Wildfires have been ravaging the west coast for weeks. During that time, Trump golfed, held campaign rallies, and tweeted ad-nauseum. But, until this week, he found no time to even mention the devastation unfolding there.
The fires have charred over 3.2 million acres and destroyed about 4,000 structures in California, killing at least 22 people. …
As of Sunday morning, at least 10 people had died because of the fires in the Oregon, where smoke has turned the air toxic. …
The land that has burned in just the past week has already amounted to the state’s second-worst fire season, after 2015, said [Washington] Gov. Jay Inslee, who is calling the fires ‘climate fires.’
(NBC News, September 13, 2020)
Clearly, fiddling Nero had nothing on golfing Trump.
But crass and craven political calculation finally forced him to play the president of blue states too. That’s why he made such a show of presiding over a wildfire roundtable in California on Monday.
Except that, to Trump’s obvious chagrin, it featured California Governor Gavin Newsom and a scientist challenging him to respect scientific data. Specifically, they pleaded with Trump to recognize the way climate change is exacerbating weather phenomena – from wildfires in the west to hurricanes in the south and snowstorms in the north.
But Trump was fresh from a rally in Nevada the night before, where he gleefully hailed his decision to
- withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement; and
- roll back President Obama’s regulations to fight greenhouse gas emissions and limit car pollution.
Therefore, it was hardly surprising that this climate-change denier brushed off Newsom and that scientist as follows:
It will start getting cooler, you just watch. The scientists? I don’t think the scientists know, actually.
(CNN, September 14, 2020)
That’s it folks. Well, to be fair, his plan to fight the ravages of climate change also includes “raking the forest” of fallen trees and dry leaves.
Never mind that tinder-dry grass and sagebrush are the flammables causing and accelerating the spread of these wildfires. Or that he’s lecturing governors of the states affected about proper forest management, ignoring the inconvenient truth that over half of the land ablaze is federal land, which means that he, not they, is the one responsible for managing it.
Given this, one can hardly blame Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for denouncing Trump as a “climate arsonist.” But nobody should be surprised by this president’s blame-shifting arrogance and recklessness.
After all, this plan is wholly consistent with his science-defying plan to fight the ravages of Covid-19, namely to wait for it to disappear … like a miracle. But it’s instructive to know that, when he announced this plan in February, the country had fewer than 100,000 cases and 1000 deaths. Today, it has more than 6.5 million cases and 190,000 deaths.
No wonder CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner is now accusing Trump of “mass negligent homicide.”
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