by Rick Wilson
Trump? Not so much.
Trump may believe moving his quivering ass from a golf cart to the green counts as cardio, the same as hiking the backcountry in Yellowstone, catching the waves off Laguna, or kayaking through the mangroves in Florida Bay, but no. The weird golden-throne-loving Manhattanite in him doesn’t get the value of America’s natural wonders and rich biodiversity or how a clean environment is a core element of quality of life in the modern world. He’s lived inside an air-conditioned tower all his life.
Kellyanne Conway, desperate to bring suburban women back into the GOP, has forced Trump to give a few deeply awkward speeches about the environment where he grimly plods through the teleprompter and looks about as comfortable as he would hip-deep in raw sewage.
Maybe I’m spoiled and biased—I live in North Florida, one of the most beautiful places on earth, where I enjoy fishing and boating, hunting and camping, and seeing it from above as a private pilot. The sense that it’s all at risk now in a flurry not of mere deregulation but of aggressive, dickish destruction for the sake of lobbyists and corporate sponsors of Trump makes me sick to my stomach. Look, not every regulation from the EPA is sensible, balanced, cost-effective, or environmentally useful; but the Trump approach, to shred them all in a rush to please donors and troll environmentalists, is beyond reason.
In the next term, expect the very worst for America’s environment.
Trump’s 2019 promise to gut the Endangered Species Act is a hideous measure of how low his regard for posterity has sunk. The insistence that the protections in the act are somehow stopping the American economy from growing will have ramifications that stretch far beyond his lifetime—extinction is forever. Gutting protections for wildlife, and removing wilderness and parks designations that comprise vital ecosystems for these species, is a deliberate, ugly element of the Trump state. Protecting these species is a matter of work that has been undertaken now for a generation, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. This isn’t simply a matter of conservation versus industry. It’s a matter of responsibility to our children and grandchildren, our legacy for the future. I’d get the kids out to the national parks as soon as you can, folks. At this rate, they’ll be paved over for Ivankalands and Don Jr.’s House of Endangered Meats before the end of the second term. Why bother with pristine National Wildernesses when they could be so much better repurposed as either oil fields or Trump Wilderness Adventure Golf Resorts™?
Clean water? Endangered-species protections? What’s a little extinction and permanent habitat loss when we need to MAGA? Isn’t some lead and E. coli poisoning worth it when we’ve got so much winning going on?
Coal will continue to gather the lavish government protections and benefits it received in the first four years of Trump. Agribusinesses will continue to live with market protections that screw consumers, destroy farmland, and encourage the widespread use of pesticides. Big Corn will continue to make billions on subsidized ethanol.
He’s gotten away with most of it in the first term under a frenzy of executive orders and the fog of war generated by other scandals, the Mueller investigation, and his usual cloud of bullshit that darkens the sun with its density. Washington has essentially been too busy to focus on the damage his EPA and White House are doing to America’s environment.
When the second-term political pressure is off, the oil and natural gas folks are already expecting a bonanza in that he’ll radically expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and permissions, including off the coast of Florida. There’s a burning irony here, because Florida is, in large measure, Trump country. It was the jewel in the crown of his swing-state pickups in 2016.
As your ambassador from the most purple (and weirdest) state in America, I can tell you exactly why Donald Trump took Florida off the list in 2017 when he announced he would allow expanded oil and gas drilling off the coasts of the United States. He did it because then-governor and now–U.S. senator Rick Scott called and tore him a new one over the issue. It would have cost Scott and now-governor Ron DeSantis their 2018 elections.
Florida may be deep red on some issues—income taxes, guns, and school choice, to name a few—but it is powerfully pro-environment when it comes to preserving the unique quality of life we all enjoy. No, I’m not talking about our abundant Native American casinos (try the fried alligator; it’s transcendent) or our high strip-clubs-per-square-mile ratio. No, I’m talking about offshore drilling.
I’ve worked in Florida politics for thirty years. I’ve studied what makes voters tick from Key West to Pensacola and every weird Florida Cracker-ass -burg and -ville in between. If there’s a unifying issue in my home state, it’s that everyone—white, black, Hispanic, rich, poor, coastal, and inland—hates offshore drilling. As in all things political, it didn’t matter whether the fear of the damage drilling might cause was rational or irrational; it was there. But in April 2010, with the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was game over. The massive oil spew cost the Panhandle billions and caused environmental damage from which the region is still recovering. Now the fear is very rational. Our lives and economy depend on a clean environment. Florida gave Trump its vote in 2016. He’s almost certain to give it the finger after 2020 and allow drilling off our shores.
As for climate accords of any sort, forget it. We’ll fall behind the rest of the world not only in the emerging clean energy sector but in any meaningful reductions in carbon emissions. Republicans (me included) were furious when Barack Obama “picked winners and losers” in the energy sector. Trump’s team is doing the exact opposite kind of winners and losers game; regulations are a cost seeking to induce behavior, and they’re going to flood the zone in favor of the carbon economy for the next four years to monetize their elimination of regulatory checks on bad behavior.
