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Attorney's file on Roger Stone, LaRouche and Russia influencing the 2016 presidential election


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The FBI Came Close to Staging a Coup

For the 25th Amendment to remove a President the Vice President, a majority of the cabinet Secretaries, two-thirds of the House, and two-thirds of the Senate all have to agree the Prez is unable to continue his duties.

Damn, the FBI got sooooo close...🧐

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Here is some follow up to the McCabe interview last night:

 

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1 hour ago, Robert Wheeler said:

Actually, they were not close at all, but that's a longer story.

Sarcasm ain't yer strong suit?

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In the meantime, as famed Conservative Provocateur Alan Dershowitz said the other night; 

“If [McCabe’s comments are] true, it is clearly an attempt at a coup d’état,” Dershowitz said. He added, “The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It’s not about the most fundamental disagreements. It’s not about impeachable offenses. And any Justice Department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution.”

I don't think anyone has a problem with invoking the 25th Amendment in a Woodrow Wilson type scenario.

For the sake of argument though, lets say the lawyer above is reading the 25th too narrowly and it was possible to remove the President because the Cabinet decided the President was "Crazy" for firing Comey. 

I guess the Cabinet would have to ask, "was the President crazy for firing Comey?"

The answer of course is No.

The entire Russia Collusion investigation was made up in its entirety, as Peter Strzok said to his supposed girl friend Lisa Page, it was as an "insurance policy" should Hillary lose the election.

Pure bullshed.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/trumps-mental-impairment-psychiatrist-makes-case-invoking-25th-amendment/

 

Edited by Cliff Varnell
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This seems really weird to me if its true.  I have a hard time thinking it is.  

In reading the amendment, I simply do not see how it applied to this situation.  To me it clearly denotes that somehow the president becomes physically incapacitated.  And the only times it has been used has been for that purpose.

Now if this condition should become ongoing or permanent it does allow for the president to be removed and the VP to take charge.  Sort of like declaring a conservatorship if someone is senile.

But to use this the way these guys wanted to use it?  I would not even say that this was a stretch.  In legal terms, it was worse than that.

 Firing Comey was not the Saturday Night Massacre.  

Edited by James DiEugenio
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8 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

No where in this article does John Kiriakou mention the fact that James Comey swung the election to Donald Trump.

 

Comey "swinging" the election: that is your opinion, it’s not a “fact”. As far as I know, Comey has never expressed his motivation for the email release. But it is a fair speculation, and more in keeping with what actually transpired since, that Comey did what he did as a limited hangout, to forestall a far more damaging leak.

Trump’s observation during the 2016 campaign that US interests would be better served by a friendlier diplomatic posture towards Russia seemed like a common-sense position, which was met by something approaching hysteria by certain national security cliques, an affliction which was then passed over to shocked Democratic Party supporters after the election. The negative passion directed towards Russia has been a manufactured propaganda campaign, based largely on exaggeration, conjecture, and Orwellian “two minutes of hate” tantrums. The scholar Stephen Cohen, one of America’s leading Russia “experts”, finds this hysteria extremely troubling and damaging to US interests as well. In a recent interview, Cohen described how he has now been effectively banned from the mainstream media. The banishment of reasonable opinion is partly what leads to casual smears of persons you disagree with as “Putin/Trump fascists” without recognizing you sound like the John Birch Society.

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Read this one and weep:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/430465-warren-officials-have-constitutional-duty-to-invoke-25th-amendment-if

Wow, talk about mobocracy.  What the heck is she thinking of?  I like Warren, but this?

See, in my view, what is supposed to separate us from them is that with us its not just who's ox is being gored.  We uphold a standard for everyone that should be obeyed.

Impeaching Trump is one thing.  If you think you can do it, then try.  Personally I do not think the votes are there in the senate. At least not right now.

But to fabricate some kind of mental incapacity with psychiatrists that have never examined or observed the guy?  C'mon.

