The G7 Is Just Another Stage for a Presidential Sh*tshow
Donald Trump skipped a climate session and his spokesperson appeared to lie about it. But no worries, he's reportedly got a plan: nuke the hurricanes.
Heads Of Government Attend G7 Summit
Jeff Mitchell / Getty Images
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a288150...n=17878872
By Jack Holmes
Aug 26, 2019
At a time when the issues facing our planet and our species require a daunting level of global cooperation, the United States has a leader who is almost entirely hostile to that cooperation.
Donald Trump, American president, graced the G7 this weekend following a week of surely unprecedented presidential insanity. But it wasn't the week prior that prompted France and the other nations who showed up in Biarritz to abandon any hope of crafting a joint statement before the summit even began.
According to the Washington Post, this weekend has been further evidence that "other world leaders are growing more comfortable separating themselves from the United States on policy issues."
The president, of course, says there is Tremendous Unity. "I think we have a lot of things," he said in response to a question on where the G7 nations share the most common ground. "I think really the unity, the fact that we're all getting along so well is one of the big takes from this. We really have good relationships. And we're doing a lot about a lot." There's unity with regard to the unity, you see. Unfortunately, this unity did not extend to a global crisis that threatens human civilization as we know it.
The "Special Relationship" is in good hands, though the stairs could be a problem.
What do you say governor, think we can make it down without ending up in an Anglo-Saxon heap at the foot of the stairs?
I don't know Boris, think I'll wait for the Melania or the SS.
The G7 held a climate session this Monday morning amid an escalating fiasco in the Amazon rainforest, and the American president simply did not show up. He's got bigger fish to fry, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told reporters: "The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the Administration attended in his stead.”
Except, as CNN's Daniel Dale reports, the leaders of both those countries—Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi, respectively—attended the climate session. So did every other national leader at the conference. Trump's scheduled sit-downs with Merkel and Modi were either side of the climate session. There was no timing conflict, at least on paper. This appears to be, and this is shocking, a lie.
Never fear, however. The president didn't skip the climate talks because he doesn't give a shit, or because even the most sweeping global concerns must be translated into petty personal affairs to earn his attention. (Please ignore that he passive-aggressively re-ignited his feud with the prime minister of, checks notes, Canada, or that he is already planning out how to make some cash off next year's G7 by holding it at his golf club in Miami.) He didn't need to go to the session because he's already got this climate thing figured out.
Even if you disregard this abominable sentence construction—"we are right now having"—and the fact that "clean air and clean water" are separate fucking issues from the greenhouse effect that is destabilizing our planet, there's also the problem that even this claim is a lie.
The United States does not have cleaner air or water than any other country, and they're not cleaner than ever—another common Trump claim when asked about climate change (which, again, is a separate issue).
Air and water quality have worsened since 2016, a decline which you may have deduced coincides with Donald Trump entering office. In 2017, his first year, the number of "unhealthy days for ozone and fine particle pollution" in 35 major cities spiked 20 percent year-over-year.
In fairness to the president, however, it's not at all clear that anyone in a position of major power or influence is taking the climate crisis seriously enough. Take the Amazon, for instance. The sprawling rainforest produces 20 percent of the world's oxygen and functions as a giant carbon sink to soak up the CO2 that we're pumping into the atmosphere, and which is imperiling the future of our species.
According to The Intercept, "Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret." Sounds bad!
G7 Summit in France
Everything’s going great.
So, what was the response from the other G7 leaders—a group of actual human adults who are theoretically capable of devoting attention to issues that don't directly and immediately affect them, and also Boris Johnson? They agreed to fork over $20 million.
That seems like a lot of money until you remember the world has pledged via donations $1.2 billion to rebuild the Notre Dame, a very nice cathedral which soaks up zero carbon dioxide.
It probably cost more than $20 million to hold this event and get all the delegations there. Granted, it's hard to get a bunch of countries to agree on anything, but you'd think "breathing" is something we can all see is important.
(Things aren't much better domestically, either: the Democratic National Committee voted down a proposal this weekend to hold a presidential debate on climate change. Because who needs to hear from the candidates, in greater depth, about this existential crisis for humanity? It's a side issue! Niche!)
Maybe we're all worried for no reason, however. President Good Brain is on it, at least when it comes to one product of the climate crisis: the savagely powerful storms that will slam into our coastlines thanks to warmer water that produces stronger winds and more extreme precipitation events.
Donald Trump, American president, has a plan—at least according to Axios, which reports on a behind-closed-doors proposal so manifestly insane that it's hard to believe, even for the guy who proclaimed last week that, as a nation, "We have great mental illness."
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" according to one source who was there. "They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?" the source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks.
This really does seem impossibly dumb, and the president has called it Fake News—not that that means anything. But then we see that a senior White House official defended the idea to Axios!
A different senior administration official, who has been briefed on the president's hurricane bombing suggestion, defended Trump's idea and said it was no cause for alarm. "His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad," the official said. "His objective is not bad."
"What people near the president do is they say 'I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.' ... It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren't going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into 'the president is crazy' narrative."
This poor sap missed the memo. Your boss is going to yell Fake News, buddy, there's no need to defend the thing he'll say didn't happen. Meanwhile, another official served up a non-denial-denial.
A senior administration official said, "We don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team."
Axios offers that this idea has been percolating since the Eisenhower era, though it has not garnered Presidential Consideration since the '50s, at least that we know of.
Luckily, even if nuking the hurricanes is on the table, we can trust our president as a man of restraint. On Monday, he declared—and not for the first time—that he would not (not!) perpetrate a genocide in Afghanistan that would result in 10 million deaths. Apparently that was under consideration, too.
