Meanwhile, His Own Staff Scrambles To Come Up With “Legit” Reasons To Discredit The Administration’s Own Dire Climate Report, After Trump Simply Says “I Don’t Believe It”
We’re not going to get sucked into an argument here about whether Trump actually doesn’t know these are baldfaced lies he’s spreading, or he does know and is just hoping to reach out to people who don’t know, and inflame them. Because either way, he isn’t going to issue corrections or take them back.
Here’s one:
A quick check of Snopes finds that:
- This was not even in the U.S., but Canada.
- This was not an “illegal” but a refugee who had already legally been admitted into Canada by the Canadian government.
Here’s another:
G.M. did pay back the bailout money it received from the Obama bailout plan. A long, long time ago. Here’s a Reuters article from 2010.
And then there’s this one (which you’ve probably seen by now):
Authoritarianism anyone?
Meanwhile, Sarah Sanders was busy debunking the Administration’s own climate assessment, (here’s a link to the full report), which predicts huge economic impact without major steps to push back global warming. The White House spokesperson saying among other things that it’s not “data driven”, and running with the President’s thought that the U.S. has “a record clean air and water“, whatever that means. Nice try.
In some ways, for Trump, this is just another “America First” issue. He spent a lot of time in a Washington Post interview talking about how a lot of damage to the environment these days is caused by other countries dumping stuff which then “blows over and it sails over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific”, seemingly placing the responsibility for leadership in this area on other countries, not us. While still asserting he doesn’t really believe it’s happening anyway.
Trump’s main argument against believing–other than “a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers”–is that taking action now would be a job killer. Because cleaning up the environment would hurt U.S. corporations too much to comply with stricter environmental standards. But that should be accepted now as complete BS, since the new report, and so many other reports show way more severe economic consequences down the road if nothing is done. Emergency funding for natural disasters right now is a significant contributor to the ballooning budget deficit. And it gets worse every year.
At the same time, the climate change deniers are undeniably winning at this stage in the game. Because each time a new, terrifying scientific report comes out on the perils of not doing anything about rising temperatures, sea levels, etc. it’s treated as huge breaking news. And it shouldn’t be anymore. Then it’s debunked by Trump and his team of deniers. Then the next report comes out and is treated as a huge surprise. It’s not a surprise. There aren’t two sides to this. The fact that there still is a huge back and forth means that unfortunately Trump’s team is winning on one of the issues on which he’s most hugely misguided and/or misleading, because he’s successfully enforcing the view that it’ll still something subject to debate.
One final note today: for those who’ve been reading The Chaos Report for a while, you know that we pride ourselves on ignoring the froth, distraction and noise, but we just kind of let it rip today. And there is a lot of other important stuff going on too: like Senate Republicans moving ahead with a highly controversial judicial nominee, and even Republican Senators getting angry after the White House refused to let CIA Director Gina Haspel brief them on the agency’s findings on Saudi Arabia and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But if you really want to read something astounding, check out this fantastic Miami Herald piece about how an extremely rich and powerful money manager, who was pals with both Trump and Bill Clinton, apparently got away with molesting scores of underage girls, with an unusual legal assist from the U.S. Attorney in Miami who’s now Trump’s Secretary of Labor.
We apologize for the delay in publishing this morning. We were having connectivity issues with our internet provider. Thank you for your patience!