperate man, begging the one person he knows can save him from his coming demise. It reads, in part, ‘Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere…[possibly by] FBI.’ What exactly prompted DeMohrenschildt’s hopeless situation? He tells Bush that, ‘I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people,’ and then implores Bush to ‘remove the net from around us.’231

When DeMohrenschildt sent the letter, he signed his own death warrant. No information could have been more dangerous to the CIA and Bush than their direct connection to the Kennedy assassination through Oswald’s best friend in Dallas before the assassination. The fact that DeMohrenschildt had attempted to reveal the truth of the assassination in his own book almost ensured that he would be called as a witness before the HSCA. Bush and the CIA could not allow this to happen.

Bush’s response to DeMohrenschildt was cordial, but sent a diabolically subtle and unmistakable message to his friend. It read, in part, ‘…my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years…I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter’s death a few years ago and the current poor state of your wife’s health.’232 Translation: The CIA has checked into your matter, and has found nothing to support your allegations that government agents are targeting you or that your life is in danger. It must all be a figment of your imagination due to your deteriorating mental condition, caused by your daughter’s death and your wife’s poor health. Contacting me was a huge mistake.

After reading Bush’s response, DeMohrenschildt must have deduced two things for certain: 1) He could expect no help from Bush and the CIA. He was out in the cold, and they were not going to bring him back in; and 2) His days were numbered.

DeMohrenschildt fled for Europe and stayed there until the spring of 1977. Upon returning to the U.S., he was scheduled to appear before the HSCA which sent an investigator to DeMohrenschildt’s Florida residence. That very day, DeMohrenschildt was found shot to death in his home; a shotgun was found nearby. It was ruled a suicide by police, but his wife Jeanne, the former Jeanne LeGon who worked with Abraham Zapruder at Nardi’s in Dallas, vehemently disputed this. A year later she had the courage to speak freely to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She stated that her husband George had not committed suicide and that Oswald was a government agent who had not killed the President. She also implied that the CIA had killed Kennedy.233

Found in DeMohrenschildt’s belongings was the address of ‘Bush, George H.W., 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum, Midland, Texas.’234 This was not the only JFK suspect who was found dead with Bush’s information on his person. CIA pilot and drug runner Barry Seal, who may have flown a getaway plane out of Dallas on 11/22/63, had George Bush’s private phone number in his pocket when found shot to death.”

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

LBJ Created the Sham Warren Commission, Full of JFK Haters, 55 Years Ago Today

Fearful that an honest investigation (several were being discussed) of his predecessor's assassination, just a week before, would reveal his involvement, Lyndon Johnson, on November 29, 1963, created the Warren Commission. We now know that this commission was a fraudulent enterprise meant to cover up the truth, not expose it. The following excerpt from my book--JFK and the End of America--addresses the matter:

Of all the things the mainstream media overlooked in the wake of the assassination, one of the most blatant indicators of Lyndon Johnson trying to cover his tracks was his cunningly shrewd selection of Warren Commission members. Republicans were in the majority, and nary a liberal was to be found, unless we count Earl Warren. As its titular head, Warren imbued the panel with an integrity it did not deserve; he had a reputation for progressive values and was despised by the extreme right-wing. Johnson saw his appointment as a way to appease liberals and Kennedy loyalists. But Warren was a reluctant appointee, and he rarely showed up for any of the hearings. The meat of the commission work was performed by Kennedy haters.

Johnson appointed just two Democrats—Richard Russell and Hale Boggs—both southerners who had opposed JFK’s domestic agenda especially in the area of civil rights. This is a polite way of saying that even the Democrats on the Commission were not Kennedy admirers. It is easy to forget that the Democratic party in the early 1960s was evenly split between conservatives and liberals. Southern Democrats were nearly unanimously right-wing ideologues; much the same way that Republicans are today. Many of them, like John Connally and Strom Thurmond, switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican when the domestic strife of the ‘60s caused politicians to choose sides that more closely identified with their policies. Today southern Democrats are as rare as southern Republicans were in 1963. The point is, Johnson could rely on his Dixiecrat friends to avoid digging too deeply into the ugly truths of who really planned and executed the murder of a President for whom they bore no love. Still in all, despite their political opposition to JFK, Russell, Sherman Cooper (Republican) and Boggs had misgivings about the commission’s findings that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally. Not until John McCloy came up with compromise language did the three dissenters acquiesce to the others’ magic-bullet charade. But Russell, according to author Gerald McKnight, never understood the full ramifications of conceding to McCloy. McKnight writes that, “Because of Russell’s chronic absenteeism he never fully comprehended that the final report’s no-conspiracy conclusion was inextricably tied to…the single-bullet theory.240 Cooper may have been similarly oblivious—he attended barely half the meetings. Boggs’ attendance was also sporadic, but his dissent appeared to disturb the commission’s hierarchy more than others. He was bugged and followed by the FBI for years, and he vehemently objected to J. Edgar Hoover’s Gestapo tactics. (Boggs’ post-Warren Commission troubles and his mysterious disappearance are addressed in a later chapter.)

Over the life of the commission, it was three of the Republicans who exerted the most influence on the eventual whitewash: Allen Dulles, Arlen Specter (Dulles’s intrepid and ambitious lawyer) and Congressman Gerald Ford. Specter expertly badgered and discredited hostile witnesses (read, witnesses who had knowledge of conspiratorial activity) and concocted the magic-bullet scenario which allowed the commission to frame the dead patsy for the crime. Because of the time constraints inherent in a frame count of the Zapruder film, Oswald had only six seconds to fire three shots, and two of them—the complete miss and the head shot—were already accounted for. That left just one bullet to do the rest of the damage. Specter’s strained contrivance took care of that problem for the plotters. One bullet, he said, despite all evidence to the contrary, entered the President’s back, exited his throat, entered Connally’s back, broke his wrist, tore through his ribs, landed in his leg, and came out on a Dallas stretcher in pristine condition. No one but Specter saw this as an even remotely logical occurrence; still it exists in the official record today, despite the fact that no bullet fired in the history of the world has ever duplicated this feat, and despite the fact that no Parkland medical personnel saw a rear entry wound on the President’s body. The Bethesda doctors did see a rear entry wound, but the wound was too low on the President’s back to have exited his throat. The only way that wound could have been made was by body alterationists in transit from Parkland to Bethesda. The body alterationists created a wound that couldn’t be easily accounted for. Specter tried, but he needed a big assist from Gerald Ford to complete the sham.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

The Death of America, and its Slow Descent into the Quasi-Fascist Nightmare of Trump, Happened 55 Years Ago Today

It was 55 years ago today that America took a wrong turn in Dallas from which it has never found its way back. November 22, 1963, marked the beginning of the end of a genuine American democracy. What died that day was more than a U.S. presidency; it was the hope we would truly fulfill our destiny as a beacon of peace and morality in the world. Today our government is as corrupt and venal as a third-world dictatorship, full of greedy liars and unscrupulous conmen. But it wasn’t always this way. Those of you who are old enough to remember the brief era of Kennedy know of what I speak. If you’re not, please read on and learn how we lost our way. What follows is an excerpt from my book JFK and the End of America:

Despite public perception and media insistence to the contrary, the Kennedy family DID believe that JFK was the victim of a deadly conspiracy.

