The long awaited sigh of relief

| 4:30 pm EDT August 29, 2019
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You don’t need to be an expert on Donald Trump’s speech patterns to know that when this raving egotist claims superiority in a subject, it almost certainly means the opposite—that he’s at the other extreme of whatever it is he is claiming to be. Trump sometimes follows up such ludicrous assertions with an offer of “proof” that is laughably inapplicable and only helps further expose Trump’s fraud.

This tired linguistic exercise happened Monday on the world stage concerning a topic of no less importance than the wellbeing of our physical world. In a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron after the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, Trump declared his alleged commitment to our planet, boasting, “I’m an environmentalist. I lot of people don’t understand that.”

Next, Trump offered the basis for his claim: “I have done more environmental impact statements probably than anybody, that’s, I guess—I can say, definitely—because I’ve done many, many, many of them—more than anybody that’s ever been President, or Vice President, or anything even close to President.” Although that sentence was garbled, even for Trump, he was no doubt referring to the environmental impact statements that are required by law to show a real estate project’s potential effects on the environment. The thing is, Trump would not have been personally involved in crafting any environmental impact statement in connection with any of his deals. More importantly, the presence of environmental impact statements in Trump’s deals is merely a sign of legal compliance, not some act of love for our planet.

Before ending the press conference with Macron, Trump added, “I think I know more about the environment than most people.” If Trump really knows and cares so much, then why did he skip the G7 working session on climate, oceans, and biodiversity on Monday, lie about it, then dismiss the whole topic as a “niche issue”? Of course, it’s for the same reason that Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which is that he cares nothing about the environment. Trump just loves pretending while watching others cringe as he takes steps to cause additional harm. No one knows when Trump’s last day in office will be, but when that day comes, Earth will breathe a long-awaited sigh of relief.