After Trump

The simplest way I can think of to wash the trauma of the Trump presidency from our minds is to start planning right now how to heal the terrible wounds to the American land, spirit, and sense of “equal justice under law” that will be left behind when he leaves office.

Chilling worries to the contrary, he will leave office. There will be an after Trump. The president is constitutionally forbidden to serve more than two terms. The only way the nation could suffer a third Trump turn would be to repeal or amend the 22nd Amendment, which would require two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, as well as ratification by 38 of the nation’s 50 state legislatures. That’s as close as one can get to an impossibility in the political life of our country. The Constitution simply does not want anyone to hold the office of president for more than two terms.

What might be left of America as we know it after Trump is gone? It’s not naïve to say virtually everything, albeit bruised, scuffed, profaned, impoverished, and eroded.

As many have pointed out in other venues, most of Trump’s policy moves can be erased in a day because he’s governed by executive order and not through the normal and lengthy channels of the legislative process. The rule of “easy come, easy go” applies. A president can cancel or modify an executive order of another president. Trump canceled Biden’s climate change executive orders almost immediately when he started his second term. Biden had revoked or modified more than 70 of Trump’s executive orders, which matches the number of President Obama’s executive orders that were canceled by Trump during his first term. It’s been argued that Obama and Biden both passed more far reaching and significant legislation than Trump has bothered to even contemplate. The laziness of the Trump administration has left major aspects of his dark legacy extremely vulnerable, even though the country could well suffer a collective form of political PTSD from the aftereffects of Trump’s almost decade-long display of indifference to the economic malaise suffered by much of the electorate during his reign. Even the madcap looniness of Trump’s undermining of America’s public health infrastructure can be rebuilt fairly fast, as can the broken firewalls protecting American’s national parks and monuments.

What probably can’t be erased without profound and consistent effort, however, is the damage Trump and his party have done to climate change activism, as well as to the federal agencies he’s all but dismantled though the firings and mass exodus of civil servants.

By far the most dangerous impact of Trump’s legacy will be his denial of the reality of human-caused global warming and the role US greenhouse gas emissions continue to play in the hunger, drought, and heat death spreading across the world.  The concern is so great among climate scientists that the Union of Concerned Scientists recently sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency signed by 1,000 scientific researchers decrying a recent Trump decision to no longer consider greenhouse gases to be a danger to public health.

The United States is currently the second largest greenhouse emitter in the world behind China. We produce 11% of the world’s emissions. Historically, however, we are overwhelmingly the greatest contributor to climate change worldwide. We are ranked first as well in per capita emissions, weighing in at roughly 13 tons per person per year. From what I can tell, Trump’s two administrations have made the United States the world’s leading climate change scofflaw. He has withdrawn our country twice from the Paris Accords, the most important international climate treaty in history, first signed in 2016. This means the United States has done nothing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions during his tenure. Compared to China, which has worked diligently to embrace clean energy to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, the US has become the biggest and tallest smokestack of the world.

Repairing the incalculable damage to global weather will take, I fear, many decades, presuming Democrats can manage to win the White House again. 

While the general damage to the world’s climate may be hard to calculate, the local damage of unremitting warming is relatively self-evident. Take the damage being done right now to the Rio Grande Bosque. According to a report by the New Mexico Climate Change Taskforce, the Rio Grande’s cottonwood forest, the largest in the world, is already under such heat stress that it can no longer perpetuate itself though seeding, owing to water shortages both above and below ground. The whole forest is in increasing danger not only from wildfires but also from precipitous sinking of aquifer levels which could eventually shrink or even kill off root production.

After Trump, New Mexicans will have to engage in an unprecedented effort to lower our greenhouse gas emissions. Such a vigilant effort will be driven by an existential threat to our river ecosystems that will serve as an activating metaphor for the danger facing all of us from an overheated world that we can no longer deny.

New Mexico will get little or no help dealing with the menace of crippling heat until Trump’s defunding of the Forest Service’s climate change research centers and early warning systems can be repaired. And as the Union of Concerned Scientists warns, we’ll also have to contend with Trump’s near destruction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). His mass firings of agency staff, freezing of recovery grants, attacking preparedness programs, and dumping the costs and complications of disaster recovery onto the state may require a sharper focus of expertise and political savvy than we’ll be capable of mustering without massive sustained public support.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it