President Trump and his administration have been walloped in recent weeks with revelations that Trump tried repeatedly to get FBI Director Comey to shut down the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, ultimately firing Comey when he wouldn’t agree to stand down as the President insisted. This was followed swiftly by news reports that Trump gave away highly-classified national security secrets during a bizarre, Russian-media-only Oval Office meeting between Trump and the Russians’ most notorious spies, which featured Russian photos of the President grinning like an idiot with his guests, just minutes before giving them our precious secrets. Then came the reports that the President had appointed the now-disgraced Michael Flynn to be his National Security Advisor, despite knowing that Flynn was then under investigation for a relationship with a foreign government. Finally (for the moment, at least), the Justice Department appointed an honest-and-tough-as-the-day-is-long special and independent counsel, Robert Mueller, to take over the investigation into Trump and the Russians, because the public did not trust Trump to quit interfering with the investigations that had been started.
By all accounts, these events–mostly the result of the President’s determination to do and say stupid and possibly illegal things–have flummoxed Trump and the White House into a self-protective crouch, able to pay attention to little else but trying to explain the latest revelation. Reports describe the President as furious over all of this, raging at his aides whom he falsely blames for his own recklessness, and even at the White House TV, whose programming shows that even the Trump-friendly outlets are running out of ways to try to protect the President from himself.
As a result of all of this, the President has been too distracted to devote any attention to his and EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s plan to dismantle the EPA, and allow Pruitt’s many oil company friends, and other corporate polluters, to resume their pillaging of the environment. Just weeks ago, Trump and Pruitt fired many respected EPA scientists who had devoted themselves to saving lives and loudly proposed to brutally slash EPA’s budget for health-protection; allow previously banned toxic chemicals to once again be used throughout the country; reverse the country’s commitment to clean up contaminated waterways and transform the US from the world’s leader in combatting climate change to a laughingstock climate change “denier”.
But.
The President is pinned down in his White House bunker these days, hoping just to serve out his full term rather than a term in jail, and looking for people to blame for his own behavior. He no longer has the time or energy to wreck the environment and, in the process, threaten the health of hundreds of thousands of children who are especially vulnerable to dirty air and water. The President is just too busy to see that plan through.
Good.
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