And BTW, I am not just saying this now.  Way back in the nineties, when the film Nixon came out, we did an issue of Probe magazine showing that Watergate was a booby trap, one in which the real perpetrators of a devilishly clever plan escaped unnoticed.  And people like Woodward, Bernstein and Sy Hersh, they all obfuscated the public as to what really occurred.

I despised Nixon then, as I do to this day.  But in a real way, the guy was the victim of a sophisticated plot.  

 

Edited by James DiEugenio
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You mean about Warren and the 25th?

As an attorney, do you agree with my interpretation?

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4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Read this one and weep:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/430465-warren-officials-have-constitutional-duty-to-invoke-25th-amendment-if

Wow, talk about mobocracy.  What the heck is she thinking of?  I like Warren, but this?

See, in my view, what is supposed to separate us from them is that with us its not just who's ox is being gored.  We uphold a standard for everyone that should be obeyed.

Impeaching Trump is one thing.  If you think you can do it, then try.  Personally I do not think the votes are there in the senate. At least not right now.

But to fabricate some kind of mental incapacity with psychiatrists that have never examined or observed the guy?  C'mon.

Fabricate?

Dropping out of the Iran nuke deal is a top example of Trump's mental incapacity.

Ditto dropping out of the Paris climate accords.  The family separation policy on the southern border.  Attacking the health care people get through the Affordable Care Act.  Tariffs on German cars built in America.  Calling neo-Nazis "good people."  Pledging "retribution" against those who criticize him.  Calling for a "National Emergency" because Congress won't let him build his vanity wall.  The incessant demonization of asylum seekers fleeing drug cartels which only exist because of the American appetite for getting loaded.  The cozy warm and fuzzies Trump gets around dictators while expressing disdain for democratically elected leaders.  The constant lying about his connections to Russians and the 100 plus connections between his operatives and Kremlin assets.  And on and on and on...

Trump's tweets don't scream "mental incapacity", Jim?

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

And BTW, I am not just saying this now.  Way back in the nineties, when the film Nixon came out, we did an issue of Probe magazine showing that Watergate was a booby trap, one in which the real perpetrators of a devilishly clever plan escaped unnoticed.  And people like Woodward, Bernstein and Sy Hersh, they all obfuscated the public as to what really occurred.

I despised Nixon then, as I do to this day.  But in a real way, the guy was the victim of a sophisticated plot.  

 

But those plotters didn't install Nixon in the White House.

The people accused of plotting to remove Trump from the White House are the same people who greased the skids to get him there.

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4 pieces of evidence showing FBI Director James Comey cost Clinton the election

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/11/14215930/comey-email-election-clinton-campaign

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GettyImages_622022616.0.jpg A scene from Hillary Clinton’s final campaign rally, in Philadelphia, November 7. Brooks Kraft / Getty

Donald Trump has called his election a historic landslide, but it was anything but. Only two other presidents have been elected with smaller popular vote margins since records began in 1824. His edge in the Electoral College, while decisive, depends on less than 80,000 votes across three states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) out of more than 135 million cast nationwide. It was a very close election.

In a close election, there are a million reasons “why” it was close. Trump’s popularity with working-class whites. Turnout among the Democratic base. Campaign malpractice in the Midwest. Jill Stein. Millennials. Most are probably true in the sense they could move enough votes.

The Clinton campaign, however, has centered its why-we-lost narrative on the “Comey effect,” along with another outside factor, Russia’s hacking of DNC and Clinton campaign email accounts. The “Comey effect” refers to the impact of FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter to the House Judiciary Committee announcing the discovery new emails that appeared pertinent to their closed investigation of Clinton and his subsequent letter on November 6 that absolved Clinton (after millions of votes had already been cast early).

Many people — most notably Trump and other Republicans — have scoffed at the claim that the letter changed the outcome of the election, suggesting that it’s a convenient excuse for a weak candidate who made some questionable strategic decisions.

But the Comey effect was real, it was big, and it probably cost Clinton the election. Below, we present four pieces of evidence demonstrating that this is the case.