From pp. 342-347: [Those who propagate the lie that Oswald was the killer] still attempt to deny a conspiracy in JFK’s murder by citing Robert Kennedy’s inaction after the assassination. The common cry among the sightless is, “He was Attorney General at the time. If there really was a conspiracy, he could have uncovered it. This is proof that the Kennedy family knew there was no conspiracy.” The appropriate reply to this nonsense is, the Kennedys knew almost immediately that JFK had been killed by a domestic right-wing plot concocted by his many enemies in American intelligence, government and business. But Bobby knew that, with his brother gone, he no longer had the power that goes with being the top law enforcement officer in the country. After 11/22/63 Hoover and Johnson held all the cards. Any public proclamation by Bobby concerning the truth of how his brother died could have easily been dismissed as the deranged ramblings of a man overcome by grief and bitterness; besides, as Bobby privately acknowledged many times, the truth was not going to bring his brother back, and the only thing left to do was to protect his brother’s legacy. JFK’s enemies could have countered any move by Bobby with public revelations of JFK’s sexual affairs.

With no public avenue of justice to pursue domestically, the Kennedys reached out to Russian officials with their private suspicions about who was really behind the assassination. Bobby and Jackie wanted to assure Moscow that they did not blame the Soviets for Jack’s murder, and that Kruschev should continue to advance the peace initiatives he and President Kennedy had undertaken in the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is a cruel irony that the family of the martyred President could only turn to America’s Cold War enemy to convey a terrible truth. A little background is necessary to understand why the Kennedys divulged to the Soviets what they could not speak aloud in America after 11/22/63.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, candidate Kennedy’s tough-on-communism rhetoric was almost a prerequisite to be elected to the highest office in the world. But his stance towards the Soviets softened even before he was sworn in. As early as December 1960 Kennedy made back-channel overtures to Moscow concerning nuclear disarmament and test-ban negotiations.29 Once he took office, he was forced, by political pressure and the hawkish generals and intelligence advisors, to maintain a public anti-Soviet posture, but his fear of global nuclear war always informed his deep desire for détente with the Russians. However, his mistake of assenting to the disastrous Bay of Pigs mission undercut any early attempts of dialing back Cold War tensions. Moscow became suspicious of Kennedy’s real intentions, and an era of renewed superpower aggression began. Kruschev used the Cuban fiasco to bully Kennedy at their Vienna summit in 1961. Kennedy was stunned by Kruschev’s willingness to exacerbate animosities and risk armed confrontation. Tensions culminated in the Missile Crisis of 1962. Two weeks of staring into the nuclear abyss changed the two leaders. Kennedy and Kruschev decided to back away from it all.

For the next year, they forged a tentative but very real alliance in the pursuit of peace and disarmament. It was a sometimes rocky road, what with both men forced by internal war-eager factions to avoid the appearance of weakness, but both Kennedy and Kruschev made great strides in moving towards a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. Kennedy went public with his revolutionary vision on June 10, 1963. His speech at American University that day still reverberates across the decades as the most visionary and courageous of the entire Cold War. In it he praised the Russian people and commiserated with the suffering they endured as our allies in World War II. He proposed that America consider the possibility of peaceful coexistence with our avowed enemies. He lyrically reminded us that, in the end, we shared the same fragile planet with them, they breathed the same air we did, and we both cherished our children’s future. Details of that speech were published in Soviet newspapers, and the reaction from the Kremlin was positive. The dawn of a new era in Soviet-American relations had been set in motion. A nuclear test ban treaty was signed by the superpowers two months later. As part of this process, Jack and Bobby Kennedy nurtured friendly back-channel contacts with Russian officials.

But JFK’s murder, and the news that his accused assassin had indisputable Soviet ties, threatened to undo all of the progress that Kennedy and Kruschev had made in forging a new superpower paradigm. Indeed, this was a critical aspiration of the plotters. Kennedy’s enemies killed him, in large part, because they were angered and terrified by peaceful coexistence with the Soviets. Massive military weapons stockpiles and the domestic contractors who made enormous profits from the manufacture of these weapons were threatened with obsolescence. The CIA feared its usefulness, maybe its very existence, would be extraneous in a world without a Cold War. The right-wing fringe would be deprived of its hot war with the communists. Dallas was their remedy. The framing of Oswald as a Soviet stooge was their attempt to undo all that Kennedy and Kruschev had done.

In early December 1963 the Kennedy family sent a personal emissary, William Walton, to speak with Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat. Bolshakov had met with Bobby Kennedy countless times before, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis the men had come to trust one another as useful conduits for Soviet-American peacekeeping negotiations. Bolshakov was assured by Walton that the Kennedy family was convinced that Oswald did not act alone. Walton’s explicit message contradicted the Kennedys’ subsequent public support of the Warren Commission findings. Walton told the Soviets that pro-fascist reactionaries who despised the President and his policies, and who were “…dissatisfied with…improving relations with the Soviet Union…” had organized the plot; these included, among others, oilmen H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison.30

Notably absent from the Kennedys’ identification of the plotters were Lyndon Johnson and the CIA. Bobby Kennedy initially suspected both, but he was likely dissuaded by intelligence sources who may have been trying to divert blame away from themselves. John McCone, CIA Director at the time, denied intelligence involvement and swore to the Attorney General that he would have known if the CIA had been involved. But it was Richard Helms, the Allen Dulles protégé, who was really running the CIA, and he would have kept McCone in the dark.31 And McCone would not have been privy to the machinations of Allen Dulles’s CIA-in-exile. In later years Bobby reportedly directly confronted Johnson with his knowledge of Johnson’s involvement.

But never did the Kennedys, in any public forum, accuse Johnson and Dulles of engineering the assassination. And Bobby’s reticence to come forward with what he really knew was used by the plotters as a means by which they could exonerate themselves. The reasoning was that if JFK’s own brother believed Oswald acted alone, there was no reason to believe in a conspiracy. LBJ’s surrogates gave their boss cover this way. One of Johnson’ aides, a college professor named John P. Roche, wrote a letter to a newspaper denouncing assassination researchers as “paranoids,” and cited the Kennedy family’s support of the Warren Commission as proof that there was no conspiracy.32

The CIA used the same tactic. In a memo distributed to agency assets at major media outlets, it listed several arguments that CIA-friendly journalists could use to counter Warren Commission critics. Included in the list was the reminder that “Bobby Kennedy…would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy.”33

In private, however, Bobby quietly sought out the truth of Dallas. He knew quite well who his brothers’ dire enemies were, and he directed his close associates to find out what they could. Behind closed doors he engaged in conversations with trusted advisers about assassination scenarios that implicated the CIA, the Mafia, the Joint Chiefs and Texas oilmen. He listened to what they had to say, but remained largely silent. He knew he would not have the power to bring the killers to justice until he himself ascended to the presidency.34

