Tag Archives: obama

How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

by GabrielWithrow Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In July 2014, as the largest Ebola outbreak in history was ravaging West Africa, Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain that two sick American health workers were being flown back to the United States for treatment. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days—now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent,” wrote the future leader of free world. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Over the months that followed, Trump would tweet about the outbreak more than 50 times.

Trump’s social-media outbursts were among the earliest shots fired in the political war over Ebola. The timing of the Ebola outbreak could not have been more propitious for Republicans, many of whom echoed Trump’s calls for a temporary travel ban. In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, the specter of a lethal African virus being spread through the United States by migrants stoked fears not only among the GOP base, but also among many voters who leaned Democratic. By October, two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they favored restricting travel from Ebola-affected countries.

I thought about Trump’s Ebola tweets last year as I was completing a memoir about my work treating Ebola in rural Liberia at the height of the outbreak. By early 2016, the Republican presidential primaries were dominating the headlines, and Ebola had long since faded from the front page. But the two events seemed connected to me; it was clear the outbreak had taken its toll on public debate.

St. Martin’s Press

The naked and brutal nativism on display at right-wing political rallies obviously had much deeper roots than Ebola. But from my standpoint, the outbreak helped legitimize a kind of language previously relegated to the fringes of American politics. Looking back on the campaign, I firmly believe Ebola was one of the key events that made Trump’s candidacy possible.

Insofar as Trump expresses a coherent political philosophy, those expressions can be found not in policy papers or major addresses, but in his tweets. When examining Trump’s tweets on the Ebola outbreak, the main features of his approach are plainly evident. It’s all right there: The shallowness, willful ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and empty boasting infuse every 140-character burst. And Trump’s views on the issue received massive media attention. His tweets were written up everywhere from Breitbart to USA Today to Mother Jones. He elaborated on them in his regular Fox News appearances.

Trump’s very first tweet is as clear a display as one could imagine of the kind of arch-nativism that would animate his campaign and the first few months of his presidency. It came on July 31, in response to news that two American medical workers infected with Ebola were being airlifted out of West Africa to the United States for advanced care in the most secure conditions (so-called Biosafety Level 4 facilities). Right from the start, he highlighted the central animus of his foreign policy in an all-caps summary, even when, as in this case, THEM might be US citizens.

Health officials assured the public that Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—the doctor and nurse who had braved the outbreak to serve at a hospital on the outskirts of Monrovia—posed little risk of spreading the disease in the United States. But Trump wasn’t satisfied. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he wrote on August 1. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” In other words, the Ebola fighters’ “greatness” didn’t override Trump’s desire to see them suffer because of their selfless actions.

By that time, it was clear that the outbreak was overwhelming the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and that without substantial international help, the virus would likely spread unchecked across borders. It could turn what was already a substantial regional problem into a profoundly more complicated (and expensive) international crisis. And it meant that resource-wealthy nations needed to provide help to contain the spread.

Trump certainly didn’t want to treat Ebola patients in the United States, but he did initially seem to agree that Americans should provide some sort of medical assistance to the affected countries. “A doctor on NBC Nightly News agreed with me—we should not bring Ebola into our country through two patients, but should bring docs to them,” he wrote on August 4. It was a bizarre statement for someone who just three days earlier had said that doctors who put themselves in harm’s way should be left to “suffer the consequences.” By September, he seemed to have changed his mind entirely about sending help. “Can you believe that the U.S. will be sending 3000 troops to Africa to help with Ebola,” he wrote. “They will come home infected? We have enough problems.”

Listen to Steven Hatch discuss the Ebola crisis on a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast:

Trump wasn’t simply calling for patients infected with Ebola to be excluded from the country. In one August tweet, he wrote, “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” Two days later, he extended his proposed travel ban to all of West Africa. “The bigger problem with Ebola is all of the people coming into the U.S. from West Africa who may be infected with the disease,” he wrote. “STOP FLIGHTS!”

The Ebola panic in the United States reached new heights in early October, after an infected Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan entered the country. He was symptom-free at the time of his flight but became ill several days after arriving. He sought treatment at a Dallas hospital, which led to two nurses contracting the virus. Trump, who would spend much of the 2016 campaign portraying immigrants as rapists and murderers, used the opportunity to imply that Duncan came to the United States with sinister motives. “The Ebola patient who came into our country knew exactly what he was doing,” Trump tweeted. “Came into contact with over 100 people. Here we go—I told you so!”