When we began looking at the data, we were skeptical that Comey’s intervention was decisive. Politicos are notoriously prone to attributing election outcomes to gaffes and other oversimplified causes. It was once posited that a single awkward scream cost Howard Dean his shot at winning the Democratic primary, that the Willie Horton ad destroyed Michael Dukakis, and that the notorious “47 percent” video from 2012 caused Mitt Romney’s loss. Research since has debunked the idea that these incidents were decisive factors. In almost every case, the effects of supposed “game changers” tend to be smaller than broader structural factors, including the state of the economy, the popularity of the incumbent and how long a single party has held the White House.

But Comey’s letter is unique for a few reasons. First, it was an intervention by an institution that Americans have largely perceived as nonpartisan. (Indeed, the FBI actively works to foster that image.) Second, the intervention was almost perfectly timed to impact Clinton at the worst time — dominating the final week of campaigning as an unusually large number of undecided voters made up their minds. Finally, it aligned perfectly with the narrative pushed by Trump — and bolstered by the media’s obsessive coverage of how Clinton handled her State Department email, and the slow-drip release of hacked emails — that Clinton was somehow fundamentally corrupt.

Understanding what happened in 2016 is crucial to understanding how to move forward, as efforts to reform the Democratic Party will be largely based on the stories the party tells itself about its defeat this time around — and those stories will also shape narratives about future presidential contenders.

Exhibit 1: the state polls

First is battleground state polling data from the late stages of the campaign. One of the reasons the outcome on November 8 was shocking for so many is Trump notched surprise victories not only in purple Florida and Ohio, but also supposedly stalwart blue states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Looking back at the widely used RealClearPolitics polling averages shows there was actually a lot of variation in the errors across states. As others have pointed out, one key factor affecting the size of errors was the share of voters in a given state who are white without a college degree. Much of what pundits are describing as error, however, might better be described as the “Comey effect.” States that showed some of the biggest surprises — where Trump outperformed polls — also tended to be states where there were fewer polls toward the end of the race.

In other words, pollsters didn’t get things wrong so much as fail, in some states, to speak to voters after a decisive event had taken place. RCP underestimated Trump’s margin over Clinton by less than a point (0.8), on average, in the seven battleground states where five or more polls were conducted between October 28 and Election Day. But in the other seven states, where fewer than five polls were conducted, the polling averages undershot Trump by 2.7 points.

Take Wisconsin, where Trump beat his polling average by more than 7 points: only two of the polls included in the final RCP average were conducted entirely after Comey’s letter was published.

real.clear.politics.graphic.png Data from RealClearPolitics; chart by McElwee, McDermott, and Jordan.

To be sure, the gap with Clinton was narrowing before Comey dropped his bombshell, but the pace also picked up significantly after that. For example, averaging across 14 battleground states, the race moved 1.1 points in Trump’s direction in the week following the third and final debate — but Trump gained an additional 2.4 points after October 28.

Exhibit 2: the national polls

The effect of Comey’s late intervention into the election is also clear in the national polls. As neuroscientist Sam Wang showed, Clinton’s margin over Trump falls dramatically in national polls directly after the Comey letter and never recovers. At the time, statistician Nate Silver noted that the Comey letter coincided with “a swing of about 3 points against her” — a massive swing in a tight election. These public polls are supported by internal polling from both campaigns suggesting that Comey was a massive blow to Clinton at a pivotal moment in the election.

 

sam_wang.comey.effect.graphic.jpg Sam Wang, election.princeton.edu

It’s worth noting that Comey also made headlines in July, when he testified in Congress about Clinton’s email server and then announced he would not charge her, while at the same time declaring her behavior “extremely careless.” In the words of Nate Silver, “That period produced about a 2-point swing against Clinton.” In other words, every time Comey and emails were driving the news cycle, Clinton’s national polling numbers took a significant hit.