Shortly before his death, Bobby momentarily let his guard down on a campaign trip and revealed to a stunned audience that he knew the Warren Commission was a fraud. On March 25, 1968, at a rally in southern California, he was asked by someone in the audience if he planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s death if he were elected president. Bobby paused and measured his words. “I haven’t answered this question before, but there would be nobody that would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for the…death of President Kennedy than I would.”35

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

JFK Predicted His Own Demise 55 Years Ago Today

It was October 2, 1963, and a remarkable story, written by Richard Starnes, appeared in the Washington Daily News. It claimed that the CIA was working diligently to undermine JFK’s Vietnam policies and that his own Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, was complicit in this subterfuge. Frustrated by South Vietnamese President Diem’s inability to unite his people in resistance to the aggression of the communist North, Kennedy hesitantly agreed to the CIA’s call for a regime change. But he did not sanction the assassination of Diem. On November 1, 1963, the CIA, in a plot concocted by Lucien Conein, murdered Diem in spite of JFK’s wishes. Furious at the CIA’s unwarranted actions, Kennedy vented to Starnes. In that interview, JFK tried to warn the American people that the CIA was out of control and capable of anything, including the murdering its own President.

From pages 170-171 of my book JFK and the End of America:

Together Conein and Lodge, perhaps knowing that JFK’s days were numbered, defied the President and gave the go-ahead to kill Diem. The South Vietnamese generals, having been informed that Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam entirely by 1965, saw the regime change as their only chance to win the war against the North before America left.101 On November 1, just hours before the coup, Lodge lied to Diem by telling him there was nothing to worry about.102 Later that day Diem was assassinated. When JFK received the news he was, according to Arthur Schlesinger, “somber and shaken”; he knew the CIA, through their emissaries Lodge and Conein, had arranged the murder against his wishes. As he had done after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy told intimates that he needed “to do something about those bastards; they should be stripped of their exorbitant power.”103

In his own way, Kennedy was aware of the storm that was coming. He was, in all likelihood, the source for incendiary quotes about the CIA which appeared in major East Coast newspapers in the early fall of 1963; his intent was probably to alert an oblivious public to the dangers the CIA posed to American democracy. Scripps-Howard reporter Richard Starnes wrote an article for the Washington Daily News which ran on October 2 under the headline, “Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam.” In it, Starnes quotes a high U.S. official [President Kennedy] saying that “if the United States ever experiences a Seven Days in May (a reference to a popular early 1960s fictional book detailing the overthrow of a U.S. president), it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.”104 The following day Arthur Krock wrote a sort of corollary piece which ran in the New York Times and was less harsh on the CIA. Still, Krock quoted “a very high American official [Kennedy]” who compared the CIA’s growth to a “malignancy…[and] was not sure even the White House could control…any longer.”105

Less than a month later, Conein pulled off the CIA-connected murder of Diem. Just three weeks after that, Conein was, quite possibly, in Dallas to witness the demise of the CIA’s public enemy number one. On 11/22/63 he (or his identical twin) was photographed with a self-serving smirk on his face as JFK’s limo passes. Kennedy is looking straight ahead and does not notice the Conein lookalike staring directly at him. Less than a minute after this photo was taken, the fatal shots rang out. If Conein played a part in the execution, it was the second time in less than a month that he helped topple a head of state. As Neil Sheehan wrote in A Bright Shining Lie, “[Conein] had accomplished the act that is one of the highest professional aspirations for a [secret agent]—setting up a successful coup d’etat.”106

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Fox News Does Its Best to Ignore Trump's Cronies Being Found Guilty of 16 Felonies

On a day when Trump's campaign manager was found guilty on eight felony counts and his personal lawyer pleaded guilty to eight felony counts, I couldn't resist turning on Fox News to see what the propaganda arm of the administration was saying about the walls closing in on Donny Douchebag. How could FNC ignore this one? Well, Tucker (Joseph Goebbels) Carlson did his best. For most of the show Goebbelson aired the Money Launderer-in-Chief's wildly erratic and self-promoting speech in Coal Country where truth (about coal and criminals) is a dirty word. Then we were treated to a lengthy segment on the murder of a white Iowa girl which has been blamed on an illegal Hispanic immigrant--a bone to the drooling Troglodytes who have to be kept in the Dark Ages for Donny Bone Spurs to survive.

Any fading semblance of journalistic integrity attached to FNC should be abandoned after Goebbelson's disgraceful show. Does he really think that by ignoring the obvious criminal implications for his Fuhrer will somehow make it all blow over? For Chrissakes, Cohen even stood up in court, under oath, and announced to the world that his boss directed him to make the felonious payoffs to porn stars. In a normal world that would suffice for impeachment proceedings to immediately commence. But not in this Putin-Limbaugh-Giuliani-Hannity-Carlson-Graham-Nunes dystopian nightmare where up is down, the earth is flat, and truth isn't truth.

No, desperate to change the topic, Goebbelson exploited the grief of an Iowa family. Never mind that since the launch of Fox News not one case of a white man killing someone in Iowa has ever aired. Hundreds of Caucasians, wielding guns they should not have had, but for, in part, FNC's coddling of the firearms lobby, have murdered unlucky citizens from Dubuque to Mason City without Goebbelson ever expressing his righteous indignation. But let one illegal Latino be accused of taking a life in the lilly-white Heartland, and Tucker's rage turns his face Donny-orange, his beady eyes narrow with ire, and spittle flies from his vile mouth.

Meanwhile, Cohen and Manafort are going to the Big House and, before they do, might come forward to divulge all of Donny Dumbshit's dirty secrets. The day that happens I'll turn on the Fourth Reich's favorite network to see what Goebbelson's airing. Maybe a replay of Hillary's Benghazi testimony to Congress? Or perhaps another good, old-fashioned hillbilly/Nuremberg rally like the one in West Virginia last night.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

National Security Expert Calls Trump Putin's Slave; Says Trump is Being Blackmailed by the Russians

National Security expert, and ex-Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, says Donald Trump is being blackmailed by Russian intelligence and has become Vladimir's Putin's slave. Peters made the claims during an interview with MSNBC's Ari Melber. A partial transcript of the interview is reprinted here:

"I worked against the Russians for many years," admitted Peters, "and I think I know them pretty well. In my view, I am convinced that Donald Trump is a slave of Vladimir Putin."

Peters, who once worked as a commentator on Fox News, explained, "Trump is obviously afraid of Putin. Putin is the only person he will never criticize. [In Helsinki] the world was treated to the spectacle of an American president groveling to the new czar of Russia. The worst part, though, isn't what happened before our eyes. It was terrible, an act of treason, siding with Putin against his own government, his own intelligence agencies. But what worries me far more is what damage might have been done, and probably was done, behind closed doors. Trump went into that one-on-one session with Putin utterly unprepared. He doesn't know the background; he doesn't read his notes. Putin, even without blackmailing Trump, could run circles around him."