The Duncan chapter was without any question the low point in the US Ebola story. Multiple mistakes occurred not only in Dallas, but in Liberia as well, as Duncan slipped through the screens designed to prevent people exposed to the virus from leaving the country. (He had accompanied the daughter of his landlord to a hospital in Monrovia, and she later died of the disease.) Nearly everything that could have gone wrong with Duncan did go wrong. Nevertheless, the only people who contracted the disease from him were the two nurses who cared for him. They, in turn, passed it along to no one. Duncan died, but both nurses made full recoveries.

An Ebola infection on US soil certainly isn’t a trivial matter, but it was by no means the calamity that Trump, along with tens of millions of his fellow Americans, assumed it was. Public health experts, including Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, repeatedly called for calm, arguing that the United States was well prepared to contain the virus and that closing down borders would simply make the outbreak harder to manage. President Barack Obama echoed these statements. Trump accused the CDC of lying about the threat posed by the disease. He portrayed Frieden’s and Obama’s leadership as feckless, even though Frieden’s assessment would prove to be considerably more accurate than Trump’s.

Trump’s tweets reached a fever pitch on October 23 and 24, when Craig Spencer, a returning doctor who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea, fell ill with the disease in New York City. According to Spencer’s account, the moment he became symptomatic he isolated himself and informed public health authorities. Before he became symptomatic, he was a threat to no one, and once he did, his isolation ensured that he was not a threat. If Duncan’s situation was a worst-case scenario, Spencer’s was exactly how the experts had hoped to deal with travelers from the affected countries.

This did not stop Trump from becoming unhinged, tweeting about the incident seven times in two days. He railed against what he regarded as the foolishness of US policy and accused Spencer of being “selfish” for having the temerity to eat at a restaurant prior to becoming ill. That a billionaire who has never made any appreciable personal sacrifices for others could have the chutzpah to make such charges is revealing. It also foreshadowed his temper tantrums against the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US Army captain of Pakistani descent who died trying to thwart a car bombing in Iraq. Trump publicly attacked Khan’s parents last year after they criticized his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

But if Trump’s outbursts against Spencer reveal his weird personal accounting of what constitutes altruism, his final Ebola tweet was a clear portent of future policy. On November 10, just as the news of the West African outbreak was starting to recede, he repeated his dire warnings of the threat of Ebola on US soil by noting that an infected person can spread it to two others “at a minimum.” He then added, “STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!”

On the campaign trail, Trump infamously called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” ostensibly in an effort to prevent terrorism. Once in office, he issued executive orders suspending immigration by refugees and citizens of several majority-Muslim countries. Perhaps given enough time, new circumstances will allow him to revisit his 2014 threat and add sub-Saharan Africa to the list.

Trump’s Ebola tweets are useful not only for their ability to illuminate how subsequent events that shocked the political establishment came to be, but also because they provide a clear road map for how he will respond to the next biological crisis. Ebola may have been the most dramatic such crisis of the past generation, but others have also generated substantial alarm. The swine flu pandemic of 2009, the avian influenza outbreaks in East Asia, and the SARS epidemic are just a few of the cases that have required international cooperation.

How will Trump deal with these unforeseen hazards? Will his instinct to resort to border-closing as a first-line policy lead to more suffering? Will his penchant for denigrating people who choose to serve others intimidate health care workers who might otherwise volunteer in such moments? Will he continue to reject any form of scientific expertise?

We’re not even 100 days into the new administration, but the evidence so far is not reassuring. Whatever the next biological agent, Trump may well take a dangerous situation and make it worse—both abroad and at home.

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How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

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Our Dishonest President — Part 1 of 1 Million

by WilsonElsey Posted on April 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Oh man. Here’s the lead editorial in the LA Times this morning:

This could go on forever. The online version suggests that it’s only four parts, finishing up on Wednesday, but who knows what we’ll find out between now and then? By 2020—or however long Trump lasts—this could end up being a thousand-part editorial.