Exhibit 3: The early voting numbers compared with the late deciders

Early voting numbers are also suggestive of Comey’s impact on the race. Take for example a noncompetitive blue state like Rhode Island, where there was no contest but the presidential race. In 2012, Obama’s margin between absentee and Election Day ballots was similar, and Obama actually performed about 5 points better on Election DIn 2016, Clinton pulled in the same margin with absentee voters: 60 percent compared to Obama’s 61 percent. But something rather remarkable happened on Election Day — her support collapsed, dropping by a net 13 points. In Florida, Clinton won the early vote 52 to 48, but Trump won the Election Day two-party vote 56 to 44 percent.

Steve Schale, a Florida political consultant who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign in Florida, found this difference between early vote figures and Election Day ballots even more stark in the swing I-4 Corridor that stretches across central Florida, from Tampa to Daytona Beach. Here, Schale found that Clinton won the early vote with 56.3 percent of the two-party vote, but only won 47.3 percent of the Election Day vote — a highly unusual gap suggesting a pretty significant late surge.

These early voting numbers are supported by data on “late deciders”: voters who chose their candidate in the last week tilted strongly towards Trump. And no media event was more important in the late stages of the campaign than Comey’s letter, which suggests that the most plausible explanation for the strong break in late-deciding voters was that letter.

Graphic from fivethirtyeight.com showing that voters who broke in the last week broke for Trump. FiveThirtyEight.com

Exhibit 4: media coverage of email, email, and more email

The Comey effect dominated media coverage in a way few events did during the campaign, other than Trump’s famous “grab ’em by the pussy” Access Hollywood video. During the final days of the election major newspapers published 100 stories, 46 of which were on the front page, about or mentioning the emails.” The tone and tenor of coverage shifted markedly against Clinton in the closing week of the campaign.

toneof.media.coverage.use.png Shorenstein Center

Coverage of Clinton’s emails eclipsed her policy proposals and ended up being the only story about Clinton that stuck with voters. While 79 percent of registered voters had heard “a lot” about Clinton’s emails, only 23 percent heard “a lot” about Trump’s housing discrimination, 27 percent heard “a lot” about the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s illegal political contribution to the Florida attorney general, and, surprisingly, only 59 percent had heard a “a lot” about the Hollywood Access tape. The word clouds below show, in graphical form, that emails were the central way that most voters understood Clinton:

gallup 2016 word clouds Gallup

During the entirety of the general election campaign, June 7 to November 8, Gallup found that Clinton only sustained a “lead” in media coverage, meaning more Americans were hearing about Clinton than Trump, four times. Two were email related: FBI Director Comey’s press conference in late July, in which he called Clinton “extremely careless,” and Comey’s server-related announcements in late October and early November. (The others occurred during Clinton’s bout with pneumonia and during the party’s convention.)

The Shorenstein Center found that negative coverage of Clinton’s campaign was fueled by allegations of “scandal.” As the chart below shows, “scandal” coverage toward Clinton peaked in the final week of the campaign, consuming more than a third of her coverage. The timing was perilous.

percentage_of_clinton_coverage._scandal_ Data: Shorenstein Center. Graph: McElwee, McDermott, and Jordan.

The upshot:

It’s true that there are other possible explanations for a late shift in vote intentions, but thus far there is no alternative explanation of merit. (The cyberhacks were surely important, but their effects would have been felt more steadily throughout the campaign.)

Instead, the evidence is clear, and consistent, regarding the Comey effect. The timing of the shift both at the state and national levels lines up very neatly with the publication of the letter, as does the predominance of the story in the media coverage from the final week of the campaign. With an unusually large number of undecided voters late in the campaign, the letter hugely increased the salience of what was the defining critique of Clinton during the campaign at its most critical momentThe appeal of big-picture narratives about demographics, along with anecdotal evidence of big mistakes by the Clinton campaign in certain key states, makes it easy to point fingers. But looking specifically at the three “Rustbelt” blue states mentioned at the beginning of the article, no unifying picture emerges. Most stories mention Michigan, where Clinton didn’t campaign, rather than Pennsylvania, where she campaigned intensely. Indeed, these three Midwestern states (Wisconsin being the third) provide essentially an A/B/C test of different campaign strategies — and in each state she came up just short.