"I do believe the salient points [including Trump's sexual perversions] of the infamous dossier are true. I believe Trump is subject to blackmail. Certainly financially...he's got four bankruptcies and a lot of murky business dealings. And that would have been the initial thing that attracted the Russians.

"The Russians give us (American citizens) more credit than we deserve sometimes. They would never have dreamed ten years ago that we would have elected Trump president. Rather, they would have been attracted to him because of his media role and influence, and the chance to launder money through his real-estate deals. They didn't get serious about actively supporting Trump until he started winning primaries. And then they did go all in.

"The Russians try to get you two ways if they can. From what we know of Donald Trump's character, can we believe that he [would turn down] two gorgeous Russian hookers? This is a man who is a perfect target for Russian intelligence. He has a sense of sexual entitlement, no self-restraint whatsoever, and he's got those tangled financial deals. And everything Trump did in Russia [with the hookers] was recorded.

"Trump has been, and actively is, betraying his country."

There you have it, America, from someone who would know. Your president is a pervert and a money launderer who is being blackmailed by the Russians. Donald the Narcissist is nothing more than Putin's slave. MAGA.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

The Russians Colluded Not Just With Trump, But With the Entire GOP

A Russian spy named Maria Butina, who has been arrested and charged with espionage in an attempt to sabotage American democracy, established a secure back-channel for Republican Senators and House members to coordinate their campaigns with high Russian officials.

In an affidavit filed by Kevin Helson, an FBI Special Agent, Butina is accused of filtering millions of Russian dollars through the NRA to GOP (Government of Putin) candidates in the U.S. Congress in an effort to defeat their Democratic opponents. Helson’s affidavit states that Butina was successful in “securing a very private line of communication between the Kremlin and [Republican] party leaders through…the [National Rifle Association].”

Once established, the back channel, presumably, provided a means by which Republican congressional leaders could have privately strategized for ways to win the 2016 U.S. elections–through social media propaganda, through the use of Russian bots and memes to deceive American voters, and through targeted media-ad buys with the money provided by Russian donors. This was the very blueprint that the Trump campaign used to win the White House. It is now apparent that Russians were bent on gaining control of Congress as well as the White House.

The NRA’s acceptance of Butina as an active member of the pro-gun organization is now seen as a dubious maneuver. It is possible that the NRA knowingly colluded with Butina to help undermine the integrity of U.S. elections.

To reiterate, it is illegal for any foreign power to sabotage any U.S. election through any means–with money, with propaganda, or through direct communication with candidates or their agents. And any U.S. citizen who aids and abets such efforts is committing treason,a crime that is subject to the death penalty.

This indictment casts a new light on GOP senators’ July 4th visit to the Kremlin. They were reaffirming their loyalty to Putin and Russian oligarchs, and, in essence, tacitly reassuring Moscow that they want to continue their “back-channel” conspiracy to maintain control of the U.S. Congress.

I finally know what MAGA means: it’s a concerted effort to transform the United States of America into the United States of Russia.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Russian Hackers Deleted Registered Democrats in All 50 States, and May Have Changed Vote Totals Too

Russian hackers likely broke into election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 U.S. presidential race, according to the testimony of Michael Daniel, the Obama administration’s former cyber czar, more than double the number previously given by the Department of Homeland Security. The White House cybersecurity coordinator from 2012 to 2017, made the remark while appearing on Capitol Hill during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing involving Russian interference in the race.

“We have received from the Department of Homeland Security inconsistent and varying numbers on the number of states whose systems were scanned by the Russians,” said Sen. Susan Collins. “How likely do you think it is that Russian cyber actors at least scanned all 50 states?”

“I think it is highly likely,” responded Daniel. He added that “there was no reason why they wouldn’t have at least attempted penetration of all 50.”

Daniel's worst suspicions have been confirmed by Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents. Not only did they break into voting systems in key swing states, they probably accessed the election infrastructures of all 50 states and may have even altered vote tallies. It is now a literal fact, Russia stole the election for Trump. And since then, Trump and his congressional GOP (Government of Putin) cronies have conspired to cover up the crime. It is nothing less than high treason, for which Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Jordan, Nunes, Gowdy, and all the other traitorous jackals in our government should be facing the death penalty.

According to the indictment, GRU officers Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev began probing election infrastructure in the United States in June 2016. In July 2016, they allegedly identified a vulnerability and hacked into an unnamed state's board of elections and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters. They also broke into computers belonging to an unnamed supplier of software for verifying voter registration information for the 2016 elections.

The hackers scrambled to cover their tracks after an FBI alert in August 2016 revealed that the FBI was aware of efforts to compromise election systems. The hackers nonetheless continued to look for vulnerabilities in other parts of the country in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida as late as October of 2016. They broke into the computer systems of at least five Florida county elections offices just days before the 2016 presidential election, according to five county officials who say they received malicious emails described in a leaked intelligence report. Election supervisors in Hillsborough, Pasco, Citrus and Clay counties have confirmed this.

The first attempt targeted VR Systems, a Tallahassee-based vendor that sells voter registration software to all but three of Florida's 67 counties. The second attempt was aimed at 122 election management officials across the country, just days before the election, and was disguised as a routine message from VR Systems. VR Systems' software helps check in voters at the polls and doesn't tabulate ballots. But since the attack could have infected election workers' computers, it is quite possible that vote tallies were altered in Trump's favor.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report says that in at least six states the Russian-affiliated cyber operatives "went beyond scanning and conducted malicious attempts on voting-related websites." In most of those cases, the Russian cyberattackers attempted to use an SQL injection which involves using special characters on a public website to gain access and to either read or manipulate data.

The report says that in "a small number of states," the Russian operatives were in a position to alter or delete voter registration data. And it's a safe bet that it was registered Democrats' who were knocked off the rolls. This alone could have determined the election by dictating who could and could not vote. In North Carolina, for instance, some legitimate voters in blue precinct could not vote because the e-poll registration system asserted that some legitimate voters weren’t registered.

As for changing the vote tallies, the right-wing is desperately trying to convince us the Russians didn't do it. I don't believe them. The GOP has lied to us about everything else, why not this? Hell a delegation of them just got back from the Kremlin where they may have been begging Putin's hackers to rig the midterms for them.

The mainstream argument has now come down to this: despite their motivation to subvert our national elections, Russian leadership might still hesitate to alter vote tallies out for fear of getting caught. My counterargument is this: what would stop Putin from doing this? He knew that after his boy Donald was elected, there would be no retribution from the United States of Russia.

www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Prominent Psychiatrist Pulls No Punches--Trump Is a Psychopath

Psychiatrist Andrew Spitznas, in a courageous move, has broken from his American Psychiatric Association colleagues and provided a diagnosis of Donald Trump, so that all Americans can be duly warned of what sort of monster occupies the White House. Spitznas's article, simply titled "Donald Trump, Psychopath," appeared in the July 1 edition of Patheos. Significant portions are reprinted below:

Psychopathy has four key components: antisocial personality traits, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, paranoia, and sadism. So let me elaborate on how Trump displays all four of these.

