President Donald Trump wants to unify the nation and is on course to do just that, but not in the way he envisions.
Because of his sweeping rollback of environmental regulations, Trump stands to unify a majority of the country voiced through opposition rather than support.
Trump is making the same elemental mistake as his immediate Republican presidential predecessors, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes. They did not grasp that ultimately, environmental protection is not a partisan issue but a unifying force. Any politicians who make a practice of typecasting environmental regulation as a bogeyman do so at their peril. That is because the ill effects of environmental degradation, if allowed to persist, do not discriminate between age, gender, wealth, or political affiliation.
Environmentally-inspired national unity has a solid if rarely outspoken base. Numerous polls show that a majority of Americans believe in the integrity of the regulations to curb pollution and protect public health. It follows that when these regulations are threatened with dilution or all-out revocation, a broad cross-section of Americans eventually closes ranks in opposition.
Hence, despite his personal popularity, President Ronald Reagan had to abandon his deregulatory crusade when his surrogates’ flagrant environmental rollbacks ignited public outrage.
Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, started out as the self-proclaimed “environmental president”. For his reelection bid, however, Bush felt compelled to engage in environmental deregulation to woo voters from the Far Right. A favorite Bush campaign ploy was to ridicule democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore as “Mr. Ozone Man”. Unfortunately, all this environmental pullback accomplished was to alienate key factions of the independent swing vote and help elect Bill Clinton.
Bush’s son, George W., also tried his luck at a widespread assault on federal environmental regulation. The idea was to demonstrate his conservative distaste for centralized big government. Aroused public opinion and a Democratic-controlled Congress stopped most of Bush’s efforts in their tracks and set the stage for the election of a pro-environmental Barack Obama.
Following in modern GOP tradition, Trump is ignoring all the warning signs triggered by his environmental agenda. In addition to widespread grassroots sentiment, there is another ample foundation for a unifying backlash against him. Many locally elected Republican officials around the country and numerous heads of major corporations are not buying in to Trump’s climate change regression and accompanying legislative agenda.
As Trump’s environmental pullback becomes more noticeable and public opposition mounts, will the president relent? Is replacement of anti-regulatory zealots in his administration in the cards?
All that it would take to speed up Trump’s epiphany is for an environmental disaster to occur that could be convincingly linked to his regulatory retreat. Then, united opposition to his policy would publicly surge. Included would be rebellion from many of his voter strongholds, which are in environmentally vulnerable locations and lacking in vigorous enforcement.
But no need for disaster to strike to glimpse the incipient outbreak of this environmentally-inspired national unity. Just tune in to the nation’s capital April 29th for the protest march against climate change denial.