Why Donald Trump Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

11 July 19

razen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement.

By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning. Trying to parse the nonsense of Trump’s speech sentence by sentence is silly, so concentrate instead on its underlying meaning: the oil companies clearly won a crucial battle with Trump’s election, postponing their moment of reckoning. (Less so the coal barons, whose decline was already too far advanced). But they clearly sense that they are losing the war, and more decisively than before. Trump’s big-man folly—withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, for instance, when it would have been easy enough to sabotage progress more quietly—has decisively discomforted the suburban voters that he must retain for reëlection.

By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?”

The absurdity of the whole enterprise is clear when you remember that Trump doesn’t even believe that global warming is real—he has stated this repeatedly. In that case, only fear of the polls could possibly drive him to stress that America’s carbon emissions are down (except for, um, last year, when they went, um, up). Why else would he care? So that’s craven as well as brazen. But cravenness is probably a good sign—it means that the school strikers and the divestment campaigners and the pipeline protesters and the marching scientists have carried the debate. The tiny minority of climate deniers currently wield federal political power, but it’s finally beginning to sink in with the broader public that climate change is the threat of our time. Among Democrats, that process is well advanced—by some measures, climate change is the No. 1 voting issue in the primary, and, indeed, they are announcing serious cash-on-the-barrelhead plans to do something about it. But Trump’s performance on Monday must indicate that it’s also increasingly the case among independents, the group that holds the key to his electoral future.

This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult.

So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge.

ALSO SEE: Ex-Palm Beach State Attorney: Acosta Is 'Completely Wrong'
About Epstein Plea Deal

Alexander Acosta's Trumpian Non-Apology

By Matt Ford, The New Republic

11 July 19

The labor secretary botched the Jeffrey Epstein case a decade ago—then he botched his chance to admit his mistakes. His boss must be proud.

t was already clear before this week that Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, as a federal prosecutor a decade ago, had mishandled the Jeffrey Epstein case: He gave the well-connected hedge-fund manager the deal of a lifetime for sex-trafficking underage girls, immunized his co-conspirators from potential charges, and denied his victims a chance for justice. Epstein’s arrest by federal prosecutors in Manhattan over the weekend only underscored his failure.

So perhaps there was nothing Acosta, amid mounting criticism, could have said at Wednesday’s press conference to make things right. But the proper approach, obvious to many, was to show some contrition. He could have acknowledged his mistakes and apologized for them. He could have highlighted why others shouldn’t discount victims of sexual abuse in the future as he once did. He could have even resigned.

Acosta chose another path. He gave an astonishingly Trumpian performance: admit no error, shift responsibility, and blame the media. It was an inexplicable choice as well as an ironic one, since it may not be enough to save him from the president’s mercurial whims.

Acosta, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Miami from 2005 to 2009, began by praising the Southern District of New York for arresting Epstein over the weekend. “I’m pleased that the New York prosecution is going forward,” he told reporters. “His acts are despicable and the New York prosecution affords an opportunity to more fully bring Jeffrey Epstein to justice.”

The acts described in the indictment took place between 2005 and 2007, well within the timeframe of Acosta’s handling of the case. That brought renewed scrutiny of the non-prosecution agreement struck with Epstein in 2007, which scrapped a 53-page indictment in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser state prostitution charges and registering as a sex offender. Instead of confessing error, Acosta on Wednesday gave only the most threadbare acknowledgement that he might have made mistakes. “We now have twelve years of knowledge and hindsight and we live in a very different world,” he said. Reporters failed in multiple attempts to elicit an apology from him. Asked if he has “no regrets,” he replied, “No regrets is a very hard question.”

So where did the blame lie, if not with him? Here, Acosta found no shortage of suspects. He readily pointed the finger at Florida prosecutors and law-enforcement officials. “Simply put, the Palm Beach State Attorney’s office was willing to let Epstein walk free, no jail time, nothing,” he said. “Prosecutors in my former office found this to be completely unacceptable and they became involved.” He also blamed the state for Epstein’s eventual 13-month sentence, which was largely served out of jail thanks to a generous work-release policy, instead of the 18-month sentence they had negotiated.

If Acosta was worried that Florida would go easy on Epstein, why did he later go so easy on him? This time, it’s the American people’s fault. He suggested that a jury weighing the case, prior to the rise of the #MeToo movement, might have reached the wrong conclusion. “One of those tough questions in these cases [is] what is the value of a secured guilty plea with registration versus rolling the dice?” Acosta said. “I know that in 2019, looking back on 2008, things may look different.” To whatever extent he’s right about changing cultural attitudes toward survivors of sexual assault, Americans hardly looked kindly on the exploitation and abuse of underage girls twelve years ago.

At one point, he even seemed to place the onus on the victims themselves. A reporter asked Acosta whether he had a message for the women affected by Epstein’s alleged crimes. “The message is you need to come forward,” he replied. “I heard this morning that another victim came forward and made horrendous, horrendous allegations—allegations that should never happen to any woman, much less a young girl. As victims come forward, these cases can be brought, and they can be brought by the federal government, they can be brought by state’s attorneys, and they will be brought.”

What happened in this case, however, wasn’t that the women didn’t come forward; they did. It’s that Acosta didn’t hear them. To cap off the Trumpian display, he even took a jab at the press. One of the Miami Herald’s stories on the Epstein case opens by describing how Acosta met with the hedge-fund manager’s lawyer in 2008 to hammer out the non-prosecution agreement over breakfast at a local Marriott. Was that accurate, a reporter asked Acosta? “I’ve read this, and, you know, one of the things I find interesting is how facts become facts because they’re in a newspaper, as opposed to in the public record,” he said, as if to suggest it was fake news.

He then proceeded to confirm that a similar breakfast meeting had actually occurred, though not exactly in the way it was described. Later, a Herald reporter asked why he didn’t set the record straight when the newspaper contacted him for comment multiple times before publishing the story. Acosta replied that he doesn’t comment on former cases, saying that it’s the Justice Department’s job. It’s not my fault, in other words, if reporters misprinted something after I turned down the opportunity to correct them. Contrast that with Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who praised investigative reporters for shedding light on Epstein’s acts during his own press conference this week.

It’s doubtful whether the more subdued performance will be enough to save Acosta from dismissal. Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, reportedly urged Trump to drop Acosta before the scandal drags on any further. A growing chorus of Democrats is also demanding his departure. Acosta’s performance lacked the volcanic rage of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose angry, partisan remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall rallied Trump and other Republicans behind his nomination. But what it lacked in outrage, it supplied in mimicry of the man who will now decide Acosta’s fate.