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)

Using the gold standard for American practice, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), a person with ASPD must show compelling evidence of one of the following seven features. Going far beyond that minimum requirement, I’m going to show how Trump displays all seven.

First, a sociopath (the term for someone with ASPD) may engage in unlawful, criminal behavior. Despite Trump’s perseverative tweets of “no collusion” and “witch hunt,” the 20 criminal indictments issued by Mueller against Trump cronies indicate for all but the brainwashed that our president is a crook and traitor. Or look at his real estate dealings, signaling that Russian shell corporations and money laundering have been financing the tacky Trump lifestyle for over a decade. I’d urge you to read Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s essential The Road to Unfreedom, and see if you don’t come away completely convinced that our president is in bed with Putin and his thugocracy.

A sociopath typically lies profusely. Are 3200 falsehoods, by The Washington Post’s last count, enough for you? I’ve made a habit of reading Trump’s tweets daily, and one gets far closer to the truth by adding a “not” to whatever he belches out. Every day is opposite day in Trumplandia.

Impulsivity is another hallmark of the sociopath. Trump lacks coherent policies, as his off-the-cuff remarks take Congressional Republicans and members of his own cabinet by complete surprise. (Remember how Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned he was out of a job?)

The person with Antisocial Personality Disorder is often irritable and aggressive. Here, we have reliable reports of Trump’s frequent angry outbursts in the White House. The celebrity who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, and the candidate who urged followers to get violent with protesters, is now the president who posts violent Hillary-themed tweets and engages in phallic nuclear brinksmanship with Kim Jong-un over the size of their buttons.

Speaking of North Korea, Trump’s game-playing in the lead-up to his feckless summit shows another sociopathic symptom, a disregard for the safety of others. The president is also heedless of the consequences of his racist speechifying and its correlation with the rise in hate crimes in our country.

Next, sociopaths commonly exhibit irresponsibility in such areas as work obligations. The businessman with 3500 lawsuits for failing to pay contractors and employees is the president who spends more time watching Fox News sycophants than studying security briefings. One of his rare periods of media silence was the weekend Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, when Trump couldn’t be pulled away from a golf tournament.

Lastly, Trump displays a sociopath’s lack of remorse. Surprise, surprise, the candidate who famously asked Anderson Cooper why he would ever need to repent hasn’t suddenly grown a conscience. No apology ever arrived for saying there were fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. Per his equally nasty spokespeople Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his most offensive statements are just jokes or are willfully misinterpreted by his foes in the “fake news” industry.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)

For NPD, we’ll again turn to the DSM-5 to understand Trump’s extreme narcissism. The DSM-5 requires that five of nine criteria must be met to make the diagnosis. I’ll be less exhaustive here than with ASPD, showing how the president meets seven of the criteria.

First, someone with NPD typically has a grandiose sense of self-importance. Evidence for this trait in Trump overflows; let’s just consider how he describes himself as a “very stable genius,” despite an elementary school vocabulary and innumerable typos in his covfefe tweets. Or how about his belief that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, despite manifestly making the world a less safe place?

Trump is also preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited power. How else to explain his admiration for thuggish leaders like Assad and Duterte, or his recent utterance that he’d like to see Americans stand for him as they do for North Korea’s Kim?

The narcissist’s unquenchable desire for unwarranted admiration shone through in the sickening toadying by his cabinet at their televised first gathering. We hear about it in the reports that his advisors highlight flattering news items in his daily briefings. We saw it in the coverage of his whirlwind visit to Puerto Rico last October, when he asked the island’s congressional representative to repeat some of her flattery to him, so all of the media present could hear it again.

Trump’s sense of entitlement comes through in his hate speech against the mainstream media (“the enemy of the people”), which has the gall to write truthful, negative things about his conduct and its consequences. And how about his outrage towards James Comey, who wouldn’t promise him undiluted loyalty? Our “law and order” president thinks he should be able to pardon himself (not that he’s broken any laws, mind you).

His interpersonal exploitation and lack of empathy are seen in the fact that everyone, including his children, only matter to him as a means to his own betterment, not for any intrinsic worth they have as human beings. Lastly, his envy crystallizes in his fixation on Obama and his hatred of Justin Trudeau, knowing that he will never possess their substantive charisma or earn the affection of good citizens as these two leaders have.

Paranoia and Sadism

After antisocial personality traits and a diagnosis of NPD, the third defining component of the psychopath is paranoia. We observed this early in Trump’s presidency, with his conviction that the popular vote was fraudulently stolen from him, and his assertion that President Obama had wiretapped his NYC residence. It continues with his unilateral initiation of a trade war with allies like Canada and Germany, framed by his assertion that these countries are laughing at us. His choice of media sources also speaks volumes; no investigative journalism for him, but rather the deluded conspiracies of the National Enquirer and Info Wars.

The fourth trait of sadism can fairly be said to define Trump and his presidency. The celebrity who body-shamed Rosie O’Donnell and former beauty pageant contestants, whose catchphrase was a demeaning “you’re fired,” has unsurprisingly carried his misconduct into the Oval Office.

His abusive name-calling (Lying Ted, Crooked Hillary, Crying Chuck Schumer, Liddle Bob Corker, Crazy Mika) shows an immature cruelty that would be unacceptable on a kids’ playground. The continued chants of “lock her up,” egged on by him at his rallies, are unfit for a democracy.

Here again, his admiration of Rodrigo Duterte (and his extrajudicial killings) and Bashar al-Assad (turning his country into a vast killing field) reveals the murderous potential of Trump. His loathsome policy of separating immigrant children from their parents is trauma on a massive scale, which only a man devoid of empathy and reveling in psychological torment could enact.

Why Precise Labels Matter

Hopefully, my gathering of the evidence has convinced you that our president is unquestionably a psychopath, a malignant narcissist. My data presentation is hardly exhaustive, so I’m quite sure my readers can come up with many other examples of Trump’s statements and misconduct that could further bolster my case.

It’s now fair to ask why naming our president a psychopath matters, and I can come up with three key reasons. First, in an age of rampant lies, we need to be wholly honest. In the immediate shock of Trump’s election, it was enough to vaguely posit that our new president was dangerous and make a long list of his concerning traits. But now that we’ve had more time to collect our thoughts and far more data, mental health professionals have a public obligation to use our training and knowledge to speak out with clarity.

This frankness will allow all of us to comprehend what we’re dealing with, to understand our societal prognosis, if you will. Knowing that our psychopathic president is in the august company of Muammar Gaddafi, Joseph Stalin, and serial killers, we can dispense with the fantasy that the Oval Office will somehow make him behave presidentially.

Instead, we can accept the truth that the key to managing a psychopath is containment and damage minimization. This is why the mid-term elections are so important, and why the continued protest and light-shining on this administration’s vile policies remain necessary.

Accepting that Trump is a psychopath will also buttress our own mental health. As I wrote last week, it is exhausting and traumatizing to live under the rule of a psychopath. However, just as there is power in a therapist helping a client to realize that her husband is abusive – and to overtly deploy the word abuse – I think there is something paradoxically empowering in acknowledging our current national predicament.