We do not intend to exculpate the Clinton campaign — in hindsight many decisions were flawed — but rather to note that the decisions were not abnormally bad (all campaigns make errors, and Trump’s made far more than others). However, the historic intervention into the election by James Comey means three major things:

Use caution when drawing lessons from 2016

Academic research will eventually yield important findings, but there is the potential for Democrats to overcorrect following this historic presidential loss. Introspection is important — and while still early, it’s already underway — but understanding exactly what led to the loss is foundational to understanding how to move forward. Lessons should draw from a broader pool of data than the results of the extraordinary 2016 election.

Democrats cannot rely exclusively on the presidency

Democrats must focus down-ballot where the problems are more acute (for instance, failing to run candidates in winnable elections). Because presidential elections are so variable and are so strongly dependent on outside forces, the low-hanging fruit for the Democrats is focusing on organization and mobilization down-ballot.

Something disturbing happened in 2016

Along with the Russian-linked theft and publication of emails from the Clinton campaign and the DNC, the Comey effect is of a different category than the usual investigative reporting or opposition research that campaigns have to contend with. Comey broke a decades-long norm of not intervening in presidential elections. The fact that his interference alone almost certainly swayed an election is indicative of a broader and disturbing breakdown of political norms.

(quote off)

 

This USA Today article appeared the day before the election.

Analysis: FBI chief Comey's actions changed election irreversibly

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/07/analysis-comey-trump-clinton-fbi-president-election/93415018/

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For a year, the 2016 presidential campaign has sparked the use of the word "unprecedented" in a way that has been, well, unprecedented.

Put this on that list.

In the two weeks before Election Day, FBI Director James Comey dispatched a pair of bombshell letters that first announced a revived investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails and then concluded, basically: never mind.

That hasn't happened before. The closest parallel might be the announcement four days before the 1992 election that former Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger was being indicted in the Iran-contra affair, a step that enraged the embattled George H.W. Bush. (Bush would lose his re-election bid but pardon Weinberger before he left office.) This time, analysts in both parties believe the initial Comey letter has had consequences that can't be reversed by the follow-up letter nine days later — an interval when 40 million Americans cast early ballots.

For one thing, it staunched rising momentum for Clinton, causing enough concern that she largely shelved plans to adopt a more positive message in the campaign's close in favor of continued attack on her rival.

For another, it got Trump out of the spotlight for vulgar comments on the Access Hollywood video and back on offense. He and his allies used word of a new FBI investigation and an erroneous report on Fox News to argue that Clinton was about to be indicted.

Down the ballot, the renewed controversy prompted Democratic strategists to lower their calculations on the number of House and Senate seats their candidates were likely to pick up.

And it plunged the FBI, the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency, into the sort of partisan furor that this year also has eroded public faith in the news media, the two major political parties and the election process itself.

Imagine, for instance, the first meeting between the FBI director and the president-elect, whichever candidate wins. Clinton's allies have blasted his judgment in sending the first letter; Trump has accused him of bending to political pressure in sending the second.

You might say it will be unprecedented.
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Cliff Varnell
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9 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

Comey "swinging" the election: that is your opinion, it’s not a “fact”. As far as I know, Comey has never expressed his motivation for the email release. But it is a fair speculation, and more in keeping with what actually transpired since, that Comey did what he did as a limited hangout, to forestall a far more damaging leak.

Trump’s observation during the 2016 campaign that US interests would be better served by a friendlier diplomatic posture towards Russia seemed like a common-sense position, which was met by something approaching hysteria by certain national security cliques, an affliction which was then passed over to shocked Democratic Party supporters after the election. The negative passion directed towards Russia has been a manufactured propaganda campaign, based largely on exaggeration, conjecture, and Orwellian “two minutes of hate” tantrums. The scholar Stephen Cohen, one of America’s leading Russia “experts”, finds this hysteria extremely troubling and damaging to US interests as well. In a recent interview, Cohen described how he has now been effectively banned from the mainstream media. The banishment of reasonable opinion is partly what leads to casual smears of persons you disagree with as “Putin/Trump fascists” without recognizing you sound like the John Birch Society.