And while we’re on the subject, a federal judge has ruled that it’s OK for a lawsuit to go forward accusing Trump of inciting violence at one of his campaign rallies last March. That’s sure something you don’t see every day. But Wikipedia tells me the judge is some notorious Obama appointee, so he’s probably taking direction from the same folks who ordered Trump wiretapped. As the president puts it:

Yessir. Find the leakers, and we’ll probably also find out who’s pulling the strings of this so-called judge.

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Our Dishonest President — Part 1 of 1 Million

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The Price Affair Is a Dark Horse Corruption Scandal Just Waiting to Erupt

by PhilippASV Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

It’s been previously reported that HHS Secretary Tom Price has made some questionable stock trades that appear to be based on inside information he had as a congressman. But Robert Faturechi reports that there’s more:

On the same day the stockbroker for then-Georgia Congressman Tom Price bought him up to $90,000 of stock in six pharmaceutical companies last year, Price arranged to call a top U.S. health official, seeking to scuttle a controversial rule that could have hurt the firms’ profits and driven down their share prices, records obtained by ProPublica show.

….On March 17, 2016, Price’s broker purchased shares worth between $1,000 and $15,000 each in Eli Lilly, Amgen, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, McKesson, Pfizer and Biogen….The same day as the stock trade, Price’s legislative aide, Carla DiBlasio, emailed health officials to follow up on a request she had made to set up a call with Patrick Conway, the agency’s chief medical officer. In her earlier emails, DiBlasio said the call would focus on payments for joint replacement procedures. But that day, she mentioned a new issue.

“Chairman Price may briefly bring up … his concerns about the new Part B drug demo, as well,” she wrote. “Congressman Price really appreciates the opportunity to have an open conversation with Dr. Conway, so we really appreciate you keeping the lines of communication open.”

The “Part B drug demo” refers to a proposed Obama rule that removed the incentive for doctors to prescribe expensive drugs that don’t seem to improve patient outcomes. As it happens, there were plenty of folks in Congress from both parties who opposed this rule, so Price’s opposition wasn’t unusual. The difference is that all the others didn’t buy lots of pharmaceutical stock at the same time they were lobbying to stop a rule that might have eaten into pharmaceutical profits.

So far, the Price affair hasn’t attracted all that much attention. There are too many other Trump administration scandals to worry about. But this one has a decent chance of blowing up one of these days.

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The Price Affair Is a Dark Horse Corruption Scandal Just Waiting to Erupt

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Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

by MagnoliFIHM Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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While chastising Democrats for threatening to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday delivered one of his most egregious falsehoods yet. Republicans, he insisted, have historically been cooperative when it comes to giving up-or-down votes to Democratic presidents’ court appointments. Spicer specifically mentioned former President Barack Obama in making this assertion.

“Republicans in the past have allowed Democrat presidents to have their SCOTUS nominees voted on up or down,” Spicer said. “And for the most part, when you go back through President Obama or President Clinton…Republicans have joined with Democrats to allow people who are qualified to go onto the court.”

“It was Obama’s nominees that got through—all with Republican support,” he added. “It’s difficult to understand why, when you’ve got someone as eminently qualified as Gursuch, that this the stake that they want to drive. And I think it further sets a partisan divide in our country when we can’t allow people who are qualified, and universally so, to get on the bench.”

There’s one glaring problem with Spicer’s remarks: Merrick Garland. In 2016, Obama selected Garland to replace the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February. Arguing the nomination to fill the vacant seat should be left to the next president, Republicans staged an unprecedented blockade to the nomination process, refusing to even hold hearings on Garland’s nomination. That gamble paid off, and here we are with Trump and Gorsuch—and Spicer’s bald-faced lie.

Watch Spicer’s remarks, which start around the 1 hour and 49 minute mark:

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Here’s the Biggest Lie Sean Spicer Told Today

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Republicans Scramble to Advance Bill Targeting Planned Parenthood

by ElbaKuester Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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Vice President Mike Pence and a Republican senator recovering from surgery were whisked onto the Senate floor on Thursday to help advance legislation that would allow states to withhold federal family planning funds from health care providers who also offer abortions, including Planned Parenthood.

Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the bill, leaving it with just 49 votes. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who had been recovering from back surgery at home in Georgia, arrived at the Capitol to cast the 50th vote. That resulted in a tie that allowed Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote on a procedural motion on the bill, which can now advance to a final vote.

