Trump Stomps Planet Earth
WASHINGTON
— We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to see the president of the
United States step up to the lectern to confidently tell us how he will
combat the existential threat to the planet — be it aliens, asteroids,
tidal waves, volcanoes, killer sharks, killer robots or a
500-billion-ton comet the size of New York City.
So
it was quite stunning to see the president of the United States step up
to the lectern to declare himself the existential threat to the planet.
And with a calming band playing us to our doom, just like on the Titanic.
You know you’re in trouble when beclouded Beijing, where birds go to die, replaces you as a leader on climate change.
America
is living through a fractured fairy tale, in the grip of a lonely and
uninformed mad king, an arrogant and naïve princeling, a comely but
complicit blond princess and a dyspeptic, dystopian troll
American carnage, indeed.
On
climate change, the troll, Steve Bannon, got control and persuaded
Donald Trump to give a raspberry to the world. Bannon had better watch
out or rising waters will wash out his bridge to the past.
Even
though Jared, Ivanka, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Elon Musk, Bob Iger and
Lloyd Blankfein pressed the president to stay in the Paris climate
accord — which is merely aspirational about the inhalational — Bannon
won the day because Trump loves to act like the fired Mr. Met.
As
his biographer Tim O’Brien recalled on ABC’s “This Week,” Trump once
pointed out a dozen six-foot-high speakers by the pool at Mar-a-Lago
blasting classic rock and said: “You know, when I moved here to Palm
Beach, nobody wanted me around. And I love cranking this music as loud
as I can because it bugs the heck out of all of these so-and-sos and I
love it.”
It
is a familiar pattern. “He wanted to get out of Queens to come to
Manhattan,” O’Brien said. “He wanted to be accepted by the real estate
class in Manhattan, but then he thumbed his nose at them.” He wanted to
run for president as a Republican and get the G.O.P. establishment’s
approval, but then he thumbed his nose at it.
The
same with The New York Times, seeking favor and then dubbing us
“failing.” And now it’s the turn of our aghast European allies.
The
more he is labeled a boor and a brute by his critics at home and
abroad, the more Trump digs in, trying to drag America back to a time
when black smoke belched, women scrambled for birth control, sick people
were out of luck, reefer madness reigned and Cuba was shunned.
In
the year 2017, the American president is leading us into a bold new
future, saying he can’t wait to party hardy at “a big opening of a brand
new mine.”
Trump was goaded in the direction of dropping out of the Paris accord by a couple things that irritated him.
As Mark Landler and Michael Shear reported
in The Times, Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, had told
reporters in Sicily that Mr. Trump might be coming around. “His views
are evolving” on climate change, Cohn said. “He came here to learn. He
came here to get smarter.”
That smarted and made Trump want to blast classic rock.
Then
the president read an interview with Emmanuel Macron in a French
newspaper, bragging about how he had prepared to give Trump an Iron Man
grip because it was “a moment of truth” showing that he “won’t make
small concessions, even symbolic ones.”
Comparing
Trump to strongmen Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Macron made it clear that he was determined to face down the bully,
pushing back hard on Trump, just as he would a few days later with
Putin. He scolded the Russian president for his state-controlled media’s
“lying propaganda” and warned that France would use military force if
Putin’s ally Bashar al-Assad unleashed chemical weapons on civilians
again.
As Ashley Parker, Phil Rucker and Michael Birnbaum reported
in The Washington Post Thursday: “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman
31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said. A few
days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden,
‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’”
Whether
Macron is being coached by his wife, whom he met when she was his drama
teacher in high school, is not clear. But he understands the signs and
symbols of power.
Trump
is the president with a background in entertainment, but the
39-year-old French president is the one who has mastered theatrics, from
the splendor of “Ode to Joy” playing at the Louvre on election night as
he made his slow victory walk, to his steely six seconds of arm
wrestling with Trump, to his dramatic swerve to embrace Angela Merkel,
leaving Trump nonplused and waiting to shake his hand, to his dressing
down of Trump’s pal Putin at Versailles, to his televised exhortation
aux barricades on Thursday in English: “Make our planet great again.”
As The Times’s Adam Nossiter wrote,
Macron has a “deeply held belief that France in some sense has been
missing its king since the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793.” And
he has consciously cultivated a regal air as he champions “radical
centrism,” globalization and protecting the environment. The Post dubs him “the prince regent of Paris and Pittsburgh alike.”
Trump,
on the other hand, has rattled the world with his crude manner, cruel
policies, chaotic management style, authoritarian love-ins and
antediluvian attitudes, cementing his image as the highchair king.
For once, the French have a right to be condescending toward the United States.