Possible Objections or Drawbacks

Reviewing the potential objections to truthfully labeling Trump a psychopath should further underscore why taking this step is so important. Hopefully, no one with even a dollop of integrity and critical thought is still dragging out the lazy argument that diagnosing Trump stigmatizes everyone who suffers from mental illness. Let’s all say it together again in unison: Trump’s psychopathy is not a stand-in for all mental illness, and those who struggle with a psychiatric disorder run the same gamut of virtue and villainy as those fortunate enough to be free of mental illness.

Some will contend that making public pronouncements about the mental health of public figures violates the “Goldwater Rule,” formulated in 1973 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Rather than rehash this debate, I will refer readers to my previous columns that tackled this in detail. Even better, you may want to peruse Friday’s editorial in Psychology Today, penned by my brave colleague, Bandy X. Lee, M.D., calling upon the APA to modify their antiquated, unscientific gag rule.

Others may argue that it is careless to diagnose a public figure from afar, without interviewing him. However, diagnosing someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder, Trump’s DSM-5 diagnosis that should cause the greatest alarm, is seldom done primarily through interviewing the patient. For obvious reasons, sociopaths are not keen to have themselves labeled as such and will misrepresent themselves to the interviewer. The diagnosis therefore is typically, largely made through collateral sources, such as information from concerned family members or legal records. A parallel process is occurring when I confidently assess Trump by way of his speeches, media appearances, and biographical sources.

(By the way, this is in stark contrast to nearly every other psychiatric diagnosis that I’ve encountered in my 24 years as a psychiatrist. On a weekly basis, I have new patients introduce themselves by saying, “I think I’m bipolar.” Much of the time, their self-assessment is correct. Contrarily, only once has a patient told me he thought he was a sociopath, and bless his sensitive soul, he was wrong.)

A greater personal concern to me is that mental health allies may fear I’m going too far in my pronouncement of Trump’s psychopathy, causing our movement to lose respectability. However, time is not on our side here. Doing the math, it took nine years for the APA to issue their 1973 Goldwater Rule, since the triggering offense occurred during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for the presidency. In the face of Trump’s ongoing dangerousness, we can’t vitiate our public statements while we await the slim possibility that the APA might see the error of their ways.

By contrast, I’m losing no sleep over alienating Trump’s supporters. Since 90% of Republicans still think Trump is doing a heckuva job – since they flare indignantly when Sarah Huckabee Sanders is refused a meal, but don’t bat an eye at her lies about children in cages – I have no hope of persuading them of any logical, humanistic, data-supported proposition. My biggest hope is that speaking out like this might nudge young and minority voters to turn out for the midterms. With a psychopath in the Oval Office and the current batch of thumb-twiddling enablers in Congress, our best hope for this country’s future is a shift in Congressional control, while using our keyboards and taking to the streets in protest.


www.amazon.com/dp/1948260085

Trump's Deep Corruption Extends to High Court: Son of SCOTUS Justice Kennedy Loaned More Than $1 Billion of Laundered Russian Money to Trump

The mainstream media, overwhelmed by so many mass shootings and the immense scope of Trump crony-corruption, has overlooked the real story behind the retirement of SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy claims he just wants to spend more time with his family; the truth is, he might be getting out one step ahead of Robert Mueller's clutches.

It turns out Justice Kennedy has a "special" relationship with Donald Trump. Kennedy's son, as head of Deutsche Bank's global real estate capital department, loaned Trump over $1 billion at a time when no other bank would go near Trump's notoriously fraudulent real estate schemes.

During young Kennedy's tenure, Deutsche Bank became Trump's most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, Trump now owes Deutsche Bank around $300 million. He has four large mortgages, all issued by Deutsche's private bank. The loans are guaranteed against the president's properties, including a new deluxe hotel in Washington DC's old Post Office. But Trump leases the Post Office, meaning he cannot take out a mortgage on it. What he has is a loan that he "personally guaranteed." These shady financial arrangements are indicative of a shell game, possibly as part of a money laundering scam for Russian oligarchs.

Deutsche Bank has long been suspected of financial dirty dealings with Putin and his cronies. In January, the bank was fined $630 million by the U.S. Department of Justice for helping Russian oligarchs launder their money. One common way for crooked banks to launder money is to invest it in fraudulent real estate transactions, like the ones commonly affiliated with Trump hotels. Hotels are erected and space is rented by anonymous parties, but the buildings go unoccupied and the leases are sold for enormous profits in due time. If the government looks the other way, the laundered money comes out clean on the other end. This would explain Trump's overly cordial and complementary disposition towards Putin, and his cozy relationship with a Supreme Court Justice who just happens to retire right before the Mueller investigation reaches its conclusion.

The Trump/Kennedy conversation of February 2017 now takes on more sinister connotations. After his first address to Congress, Trump went out of his way to engage Kennedy:

"Say hello to your boy," Mr. Trump said. "Special guy."

Kennedy responded in kind by thanking Trump for the special treatment that his son was afforded by the Trump family.

Trump isn't the only member of his administration with deep ties to Deutsche Bank. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also has a tangled and seedy relationship to the bank. And Jared Kushner's real estate company finalized a $285 million loan with Deutsche Bank right before the election, which he subsequently failed to disclose.

In May, House Democrats asked Deutsche Bank "to hand over its findings on two politically charged matters — its banking on behalf of Trump and trades from the bank's Moscow operation that helped move some $10 billion out of Russia." They refused, citing client confidentiality.

But now Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued a subpoena requesting the bank turn over its documents relating to its Trump family transactions. Kennedy's son will certainly be a key figure in those transactions. And his links to Russian oligarchy money laundering will undoubtedly be exposed.

Given this new information, it is illuminating to look back now on Justice Kennedy's recent decisions on controversial cases. He ruled in favor of dark money invading politics, opining that corporations would not necessarily corrupt politicians. He has also ruled in favor of Trump's racist immigration ban, casting the deciding vote in the 5-4 decision. It appears not even the highest court in the land is free of the rotten poison of Trump's vast corruption.

It is fair then to ask: Why is Kennedy really retiring? Was he paid off? What involvement/knowledge does he have concerning Trump's money laundering connections with Russian oligarchs? Is he afraid he will be subpoenaed by Mueller? Did he resign to allow Trump to choose another right-wing lunatic judge while he still can?

What we do know is that Kennedy rode off into the sunset one step ahead of Mueller's posse.

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How Does Trump Maintain 90% Approval Rating Among Republicans? Here's How.

