Americans' Acceptance of Trump's Behavior Will Be His Vilest Legacy

By Robert Reich, Guardian UK

29 December 20

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to American democracy

ost of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America.

Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy.

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows.

The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity.

In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the members of the Sackler family that own it, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.

Here, too, they’ve got away with it. These windows remain broken.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his re-election.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.

Trump’s recent pardons have broken double-pane windows.

Not only has he shattered the norm for presidential pardons – usually granted because of a petitioner’s good conduct after conviction and service of sentence – but he’s pardoned people who themselves shattered windows. By pardoning them, he has rendered them unaccountable for their acts.

They include aides convicted of lying to the FBI and threatening potential witnesses in order to protect him; his son-in-law’s father, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to the Federal Election Commission; Blackwater security guards convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians, including women and children; border patrol agents convicted of assaulting or shooting unarmed suspects; and Republican lawmakers and their aides found guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.

It’s not simply the size of the broken window that undermines standards, according to Wilson and Kelling. It’s the willingness of society to look the other way. If no one is held accountable, norms collapse.

Trump may face a barrage of lawsuits when he leaves office, possibly including criminal charges. But it’s unlikely he’ll go to jail. Presidential immunity or a self-pardon will protect him. Prosecutorial discretion would almost certainly argue against indictment, in any event. No former president has ever been convicted of a crime. The mere possibility of a criminal trial for Trump would ignite a partisan brawl across the nation.

Congress may try to limit the power of future presidents – strengthening congressional oversight, fortifying the independence of inspectors general, demanding more financial disclosure, increasing penalties on presidential aides who break laws, restricting the pardon process, and so on.

But Congress – a co-equal branch of government under the constitution – cannot rein in rogue presidents. And the courts don’t want to weigh in on political questions.

The appalling reality is that Trump may get away with it. And in getting away with it he will have changed and degraded the norms governing American presidents. The giant windows he’s broken are invitations to a future president to break even more.

Nothing will correct this unless or until an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize and condemn what has occurred.

What Could Biden's 'Climate Cabinet' Realistically Accomplish?

By Zoya Teirstein, Grist

29 December 20

ast week, President-elect Joe Biden announced his “climate nominees,” the people who will lead executive offices and departments related to energy, environment, public lands, and climate change.

If confirmed by the Senate, Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico will lead the Department of the Interior; former governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm will lead the Department of Energy; Michael Regan, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, will lead the Environmental Protection Agency; and Brenda Mallory, director of regulatory policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center, will head up the Council on Environmental Quality. Gina McCarthy, former head of the EPA under President Obama, will lead the newly formed White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy with Ali Zaidi, a longtime climate adviser to Biden, as her deputy. (Neither of those appointments need senate confirmation.) In November, Biden appointed former secretary of state John Kerry as his special presidential envoy for climate.

“We need to seize the opportunity to build back and build back better than we were before,” Biden said at an event on Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, introducing his climate team. “That’s what this administration is going to do with the help of these fine people.”

But that’s a tall order. Biden’s Cabinet will inherit agencies in disarray — the Trump administration rolled back environmental protections, suppressed climate science, and pushed career public servants out in droves. Biden wants to hit the ground running on January 20 with a $2 trillion climate plan that seeks to revitalize the economy, significantly ratchet down emissions, and correct environmental injustices across the nation. His “Climate Cabinet” will be tasked with making much of that happen, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate and Biden is forced to lean on the powers of the executive branch.

“The policy-making processes that are Cabinet-led are critical to what the president’s ultimately going to try to achieve,” John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and advisor to Obama, told Grist. “There’s going to have to be real creativity, real attention to using all the authorities that these agencies have, that the White House has, to get the country on the path that President-elect Biden has promised.”

There’s reason to believe that Biden’s Cabinet will be able to get to work on Biden’s climate agenda, even if Republicans try to hamstring climate progress in the 117th Congress. Carol Browner, EPA administrator under Clinton and director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under Obama, says agencies can start regulating greenhouse gas emissions immediately and without Congress’ cooperation. “Whether it’s the work that Transportation and EPA can do on cars and trucks, whether it’s the work the Department of Energy can do on energy efficiency, they all have existing legal authority,” Browner told Grist. “There’s a lot they can do without ever talking to Congress.”

During her time in the Obama administration, Browner worked with the Department of Transportation and the EPA to create the framework to regulate cars and trucks on greenhouse gas emissions. She worked with the Department of Energy to regulate industrial appliances to make them energy efficient. “Those things are significant,” she said. “If done properly and aggressively, they will give you measurable and sustainable reductions.”

Podesta gave a different example of a Cabinet secretary who made a big impact on the environment: Bruce Babbitt. Babbitt, who served as Clinton’s secretary of the interior, moved the needle on conservation in the Clinton administration by encouraging Clinton to use the Antiquities Act to significantly expand the national monument system across the U.S. By the end of his time in office, Clinton had added nearly 6 million acres of protected land to the national monument system. “That doesn’t happen by chance,” Podesta said. “Babbitt was a particular champion.” Haaland, a major proponent of conservation and, if confirmed, the first-ever Native American cabinet secretary, could lobby Biden in a similar way to expand protections to not only land, but tribes and their respective cultural and natural heritages, too.

And while it’s true that Biden’s Cabinet has a mountain of work ahead of it, to borrow a phrase the president-elect wore thin on the campaign trail, his nominees can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. “They have their work cut out, but it’s not an impossible battle by any means,” Browner said. “You can have a group of people working on fixing all of the bad stuff Trump left behind and you can have another group moving forward… There’s no reason you can’t call the car companies in on day one and say, ‘Let’s talk about how many electric vehicles you’re gonna make by what year.’”

There’s another reason why Biden’s administration will be well suited to pushing through climate policy: Biden hasn’t just appointed climate hawks to head the departments that traditionally deal with the environment, like Interior and EPA; he’s also appointed people with solid climate records to head other departments across the federal government. He tapped Janet Yellen, former chair of the Federal Reserve under Obama, to head his Treasury Department. Yellen has a record of talking about the risk climate change poses to global financial stability. He intends to put former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and rival presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg in charge of his Department of Transportation. During the Democratic primaries, Buttigieg released a $1 trillion plan centered around updating and equalizing the country’s infrastructure. Biden will nominate Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general who has sued the Trump administration over its environmental rollbacks more than 50 times, to lead his Department of Health and Human Services.

“You want people across the government to embrace the program that Biden has laid out,” Podesta said. “It’s really a whole-of-government thing.”