Even in an administration known for an almost comical level of conflicts of interest, grand and petty corruptions, and the appointment of a constellation of clowns, government rejects, and Trump University grads without the slightest area knowledge of the world, Trump’s appointment of a coal lobbyist to head the EPA stands out. Team Trump’s EPA and Department of the Interior are catchments for people who are poorly qualified and deeply unethical, even for Trump world. The second term will draw even more of the dregs into Trump’s administration, so expect more lobbyists to collect government paychecks while deregulating the industries they’ll return to the moment they leave. Bonus time!
As a conservationist Republican, I realize my concerns are out of step with the new “deregulate your donors” strategy of the Trump era. This is one of the legacies of Trump and Trumpism that we will not easily live down. In a second term, Trump won’t worry about the politics of drilling off the coasts, of coal mines dumping waste into creeks and rivers, and Lord knows what supervillain-level industrial and agricultural products that will get to either enter or stay on the market because the right lobbyists stroked the right check.
In a second term, Trump’s expansive use of executive orders to accomplish things Congress wouldn’t touch with a long, sterilized pole will continue, and likely with a sense of greater abandon. The crony capitalism of the coal and fossil fuel sector, the promotion of coal (“Papa…I have the black lung”), and the lowering of water-quality standards leave this Teddy Roosevelt–style Republican and so many other folks cold.
By the end, don’t be shocked if Trump removes the United States from the International Whaling Treaty because Eric Trump found a fisherman’s sweater at Barney’s and a harpoon on eBay.
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@realDonaldTrump: Because of the small disturbance outside my Rally in Dogsbreath, Alabama last night, I am declaring Antifa to be a Terrorist Organization. They attacked the peaceful marchers. There were good people on both sides!
@CNN: Revitalized Klan holds torchlit parade outside Trump rally, attacking counterprotesters.
IMPERIAL TRUMPS
> Eight years of Trump sucks, right? It’s terrible, isn’t it? I mean, it can’t get worse, right?
Right?
Oh, you cockeyed optimists.
As in all things Trump, it can get much, much worse. If he wins in 2020, we’re never getting rid of these dolts. Even if shit goes really, really off the rails, Immortan Don and the rest of his Mad Max crew will still be racing around the desert far into the future.
A second term guarantees the rise of the Imperial Trumps, a family cult built on the remains of the moldering corpse of the GOP, featuring all the warmth of North Korea’s Kim dynasty and a kind of Hapsburg-jawed je ne sais dumbfuck rien.
The fantasy self-image of Donald Trump has always been that of royalty, and as I wrote in Everything Trump Touches Dies, it’s just that pesky Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution that forbids titles of nobility. Since he’s not, you know, famously dedicated to the Constitution in most areas, why this one?
Get ready for Donald Trump Jr., a man who speaks the fluent asshole dialogue of the own-the-libs Trump Party, to rise to the top of the 2024 GOP primary ranks. The dynastic talk that was once treated as a joke (even by me) is already growing around both Don Jr. and Ivanka. Poor Eric is left out, but then again, he always has been.
The Trump family—including the creepy automaton Jared Kushner—will continue to view the American government not as a sacred trust but as an ATM for their crapulous enterprises and nation-state-level grifting. While Kushner’s ambitions don’t appear to be especially political, his exploitation of his high office as Grand Vizier to Emir Donald has been spectacularly profitable for his companies. As for Trump personally, his hotels, golf courses, and clubs were miraculously both popular and profitable for unknown reasons.11 (Pardon me while I recover from that epic eye-roll.)
By the fall of 2019, it was clear that Trump had even managed to suborn the military into spending money that benefited his resorts and golf clubs when stories broke of Air Force cargo flights to the Middle East making unusual stops at his golf resort in Scotland for hotel accommodations and fuel.12
The ambition that drives the Trump spawn these days is powerful, and the corruption and collapse of the GOP as a party will enable their dynastic fantasies to play out with real consequences for the country. The Orange Kardashians will have the brand power of Trump, as well as the shameless hucksterism of Fox and the degraded conservative media, behind them. Mark my words, even the “respectable” elements of the conservative media will soon be producing think pieces on why Don Jr. is the bridge from raw Trumpism to a smoother, smarter populist nationalism.
As for Mike Pence, who briefly held out a secret hope that he would be the heir to the Trump movement by combining his adoring gaze, talent for bootlicking, and slavish Donald über Alles suckuppery, well, Trump treated Pence like any other wife or business partner and has already signaled he’s going to fuck him, and not in his usual two-pump-chump way. When asked if Pence would follow him as president, it would have cost Trump nothing politically to shout out his VP, but he punted. Loyalty is an alien concept to Trump, except to his own progeny.
Ivanka, though never accepted in Washington, still hopes to shape an image of the smart, Aspen- and TED-Talk-friendly modern technocrat who just happens to be the daughter of the warlord. I once had a “serious journalist” with robust access to the Trumps tell me, “She stops so many bad things. She’s a net positive.” Bro. Just because Ivanka calls you and says “I’m stopping bad things” doesn’t make it so, but like her father, she knows how easily duped the media can be.