It is now beyond dispute to those who hold facts in high regard that Donald Trump is the most corrupt, treasonous and criminal president to ever sit in the Oval Office. He laundered money for Putin’s oligarchs. His allegiance is to Russia, not the US. His business dealings were failed, fraudulent scams. He is a compulsive liar, a misogynist and a racist. He has the verbal acumen of a 3rd grader. He sympathizes with Nazis, white supremacists and authoritarian governments. He heartlessly jails innocent children and separates them from their parents. He attacks the free press and openly drools over jailing his opponents. He is a conscienceless narcissist concerned only with his own self-enrichment. His vacuous twit of a daughter and her greedy husband have used their power in the US government to profit from foreign investments. Don Jr. openly colluded with Russian nationals to get daddy elected. Trump cares not one whit about the destruction of the planet, wasteful military spending, the eradication of social safety nets, and the mass murders perpetrated by his chummy dictator pals. He signed a meaningless agreement with Kim, and in the process gave Putin what he wanted--the end of American war games on the Korean peninsula. In fact, Trump seems to be acting as Putin's surrogate. Which raises the possibility that our President is being blackmailed by a foreign power.

Trump feels empathy for no one but his miserable self. He insults our allies, has no concept of the importance of diplomacy, and is willing to destroy our institutions to save his own skin. We will be lucky to survive his four years without our country becoming a third-world wasteland. He has surrounded himself with fascist toadies, wife-beaters, greedy sycophants and warped bigots. His family is an international embarrassment, and they have made America a laughingstock. In short, Trump is a stupid, amoral pig. The worst president in our history; yet his poll numbers among Republicans are on the rise. The more criticism he receives from the left, the deeper his supporters dig in. How can this be? Are right-wingers oblivious to the facts? Do the facts even matter to them? Yes to the former. No to the latter.

A recent New York Times article quotes some of his supporters: “It makes me angry [when the media criticize him], which causes me to want to defend him to [him] more,” Ms. Gina Anders said.

The Times puts it this way: "In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: 'How can you possibly still support this man?' Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November. For many Republicans, the audio of children sobbing at a migrant detention center barely registered, because these voters don’t pay attention to the left-leaning and mainstream media that have covered the family separation crisis far more than their preferred channel, Fox News."

There it is. There's your answer for how and why Trump's supporters can stubbornly cling to their nonsensical views: Fox News. The 24/7 propaganda arm of this administration--fact-free, vicious, conscienceless, non-stop support of a corrupt, vile, sociopathic wannabe dictator--provides justification for the Trump supporter. Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham and their ilk spew lies at a faster rate than a small mind like Gina Anders' can filter. Facts become moveable, malleable inconveniences. Trump's corruption is ignored. No time to think or question. All hail the fearless leader. Like North Korea's state-run TV, Fox pounds a simple narrative into the brains of its subscribers. Trump is doing a great job, and those who disseminate facts to the contrary are whining, bitter reprobates. Or as Jeff Butts put it to a NY Times reporter: “It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda." The perverted agenda that is destroying the country.

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LBJ Stacked Warren Commission With Kennedy Haters to Cover His Tracks

Of all the things the mainstream media overlooked in the wake of the assassination, one of the most blatant indicators of Lyndon Johnson trying to cover his tracks was his cunningly shrewd selection of Warren Commission members. Republicans were in the majority, and nary a liberal was to be found, unless we count Earl Warren. As its titular head, Warren imbued the panel with an integrity it did not deserve; he had a reputation for progressive values and was despised by the extreme right-wing. Johnson saw his appointment as a way to appease liberals and Kennedy loyalists. But Warren was a reluctant appointee, and he rarely showed up for any of the hearings. The meat of the commission work was performed by Kennedy haters.

Johnson appointed just two Democrats—Richard Russell and Hale Boggs—both southerners who had opposed JFK’s domestic agenda especially in the area of civil rights. This is a polite way of saying that even the Democrats on the Commission were not Kennedy admirers. It is easy to forget that the Democratic party in the early 1960s was evenly split between conservatives and liberals. Southern Democrats were nearly unanimously right-wing ideologues; much the same way that Republicans are today. Many of them, like John Connally and Strom Thurmond, switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican when the domestic strife of the ‘60s caused politicians to choose sides that more closely identified with their policies. Today southern Democrats are as rare as southern Republicans were in 1963. The point is, Johnson could rely on his Dixiecrat friends to avoid digging too deeply into the ugly truths of who really planned and executed the murder of a President for whom they bore no love. Still in all, despite their political opposition to JFK, Russell, Sherman Cooper (Republican) and Boggs had misgivings about the commission’s findings that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally. Not until John McCloy came up with compromise language did the three dissenters acquiesce to the others’ magic-bullet charade. But Russell, according to author Gerald McKnight, never understood the full ramifications of conceding to McCloy. McKnight writes that, “Because of Russell’s chronic absenteeism he never fully comprehended that the final report’s no-conspiracy conclusion was inextricably tied to…the single-bullet theory.240 Cooper may have been similarly oblivious—he attended barely half the meetings. Boggs’ attendance was also sporadic, but his dissent appeared to disturb the commission’s hierarchy more than others. He was bugged and followed by the FBI for years, and he vehemently objected to J. Edgar Hoover’s Gestapo tactics.

Over the life of the commission, it was three of the Republicans who exerted the most influence on the eventual whitewash: Allen Dulles, Arlen Specter (Dulles’s intrepid and ambitious lawyer) and Congressman Gerald Ford. Specter expertly badgered and discredited hostile witnesses (read, witnesses who had knowledge of conspiratorial activity) and concocted the magic-bullet scenario which allowed the commission to frame the dead patsy for the crime. Because of the time constraints inherent in a frame count of the Zapruder film, Oswald had only six seconds to fire three shots, and two of them—the complete miss and the head shot—were already accounted for. That left just one bullet to do the rest of the damage. Specter’s strained contrivance took care of that problem for the plotters. One bullet, he said, despite all evidence to the contrary, entered the President’s back, exited his throat, entered Connally’s back, broke his wrist, tore through his ribs, landed in his leg, and came out on a Dallas stretcher in pristine condition. No one but Specter saw this as an even remotely logical occurrence; still it exists in the official record today, despite the fact that no bullet fired in the history of the world has ever duplicated this feat, and despite the fact that no Parkland medical personnel saw a rear entry wound on the President’s body. The Bethesda doctors did see a rear entry wound, but the wound was too low on the President’s back to have exited his throat. The only way that wound could have been made was by body alterationists in transit from Parkland to Bethesda. The body alterationists created a wound that couldn’t be easily accounted for. Specter tried, but he needed a big assist from Gerald Ford to complete the sham.

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How the CIA Controlled the Media in the Wake of the JFK Assassination

The following is an excerpt from my book JFK and the End of America:

Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite co-anchored a CBS special in 1967 called “CBS News Extra: November 22 and The Warren Report.” (It pre-empted “Mr. Ed,” the show about a talking horse; in retrospect, a talking horse was more credible than the information Cronkite and Rather provided.) The special opens with a view from the sixth floor window of a car turning onto Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. A voiceover, accompanied by string music to add profundity, says, “You are watching an official re-enactment of the murder of John F. Kennedy, filmed from the window where the alleged assassin crouched.”65 One minute into this supposed objective journalistic endeavor, we are led to believe Oswald was guilty.

