By Tom Ribe
Donald Trump is finally losing on many fronts. Having spent years convincing portions of the public that he is a normal, serious president with the public interest in mind, suddenly he is desperate, and increasingly irrelevant like a person running in soft sand from a tsunami.
Faced with a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a moral crisis of institutional racism, Trump brushes aside this powerful moment of national reckoning and asserts authoritarianism and division. He dismisses protests involving hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, from all walks of life as the antics of radicals out to get him personally. He’s clearly also lost interest in the pandemic even as it rages out of control, ruining the economy and killing people. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate, tone deaf, and dangerous response from a president at a historically powerful moment. Donald is deeply dividing our country and literally kill Americans in order to hold on to power. His lack of empathy is jaw dropping.
Contempt for Public Opinion
Donald’s feeding the fires of hate and division on social grounds matches his administration’s efforts to permanently damage our natural world and the institutions we’ve built over generations to protect our life support systems. His anti-expertise, anti-science approach to the coronavirus matches his rejection of facts with regards to all policies regarding land conservation, and pollution. His staff seems to imagine that his base will back his anti-environmental efforts against a rising tide of anger across the country. The political calculus is hard to fathom unless they imagine that the ongoing republican effort at voter suppression will tamp down majority views across the country.
Fortunately, his environmental policies are backed by such shoddy legal work that even conservative judges are throwing out his boldest efforts to always favor industry in environmental disputes. Trump’s team has never stood up for the natural world or for people facing economic and health damage from industrial developments. There is no nuance in the Trump team. Their world is black and white – industry always gets what it wants regardless of the damage exacted on the public and the environment. Public lands are for industry, not the public.
Trump’s environmental policies function from a premise that science, public opinion, and a huge body of law and regulation built up over decades by thousands of people are silly, unimportant, extreme, and inconvenient. Trump’s people think they know better than the rest of us. They have divine insight. They believe they are pure conservatives here to save America from the excesses of education and science, experience and fairness. They know time is short for them and they must go to extremes to advance the agenda of their campaign contributors and the hard-libertarian right.
Back in the 1970’s Congress and the Nixon administration understood that human activity was sometimes devastating the natural world. Experience since has verified that view in spades. They not only passed a series of specific environmental protection laws, they wrote core legislation erecting a system of democracy in environmental decision making. Known as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law requires that the public be allowed to review and comment on government environmental decisions. The law forces agencies to use science and to at least appear to comply with many administrative, pollution control, and wildlife protection laws when making a decision about a project. If they don’t, there are thousands of lawyers ready to pounce and the courts often shut down destructive projects based on shoddy environmental reviews.
Those of us who work with NEPA know that in many ways it is a procedural law, often sidestepped or ignored. But in the age of Trump extremism, it has oversized importance, forcing the Trump agencies controlled by industry officials, to pay attention to public concerns and legal requirements. The Trump people have been losing in court on NEPA matters. They are trying to gut NEPA so they can continue to ram environmental destruction past Americans.
The Trump people have tried to limit NEPA by invoking an “economic emergency” in terms of the Covid crisis. This is a stretch that requires the audience to believe that examining the health and environmental impacts of projects will cause economic harm. Greater economic harm could come from environmental damage with long term consequences of things like oil pipelines that have a variety of dangers and consequences. Environmental damage impoverishes future generations.
They have also tried to use executive orders to limit the types of projects that must have NEPA reviews and to stop reviews from looking at “cumulative effects”. They also want to block public comments in many cases or limit the timeframe for comments to the point where few people can participate. Clearly they know they are going against public opinion.
The Trump people have called this rollback of NEPA protections “modernization” or “streamlining” which are common conservative euphemisms which boil down to weaken and repeal.
Trump’s people are also rewriting regulations on the Clean Water Act (Section 401) to keep states and tribes from commenting on industrial actions that will pollute rivers and streams and potentially sicken the public and kill wildlife. Trump’s goals are clear: end all regulation of industry and keep the public from expressing its distaste for pollution or destroyed landscapes. Fortunately Donald can only go so far with this pathology without Congress changing or repeal the laws in question. Even when republicans controlled Congress (before 2018), they had no appetite for ending pollution controls and ending protections for public lands. Without Congressional action, the deregulations of the Trump administration are open to legal challenge and the Trump people are on a fierce losing streak in the courts as various environmental groups outsmart them in court again and again.
It is no secret that republicans in particular and the Donald Trump administration specifically have taken millions in campaign funds from the oil industry. Koch Industries, a major oil refinery company with extensive libertarian political organizations associated it, has been a major source of right-wing staffers for the Trump administration. Koch officials have long argued for privatization of public lands and for ending air and water pollution control laws. Likewise, they have fought for a repeal of NEPA.
Now we learn that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has stopped the Dakota Access Pipeline because of problems with the NEPA evaluation conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The pipeline has been the center of a long struggle by the Sioux Nation to protect their water supplies and their sovernity. The judge ordered the pipeline shut down and drained because of poor quality NEPA work.
The Trump response has been to try to eliminate NEPA through executive orders and neglect by agencies. But the law is on the books and executive orders that conflict with laws passed by congress and signed by past presidents are vulnerable to legal challenge.
The anti-democratic instincts of this president and his staff are pretty obvious in his dealings with the protests, pandemic and NEPA. They want to block voting by mail, keep minorities and young people from voting, and generally maintain power by going around the American people. We have to hope that Donald Trump will be voted out by such a wide margin that all his efforts to suppress public opinion will be swept aside. Then the job of rebuilding our democracy will begin and will be an all-hands-on-deck effort.