The bill would overturn an Obama administration rule that prohibits states from withholding federal family planning money from abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. The use of federal funding for most abortions is already illegal thanks to the Hyde Amendment, a budget rider first passed in 1976. The Obama-era rule protects funds for health care services like contraception, cancer screenings, and annual gynecological exams for low-income patients.

“Mike Pence went from yesterday’s forum on empowering women to today leading a group of male politicians in a vote to take away access to birth control and cancer screenings,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a statement. “Four million people depend on the Title X family planning program, and this move by DC politicians would endanger their health care. This would take away birth control access for a woman who wants to plan her family and her future.”

Last month, the House voted to approve its version of this measure. If the Senate passes the bill, it will move to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to defund Planned Parenthood.

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Republicans Scramble to Advance Bill Targeting Planned Parenthood

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In Private, It Turns Out That Trump Is Pretty Much the Same

by dannhollander37 Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Roger Cohen writes about the Trump-Merkel meeting a couple of weeks ago:

When Donald Trump met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany earlier this month, he put on one of his most truculent and ignorant performances. He wanted money—piles of it—for Germany’s defense, raged about the financial killing China was making from last year’s Paris climate accord and kept “frequently and brutally changing the subject when not interested, which was the case with the European Union.”

…Trump’s preparedness was roughly that of a fourth grader…Trump knew nothing of the proposed European-American deal known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, little about Russian aggression in Ukraine or the Minsk agreements, and was so scatterbrained that German officials concluded that the president’s daughter Ivanka, who had no formal reason to be there, was the more prepared and helpful.

Merkel is not one to fuss. But Trump’s behavior appalled her entourage and reinforced a conclusion already reached about this presidency in several European capitals: It is possible to do business with Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but these officials are flying blind because above them at the White House rages a whirlwind of incompetence and ignorance.

I’m sure glad that Republicans are restoring the respect for America that we lost after eight years of that empty suit Barack Obama.

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In Private, It Turns Out That Trump Is Pretty Much the Same

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In Mosul, Yet Another Botched Operation

by ClaribeVPSZ Posted on March 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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A US airstrike in Mosul last week appears to have killed upwards of 200 civilians. The New York Times reports:

American military officials insisted on Friday that the rules of engagement had not changed. They acknowledged, however, that American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq had been heavier in an effort to press the Islamic State on multiple fronts.

….Col. John J. Thomas, a spokesman for the United States Central Command, said that the military was seeking to determine whether the explosion in Mosul might have been prompted by an American or coalition airstrike, or was a bomb or booby trap placed by the Islamic State….Iraqi officers, though, say they know exactly what happened: Maj. Gen. Maan al-Saadi, a commander of the Iraqi special forces, said that the civilian deaths were a result of a coalition airstrike that his men had called in, to take out snipers on the roofs of three houses in a neighborhood called Mosul Jidideh. General Saadi said the special forces were unaware that the houses’ basements were filled with civilians.

….Before, Iraqi officers were highly critical of the Obama administration’s rules, saying that many requests for airstrikes were denied because of the risk that civilians would be hurt. Now, the officer said, it has become much easier to call in airstrikes. Some American military officials had also chafed at what they viewed as long and onerous White House procedures for approving strikes under the Obama administration.

This may simply be an appalling incident not related to any change in policy. Even with the best preparation, sometimes horrible things happen when you’re at war. Still, in the past two months we’ve had a botched raid in Yemen; two attacks in Syria with heavy civilian casualties; and now an airstrike in Mosul that left hundreds of civilians dead. It’s fair to wonder if a guy whose idea of military strategy is to “bomb the shit out of ISIS” has also decided that he doesn’t much care about civilian casualties while he’s doing it.

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In Mosul, Yet Another Botched Operation

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“The Republican Party Is a Party Without a Purpose”

by PaulineLoughman Posted on March 25, 2017

Mother Jones

Philip Klein unloads on the GOP in the pages of the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Obamacare repeal “the biggest broken promise in political history”:

What’s so utterly disgraceful, is not just that Republicans failed so miserably, but that they barely tried, raising questions about whether they ever actually wanted to repeal Obamacare in the first place.

Republicans for years have criticized the process that produced Obamacare, and things certainly got ugly. But after having just witnessed this debacle, I think Paul Ryan owes Nancy Pelosi an apology.