Donald Trump skipped a climate session and his spokesperson appeared to lie about it. But no worries, he's reportedly got a plan: nuke the hurricanes.
Heads Of Government Attend G7 Summit
Jeff Mitchell / Getty Images
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a288150...n=17878872
By Jack Holmes
Aug 26, 2019
At a time when the issues facing our planet and our species require a daunting level of global cooperation, the United States has a leader who is almost entirely hostile to that cooperation.
Donald Trump, American president, graced the G7 this weekend following a week of surely unprecedented presidential insanity. But it wasn't the week prior that prompted France and the other nations who showed up in Biarritz to abandon any hope of crafting a joint statement before the summit even began.
According to the Washington Post, this weekend has been further evidence that "other world leaders are growing more comfortable separating themselves from the United States on policy issues."
The president, of course, says there is Tremendous Unity. "I think we have a lot of things," he said in response to a question on where the G7 nations share the most common ground. "I think really the unity, the fact that we're all getting along so well is one of the big takes from this. We really have good relationships. And we're doing a lot about a lot." There's unity with regard to the unity, you see. Unfortunately, this unity did not extend to a global crisis that threatens human civilization as we know it.
The "Special Relationship" is in good hands, though the stairs could be a problem.
What do you say governor, think we can make it down without ending up in an Anglo-Saxon heap at the foot of the stairs?
I don't know Boris, think I'll wait for the Melania or the SS.
The G7 held a climate session this Monday morning amid an escalating fiasco in the Amazon rainforest, and the American president simply did not show up. He's got bigger fish to fry, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told reporters: "The President had scheduled meetings and bilaterals with Germany and India, so a senior member of the Administration attended in his stead.”
Except, as CNN's Daniel Dale reports, the leaders of both those countries—Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi, respectively—attended the climate session. So did every other national leader at the conference. Trump's scheduled sit-downs with Merkel and Modi were either side of the climate session. There was no timing conflict, at least on paper. This appears to be, and this is shocking, a lie.
Never fear, however. The president didn't skip the climate talks because he doesn't give a shit, or because even the most sweeping global concerns must be translated into petty personal affairs to earn his attention. (Please ignore that he passive-aggressively re-ignited his feud with the prime minister of, checks notes, Canada, or that he is already planning out how to make some cash off next year's G7 by holding it at his golf club in Miami.) He didn't need to go to the session because he's already got this climate thing figured out.
Even if you disregard this abominable sentence construction—"we are right now having"—and the fact that "clean air and clean water" are separate fucking issues from the greenhouse effect that is destabilizing our planet, there's also the problem that even this claim is a lie.
The United States does not have cleaner air or water than any other country, and they're not cleaner than ever—another common Trump claim when asked about climate change (which, again, is a separate issue).
Air and water quality have worsened since 2016, a decline which you may have deduced coincides with Donald Trump entering office. In 2017, his first year, the number of "unhealthy days for ozone and fine particle pollution" in 35 major cities spiked 20 percent year-over-year.
In fairness to the president, however, it's not at all clear that anyone in a position of major power or influence is taking the climate crisis seriously enough. Take the Amazon, for instance. The sprawling rainforest produces 20 percent of the world's oxygen and functions as a giant carbon sink to soak up the CO2 that we're pumping into the atmosphere, and which is imperiling the future of our species.
According to The Intercept, "Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret." Sounds bad!
G7 Summit in France
Everything’s going great.
So, what was the response from the other G7 leaders—a group of actual human adults who are theoretically capable of devoting attention to issues that don't directly and immediately affect them, and also Boris Johnson? They agreed to fork over $20 million.
That seems like a lot of money until you remember the world has pledged via donations $1.2 billion to rebuild the Notre Dame, a very nice cathedral which soaks up zero carbon dioxide.
It probably cost more than $20 million to hold this event and get all the delegations there. Granted, it's hard to get a bunch of countries to agree on anything, but you'd think "breathing" is something we can all see is important.
(Things aren't much better domestically, either: the Democratic National Committee voted down a proposal this weekend to hold a presidential debate on climate change. Because who needs to hear from the candidates, in greater depth, about this existential crisis for humanity? It's a side issue! Niche!)
Maybe we're all worried for no reason, however. President Good Brain is on it, at least when it comes to one product of the climate crisis: the savagely powerful storms that will slam into our coastlines thanks to warmer water that produces stronger winds and more extreme precipitation events.
Donald Trump, American president, has a plan—at least according to Axios, which reports on a behind-closed-doors proposal so manifestly insane that it's hard to believe, even for the guy who proclaimed last week that, as a nation, "We have great mental illness."
President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president's private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.
Behind the scenes: During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" according to one source who was there. "They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?" the source added, paraphrasing the president's remarks.
This really does seem impossibly dumb, and the president has called it Fake News—not that that means anything. But then we see that a senior White House official defended the idea to Axios!
A different senior administration official, who has been briefed on the president's hurricane bombing suggestion, defended Trump's idea and said it was no cause for alarm. "His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad," the official said. "His objective is not bad."
"What people near the president do is they say 'I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.' ... It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren't going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into 'the president is crazy' narrative."
This poor sap missed the memo. Your boss is going to yell Fake News, buddy, there's no need to defend the thing he'll say didn't happen. Meanwhile, another official served up a non-denial-denial.
A senior administration official said, "We don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team."
Axios offers that this idea has been percolating since the Eisenhower era, though it has not garnered Presidential Consideration since the '50s, at least that we know of.
Luckily, even if nuking the hurricanes is on the table, we can trust our president as a man of restraint. On Monday, he declared—and not for the first time—that he would not (not!) perpetrate a genocide in Afghanistan that would result in 10 million deaths. Apparently that was under consideration, too.
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