Two Minute Hate!  John Birch Society!  Those are your ideas of "reasonable" smears against people who disagree with you, Jeff?

Speaking of smears -- you mis-quoted me, Jeff.  You put quotation marks around a word I didn't use.

I wrote: "Interesting how the apologists for Trump/Putin fascism play blind to the obvious Trump/Putin conspiracy. "

An "apologist for Trumpian fascism" isn't necessarily a fascist.  An apologist for fascism is usually someone naive and under-informed, like Jeff Carter and Jim DiEugenio.

Edited by Cliff Varnell
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Can't read the "Editorial Board" Wall Street Journal article without becoming a member of that venue.

There clearly is a serious national debate ( more serious than any in my lifetime ) as to Donald Trump's mental, social and emotional states and whether these are so extreme in their abnormality versus normalcy, they and he constitutes a dangerous threat to our society, especially because of Trump's singular highest power position as President.

This unprecedented situation is a reality and as such can't be easily dismissed as simple and/or typical political bias.

This debate would not exist and be as hot and heavy for Trump's entire two years in office if there wasn't a real, large and solid fuel source ( much of it fact based ) to continually keep the issue aflame in the national discourse.

I am listing the link to the well known psychological analysis by mental health PHD'S who feel Trump is truly a dangerous man in the office of the Presidency. 

I agree with their consensus.

I know my personal feelings about Trump don't mean much in the larger society context, however, I do know one thing as sure as sugar; 

Trump's presidency with his super aggressive, combative, attacking and insulting leadership style and loud yelling-bragging professional wrestling demeanor ( on a daily basis !) has created more anxiety, anger, national divisiveness and polarization to such an unprecedented degree it is literally exhausting tens of millions of Americans.

Millions just can't watch the daily aggressive political conflict on TV or hear it on the radio any more.

This wide spread national stress situation is real.  I would call it almost a national mental health crisis.

Just seeing Trump in his most angry and attacking and insulting rally ranting state makes you nervous.  And the man just never lets up!

Trump is the opposite of a calm, reasoned, maturely thoughtful and uniting leader.

He is an inciting demagogue of the first degree, seemingly just for the sake of creating conflict energy which seems to stimulate him and that he is obviously addicted to.

Trump himself has said he likes to create conflict.

Especially among his advisers.

Think about this conflict loving mind set in the realm of Presidential leadership style and responsibility. It's alarmingly troubling to most rational people.

Lastly, I believe Trump has dealt with many unsavory groups and individuals in his decades of business dealings. I think this may be his biggest concern.  That the true extent of these dealings may someday be publicly exposed.

The ousting of crooked Nixon mid-term was inevitable for many reasons. Trump may experience the same fate.

Dr. Steve Wruble: "Trump's sensitivity to being seen as weak or vulnerable along with his need to exaggerate and distort the truth are signs of his deep-seated insecurity. His confabulation protects his fragile ego."

Dr. James Gilligan: “If we are silent about the numerous ways in which Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened violence, incited violence, or boasted about his own violence, we are passively supporting and enabling the dangerous and naive mistake of treating him as if he were a ‘normal’ president or a ‘normal’ political leader. He is not, and it is our duty to say so, and to say it publicly. He is unprecedentedly and abnormally dangerous.”

Unfortunately, mental health professionals are also seeing “the Trump effect” among their patients. There is more bullying in schools — immigrant children and children of color are fearful. There is religious and racial bullying by adults, with hate crimes on the rise across the country. Patients feel traumatized, vulnerable and helpless. Several therapists observed that therapists themselves are feeling the stress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Joe Bauer
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