Eugene Robinson On Trump's Abdication Of Any Remaining Moral Authority

[hatrack]

With his backward policies and his tiresome antics, President Trump seems to be trying his best to do something that ought to be impossible: make the U.S. presidency irrelevant to world progress.

Climate change offers one example. Trump tried hard to build suspense for Thursday’s announcement about whether he would honor or trash the landmark Paris accord; doubtless he’d rather have attention focused on greenhouse gases than on the snowballing Russia investigations. At this point, however, I have to wonder what difference the decision to leave the agreement actually makes. Trump’s pro-coal program of deregulation — a quixotic attempt to revive an industry being strangled by global market forces, not politicians — and his boosterish advocacy of oil and gas mean the United States has little chance of meeting its Paris emissions targets anyway. The real-world impact of Trump’s choice is more diplomatic than environmental.

More important are his domestic policies. And even if Trump succeeds in weakening federal fuel-economy standards, automakers will be unable to ignore California’s tougher requirements, which are also imposed by about a dozen other states — making up more than one-third of the U.S. vehicle market. The administration can seek to override the California standards, but such a move would lead to a lengthy court battle. George W. Bush filed such a challenge in 2007, but California sued, and the case was still pending when Barack Obama took office in 2009 and abandoned it.

EDIT

But Trump has given responsibility for forging peace between Israelis and Palestinians to a total amateur, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The president declines to adopt the customary U.S. stance in favor of democracy and human rights, instead offering autocratic leaders such as Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul Aziz and Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi his uncritical embrace. Such realpolitik has come back to haunt the United States in the past, and it will again. Trump is abdicating all moral power. The world has no choice but to move on.

EDIT/END

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-abdicating-all-the-countrys-moral-power/2017/06/01/709ad08a-4705-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.5c70c46a31e3

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