TRUMP’S CONTEMPT FOR SCIENCE AND GOVERNING IS STARTING TO BACK-FIRE

…The president continues to lie in both his Tweets and his promises.

 

Trump proposes to sharply reduce spending for research on climate change and science research that helps America’s overall health.

 

With the election of a 70 year old narcissist and pathological liar, we are now able to see the greatest nation on the planet slowly return to the stone age.

 

The president’s latest move to dramatically roll back climate change policies, this effectively ends the United States’ leadership role in securing science-based international cooperation against global warming.  This is the clearest sign that this administration will be animated by Trump’s total contempt for science, not to mention, his attitude against fact-based governing.

 

This has become obvious as there are now many empty offices in the White House because, as the New York Times has reported, scores of science and technology officials under president Barack Obama have since departed.  It is also expected that they will probably not be replaced.  This is already leading key environmental scientists to understand that they will be held in very low regard by this new GOP White House.

 

All these empty office are just that much more proof of Trump’s devaluation of basic science within his administration.  This includes his reversal of President Obama’s climate change policies and his proposals to sharply reduce spending for research on climate change, science and research for all American’s overall health.

 

What is even more telling from The Times report is that Trump’s deep budget cuts to health and scientific research and to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they were all done with zero input from any of the administration’s scientists.

 

The few remaining policy advisers have now ceased distributing daily memos on policy issues regarding climate change, regulation results, or the results of their basic data collections.

 

The administration insists that this is all just a consequence of their slow hiring across the board.  But most of those in the know feel that the administration will make a substantive case for the elimination of these scientific positions.

 

The administration has regularly shown total contempt for the very idea that consequential policy decisions require serious justification and the weighing of their consequences. 

 

Michelle Ye Hee Lee, a Fact Checker at the Washington Post, reports that in justifying the rollback of the Clean Power Plan, the administration is using questionable data furnished by a biased industry group, not by a non-partisan government agency.  The Clean Power Plan was seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

 

These actions by the White House just reinforces The Times’s similar conclusion about their anti-science attitude stated above.

 

But Trump isn’t stopping there, nosirree.

 

Trump has also scrapped the moratorium on the leasing of federal land for coal mining.  He is claiming that this will create jobs. But as David Roberts at VOX reports, who regularly report on the coal industry, he says that the coal companies already have access to years of coal reserves. This rationale about creating jobs is bogus as the industry has become highly automated and there are less than 70,000 workers listed today as working full-tine in mining coal.



...A large West Virginia Coal Mine with less than 100 workers 

 

 

 

On the other hand, the solar and wind energy industry is shown to have over 650,000 full-time employees, and is growing at an accelerated rate. 

 

Instead of putting coal miners back to work, why not spend some resources and time in re-training them the miners a new, higher paying and less dangerous career?

 

It was obvious where Trump has been heading with his requirement for having immediate election type “wins”, with his only real goal being for wiping out his predecessor’s signature achievements in healthcare and energy.  When he was told of how much repealing “Obamacare” would hurt untold numbers of his own voters, Trump only replied off-handedly, “Oh, I know”, but then he claimed that this could somehow be dealt with at a later date….Yeah, right!

 

The White House knew about how many people would be affected if the “Ryan-Care Plan” would have passed in Congress.  Knowing this, they tried in advance, to delegitimize the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  They showed no inclination to change course even when the CBO revealed that 24 million would lose their insurance.  They have totally ignored that Trump himself had previously vowed to provide “insurance for everybody.”  It’s as if Trump had never promised that over and over again in his campaign speeches.

 

It’s pretty bizarre that the White House had helped sink the “Ryan-Health Care Plan” by driving away all the moderate Republicans.  Then, after it died, Trump lashed out at the conservative Freedom Caucus for opposing it….?  But Trump never really bothered seriously to respond to their concerns which were based on a substantive and serious arguments.  Many elderly and poor people would lose their coverage, and the new plan would have offered less coverage at increased costs.

 

All this is happening while Trump continues to promise that he will form “a committee” to investigate his false claim that millions of Americans voted illegally.  So, he is in effect promising the use of government financing and resources to validate his absurd lie, which already undermines American’s faith in our democracy.

 

And beside his false claim to media that Obama wiretapped his phones, the White House has called on Congress to investigate the claim so that they can pretend that it has some validity.

 

Finally, there is Trump’s constant effort to undermine the news media’s legitimate institutional role in our democracy.  This done while the White House continues to promote Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and to steer more cash into Trump family’s pockets, which will happen again when the president of China, and other international leaders, visit the Florida White House.  Not to mention what it coast us all, every time Trump goes to his Mar-a-Lago retreat while Camp David goes un-used at millions of dollars to maintain.

 

Fortunately for all of us, that “contempt for governing” is starting to back-fire at the Trump White House.

 

A Hawaii federal judge has since extended the broad block on Trump’s new travel ban, and Politico notes that the judge explicitly cited a public statement from Trump that revealed that the new version is basically a repackaged version of the old one, designed to get around the federal courts.

 

The judge’s ruling also cites a statement stating as such by a top Trump adviser, Stephen Miller. 

 

These are just other examples of bad-faith politics and Trump’s overall contempt for governing at its worst.

 

 

The hope is that Trump's next 70 days is as bad as the first.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017