One has to admire the commitment that Democrats and Obama had to delivering something they campaigned on and truly believed in. They spent 13 months getting the bill from an initial concept to final passage, and pressed on during many points when everybody was predicting doom. They had public hearings, multiple drafts of different bills, they kept negotiating, even worked into Christmas. They made significant changes at times, but also never lost sight of their key goals. They didn’t back down in the face of angry town halls and after losing their filibuster-proof majority, and many members cast votes that they knew risked their political careers. Obama himself was a leader, who consistently made it clear that he was not going to walk away. He did countless rallies, meetings, speeches — even a “summit” at the Blair House — to try to sell the bill, talking about details, responding to criticisms of the bill to the point that he was mocked by conservatives for talking so much about healthcare.

The contrast between Obama and Democrats on healthcare and what just happened is stunning. House Republicans slapped together a bill in a few weeks (months if we’re being generous) behind closed doors with barely any debate. They moved the bill through committees at blazing speed, conducted closed-door negotiations that resulted in relatively minor tweaks to the bill, and within 17 days, Trump decided that he’d had enough, and was ready to walk away if members didn’t accept the bill as is…

There was a big debate over the course of the election about how out of step Trump was with the Republican Party on many issues. But if anything, this episode shows that Trump and the GOP are perfect together — limited in attention span, all about big talk and identity politics, but uninterested in substance.

Failing to get the votes on one particular bill is one thing. But failing and then walking away on seven years of promises is a pathetic abdication of duty. The Republican Party is a party without a purpose.

Go read the whole thing.

Trump, Ryan, and McConnell’s total lack of commitment to repealing Obamcare really does stand in stark contrast to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid’s total commitment to passing it in the first place.

On the eve of the House ACA vote in 2010, Obama went to Democrats and implored them to cast a vote many knew would be political suicide.

Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didn’t think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college. I went to work in neighborhoods, working with Catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in Chicago, trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help. And I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now. Because my working assumption was when push comes to shove, all too often folks in elected office, they’re looking for themselves and not looking out for the folks who put them there; that there are too many compromises; that the special interests have too much power; they just got too much clout; there’s too much big money washing around.

And I decided finally to get involved because I realized if I wasn’t willing to step up and be true to the things I believe in, then the system wouldn’t change. Every single one of you had that same kind of moment at the beginning of your careers. Maybe it was just listening to stories in your neighborhood about what was happening to people who’d been laid off of work. Maybe it was your own family experience, somebody got sick and didn’t have health care and you said something should change.

Something inspired you to get involved, and something inspired you to be a Democrat instead of running as a Republican. Because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself, I believe in an America in which we don’t just look out for ourselves, that we don’t just tell people you’re on your own, that we are proud of our individualism, we are proud of our liberty, but we also have a sense of neighborliness and a sense of community — (applause) — and we are willing to look out for one another and help people who are vulnerable and help people who are down on their luck and give them a pathway to success and give them a ladder into the middle class. That’s why you decided to run. (Applause.)

And now a lot of us have been here a while and everybody here has taken their lumps and their bruises. And it turns out people have had to make compromises, and you’ve been away from families for a long time and you’ve missed special events for your kids sometimes. And maybe there have been times where you asked yourself, why did I ever get involved in politics in the first place? And maybe things can’t change after all. And when you do something courageous, it turns out sometimes you may be attacked. And sometimes the very people you thought you were trying to help may be angry at you and shout at you. And you say to yourself, maybe that thing that I started with has been lost.

But you know what? Every once in a while, every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, you’re right, the system is not working for you and I’m going to make it a little bit better.

And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why I’ve made those sacrifices. Because I believe so deeply in this country and I believe so deeply in this democracy and I’m willing to stand up even when it’s hard, even when it’s tough.

Every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself. And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine. We have been debating health care for decades. It has now been debated for a year. It is in your hands. It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow.

With Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, Democratic voters had representatives who were as committed to their goals as they were. Republican voters should realize today that they are not so lucky.

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“The Republican Party Is a Party Without a Purpose”

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What If I Told You That Republicans Spent Only 36 Days on Trumpcare?

by AdelaidN61 Posted on March 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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If you want to know why Trumpcare failed so disastrously, here’s a big part of the answer:

The process toward passing Obamacare began on March 5, 2009, when President Obama convened a “health summit” with various players in the health care industry. It finished 383 days later, on March 23, 2010, when he signed it into law.