CBS compromised any honest investigation when it consulted with Allen Dulles before and after the program. Dulles was allowed to inspect the transcripts and was said to have had some minor objections to the content. This was Dulles’s shrewd way of letting CBS think it actually had some independence while still controlling what was broadcast. In the end, the CIA had nothing to fear. The network’s news director at the time, William Small, exchanged a series of letters with Dulles in which Dulles “…commended Small for a job well done.”66 Such was the broadcast media’s obsequious subservience to Dulles and the CIA. Fact finding lost out to the secret state’s official version of assassination. As a result, a false history of America was created; one that is still deeply embedded in the mythology of this country’s past.

Rather and Cronkite, and their ilk, were willing accomplices in this fraud. Why did they do it? Were they just blissfully unaware of the genuine truth? Did they gullibly swallow whole what was fed to them by the plotters? Or were they just ambitious men, consumed with the prestige and influence their mere faces and voices transmitted, and unwilling to surrender their lofty positions by actually challenging the men who really ran the country? Whatever their motives, it is hard to believe that they did not recognize the Warren Report for what it really was—an implausible fairy tale concocted by flawed men to cover up the ugliest political crime in American history. But instead of summoning the courage to face that ugly truth, CBS and all the other Mockingbird assets chose the path of least resistance. The CIA’s Frank Wisner once bragged that Operation Mockingbird was like his own personal Wurlitzer: he could play any tune on it he wanted, and America would follow along. And consider these chilling declarations from Dulles’s successors—William Colby (CIA Director from 1973-76): “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media”67; William Casey (DCIA from 1981-87): “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”68

Even that giant of the television medium, Walter Cronkite, was not immune to corruptive influences. As a fellow Texan (Cronkite spent his youth in Houston), Cronkite had an affinity for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson “treated him more like a second cousin than a fourth-estate adversary.”69 Cronkite’s boss at CBS, Frank Stanton, was a close friend of Johnson’s. According to Cronkite’s biographer Douglas Brinkley, “[LBJ] hoping to exert control over CBS…would routinely call Stanton to grouse about on-air content…[and] whenever LBJ went to New York, Stanton would fete him with limousines, cocktails, and coffee…to keep him happy.”70

Cronkite was also linked to Allen Dulles. In 1976 an ABC News reporter named Sam Jaffe claimed that he had seen Cronkite’s name at the top of the list of journalists who worked for the CIA. Jaffe also confirmed that Cronkite had received a briefing from Dulles as part of his normal duties. When Cronkite learned of Jaffe’s allegations, “…the anchorman sprang into damage control mode, traveling from New York City to Langley, Virginia, to confront George H.W. Bush [then CIA Director]…Cronkite demanded the list of news people who had actually been CIA agents.”71 Bush refused to release it, but later the CIA “confirmed that…CBS correspondents had worked for the agency.”72 Beyond Cronkite’s understandable consternation at having his journalistic reputation compromised, it is revelatory to note here that a list of CIA journalist assets apparently DID exist. And George Bush, head of the CIA, kept it secret. Cronkite did not deny being a CIA asset, nor did he seek a disavowal of his collaboration with the agency from George Bush. Instead, Cronkite sought to verify that he was only one of many newsmen who had worked for the CIA, as if public knowledge of such common practice would legitimize it. It speaks to the power of Operation Mockingbird. If the CIA had ensnared Cronkite, the number one television journalist of the 1960s, what newsman was immune to the agency’s perfidious influence?

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Trump Reneges on Promise to Release All JFK Assassination Files

This is a reprint of a story from the Associated Press:

President Donald Trump boasted last fall that he would open all remaining John F. Kennedy assassination records. So far, Trump hasn’t made good on the “great transparency” he promised then.
Trump announced on Thursday that the public must wait another three years or more before seeing material that must remain classified for national security reasons — more than five decades after Kennedy was killed Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The National Archives released its last batch of more than 19,000 records on Thursday. But an undisclosed amount of material remains under wraps because Trump said the potential harm to U.S. national security, law enforcement or foreign affairs is “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

He ordered the CIA and other agencies to take yet another look at each blacked-out section of their documents during the next three years to see what more can be released.

CIA spokesman Nicole de Haay said the agency has already released more than 99 percent of CIA information that was in the Kennedy assassination records collection. “CIA narrowly redacted information in rare instances only to protect CIA assets, officers and their families as well as intelligence methods, operations and partnerships that remain critical to the security of our nation,” she said.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of a book about Kennedy, lamented that it might be 100 years post-assassination before everyone has a more complete picture of what happened. “I envy the scholars of, say, 2063,” Sabato said.

The files released Thursday — mostly FBI and CIA records — detail how authorities combed through tips in the wake of Kennedy’s death, including a report from a woman who claimed she saw a man who looked like Oswald at a party in Mexico City.
Another file shows ex-CIA officer David Atlee Phillips being grilled by lawmakers about whether he believed Oswald was the lone assassin. Phillips said he wished there was information showing the Soviets or former Cuban leader Fidel Castro had played a role “because there are so many people, especially on college campuses who are convinced the CIA did it.”

But Phillips said since there was no evidence showing Cuban or Soviet involvement, he had to believe Oswald was just “a kind of loony fellow who decided to shoot the President.”

“Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t miss, and the American public doesn’t want to believe that one man could murder Camelot,” Phillips said. [Phillips was lying to the committee. See the *Note below for clarification of Phillips' role in setting up Oswald as the CIA's patsy in the assassination.]

The records are still being released today because in 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The act ordered the archives to disclose all information collected — some 5 million pages of material — on the assassination within 25 years — barring any exceptions designated by the president.

Those 25 years ended Oct. 26, 2017 and Trump had to decide whether any of the documents should still be kept secret. Several days before the deadline, it appeared Trump had no plans to withhold anything.

“Subject to the receipt of further information,” he tweeted on Oct. 21, 2017. “I will be allowing, as president, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened.”

Again, on the day before the deadline, it appeared every last shred of the government’s material was headed for release. “The long anticipated release of the #JFKFiles will take place tomorrow. So interesting!” Trump tweeted.

A lot of documents were released, but not all. Bending to appeals from the CIA and FBI, Trump blocked the release of hundreds of records pending a six-month review. “In the end there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to public!” Trump tweeted in October.

His six-month review ended Thursday when all documents, he said, were to be released “with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances.”

While happy for what’s been released so far, Sabato said more than 15,000 of the 19,045 in Thursday’s National Archives release have redactions — “some quite substantial.” He said more than 500 files were held back in their entirely for various reasons.

“Trump has set the next official argument over further disclosures at October 2021, when he may or may not still be president,” Sabato said.

[*Note: David Atlee Phillips later admitted that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed for the murder of JFK. Phillips was in charge of the "Mexico City scenario" in which an Oswald impostor visited the Russian Embassy in Mexico City and met with Valery Kostikov, a KGB officer who ran the Soviets' assassination program. When the impostor was caught on audio and video tapes, Phillips destroyed the recordings. This was necessary when it was revealed that the real Oswald was in Dallas at the time that his impostor was in Mexico City.]

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