Installing Ivanka and her android husband, Jared, in the White House was already the greatest display of nepotism in presidential history, but by the summer of 2019 Jared and Ivanka had become the awkward party guests at events like the Tokyo G20 meeting. Trump’s work to frame Ivanka as the First Princess led him to include her in event after event with world leaders, to incredibly awkward effect. It wasn’t the first time he’d thrust his groomed but talentless daughter into the spotlight, but it was one of the most embarrassing.
Her presence was deeply unwelcome at a number of events where she tried to run with the big dogs of world affairs, sparking an #UnwantedIvanka hashtag that ran wild on social media. She drew grumbles and cold shoulders from other world leaders offended that the adult child of a reality-star president was treating them as props in the drama of her personal ambitions.13
Trump made sure that his then national security advisor, John Bolton, was exiled to Mongolia during Kim Jong Don’s surprise visit to see his bestie Kim Jong-un.14 Apparently, though, it was Take Your Daughter to See a Nuke-Curious Genocidal Madman Who Starves His People and Tricks the President of the United States Over and Over Again Day. Trump brought Ivanka to Korea with him because of course he did.
Don Jr. might as well have a Pepe back tattoo, given how beloved he is by the alt-right and how frequently he boosts the social-media posts of the assorted race-war flotsam that follows his father. He’s already teased about running for governor of New York or mayor of New York City, but a better bet will be a quickie relocation to Montana or some other state, at least nominally, before he launches his political career. Junior has spent a lot of time on the campaign trail and has learned the ropes. Expect to see him at the center of the Trump efforts in 2020 and as a constant presence on social media.
Lucky us.
Even Eric the Wide-Gummed and Tiffany have been dragged along for some of the high-profile state visits and glam events. Trump wants to maximize the reach of the brand, even for the children he loves the least. This is how real dynastic politics come to America, not with a bang but a reality show. For the Trumps, it’ll be easy—with the rigid control of the GOP this president exercises, there will be none of those pesky primary elections the Bushes and even the Kennedys had to endure.
Yes, the Imperial Trumps are here to stay. Get ready for four years of the right-wing press writing strained profiles of the Strange New Respect that Ivanka is generating among conservatives, and how the first woman Republican president might not be Nikki Haley but rather the deceptively smart and successful fashion icon supermom Ivanka Trump, who is surprisingly down-to-earth. They’ll “discover” she has an easy, self-deprecating sense of humor.
She’ll even appear on Colbert or (again) SNL, poking fun at her image, and even—just a bit—at her famous father. Even skeptical conservative media will find themselves drawn to how the Princess Royal now represents the Trump nationalism without the rough edges and ugly tweets.
One other factor about the soon-to-be endless presence of Trumps in our lives: They’re breeding like rabbits, so if we don’t play our cards right now, they’ll have enough offspring to get a majority in the U.S. Senate before long.
Tweets from Donald Trump’s Second Term
@WSJ: With the passing today of Rupert Murdoch, sons Lachlan and James announced that the Fox News organization had been nationalized by President Trump. “We’re thrilled to cut out the middleman,” said a statement from the brothers.
@realDonaldTrump: The merger of Fox and the Greatest Presidential Administration Ever (ME!!) is GOOD for America and BAD for the Fake News haters and losers. CNN and MSNBC are Next!
@MSNBC: Nah, bro.
@CNN: What they said.
OUR NATIONAL SOUL
If Trump wins reelection, freedom, opportunity, and equality will no longer be the normative social forces shaping the next generation of American children. They won’t be taught that this is a country of marvelous provenance and a glorious future. Instead, they will be steeped in the essence of Trumpism: nativist, negative, and fundamentally pessimistic. The Other is the enemy. They’ll learn the long-discredited notion that ethnicity defines character. The sort of stereotyping that met the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration waves—drunken Irishmen, dour Germans, lazy Spaniards, fiery Italians, and inscrutable Chinese—are
back with a vengeance under Trump. It’s one step short of the Department of Homeland Security having a Phrenology Division to screen migrants.
A generation will learn its behavior from the worst role model since Saddam Hussein.
Instead of learning that complex and persistent national challenges need solutions based on innovation, leadership, teamwork, and accountability, they’ll learn to hail the warlord with the biggest social-media following and the most wild-eyed support. Tweet-shouting “Only I can solve!” and engaging in endless bluff, bluster, and bullshit with no follow-up will be good enough.
They’ll learn that lying about everything, all the time, is the way great leaders operate, and that truth is a fleeting, conditional construct based on the president’s whims, moods, and blood-sugar level. They’ll learn what Garry Kasparov said so presciently in 2016: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”15
They’ll be taught that it’s OK to keep people fleeing from shithole countries and desperate for refuge in cages like animals. They’ll learn to shrug at the sight of a father and his daughter drowned in the Rio Grande as they try to cross into America to seek a better life. They’ll learn that the way to stop illegal immigration is to tear children from their parents and incarcerate them in for-profit detention centers where they’re held under bright lights twenty-four hours a day—blankets, soap, and toothbrushes optional.