Trumpcare began life on February 16, 2017, when Paul Ryan released an outline of what a Republican bill would look like. It was abandoned 36 days later, on March 24, 2017.

And this doesn’t even count the fact that Democrats had been seriously debating and designing health care policy for decades before Obamacare was born. Republicans had never gone much beyond the debating point point stage. But policy matters: detailed, messy, real-life policy that makes compromises in order to produce something that works and has the support of all the stakeholders. The problem is that Trump isn’t used to that kind of thing. Ezra Klein points out today that, in fact, Trump isn’t a very good dealmaker. That’s true, and it’s something I’ve written about frequently. But he also says this:

In Trump’s past jobs, he could simply move on from failed deals and find new partners, and new markets, and new sectors. But that’s not how the presidency works, and it’s not clear he realizes that.

“Take it or leave it” works only if you really are willing to leave it. Trump often is, because he can always turn around and do a different deal with someone else. But there’s only one Congress. If Trump gets bored after a whole month of negotiations and gives up, there’s no other Congress he can turn to. That’s why Trumpcare is dead.

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What If I Told You That Republicans Spent Only 36 Days on Trumpcare?

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Leading Global Warming Deniers Just Told Us What They Want Trump to Do

by emeliamault0 Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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What does a climate change denier wish for when everything seems possible? With Congress and the White House in agreement on the unimportance of science, there’s no need to settle for rolling back President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda one regulation at a time. It’s time to get the Environmental Protection Agency out of climate change altogether.

To get a sense of what the wish list looks like, the annual conference of the Heartland Institute would be a good place to start. The right-wing think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch groups—and is best known for pushing out misinformation on climate change—has sponsored this annual gathering for the last 12 years. This year the theme was “Resetting Climate Policy,” reflecting the triumphant and hopeful mood of the conference now that they control the agenda.

The usual ideas floated at the conference have ranged from abolishing the EPA to touting the universal benefits of fossil fuels, but this year one idea in particular dominated the discussions: Climate deniers think they have a chance to reverse the EPA’s endangerment finding that formally says greenhouse gasses poses a threat to Americans and their health. That 2009 determination, prompted by a Supreme Court decision in 2007, is the basis for the EPA’s regulatory work on climate change.

“We’ve been at this for 33 years. We have a lot of people in our network,” Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast tells Mother Jones, “and many of these people are now in this new administration.” Transition staff and new appointees in the Trump administration “occasionally ask us for advice and names of people,” he added.

Rescinding the endangerment finding is the “number one” priority Bast sees for Trump’s EPA. “I think it’s almost a sure thing they are going to revisit it,” Bast says. “Whether they are going to succeed is maybe a 90 percent certainty.”

Bast overstated the strength of his case. The problem with rescinding the endangerment finding is that the EPA would somehow have to make a convincing case that holds up in court that climate change isn’t a threat to humanity. In other words, it would be incumbent upon the EPA to disprove climate change is real.

During, his confirmation hearings, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt acknowledged that the endangerment finding was the “law of the land” and there is “nothing that I know that will cause a review at this point.” But he has recently suggested he may attempt to change course. He went on CNBC and claimed “we don’t know” that the science is settled, and insisted “we need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Cato Institute’s Director for the Center for the Study of Science, Patrick Michaels, who gave an address to the meeting, agreed that the administration should make reversing the endangerment finding its priority. At one point in his presentation, Michaels asked if David Schnare—who previously spent years suing the EPA until he became a transition appointee at the agency—was in the audience. “David’s big on this,” Michaels said. Schnare was not there, but he helped to emphasize Bast’s point: Trump’s appointees are familiar, friendly faces.

In his keynote address, House Science Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) expressed his gratitude to Heartland for its “help and support.” Asked if he will be holding a hearing on the endangerment finding, Smith answered, “Probably….It hasn’t been set yet. We can add that to our list.” Smith, who has already held a “Making EPA Great Again” hearing, will plans a hearing for next week questioning the scientific method of climate studies.

For anyone who acknowledges climate change is a reality and a threat, Smith’s final words about President Trump to the roughly 200 attendees who were gathered might be considered ominous: “You won’t be disappointed with the direction he’s going.”

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Leading Global Warming Deniers Just Told Us What They Want Trump to Do

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