By ROBERT P. BOMBOY
By Robert P. Bomboy
President Donald Trump has no shame. How many times have we seen him avow that he would move in one direction while he was actually sidestepping the other way to get something for himself?
It made me think of the actor Charles Durning, who starred in a 1982 musical with Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds and played a Texas governor who positively and hilariously enjoyed dancing the political sidestep.
With Trump, it is nowhere near so funny.
He has no shame. He let it slip that he wasn’t answering the phone calls of governors who were literally begging for life-saving coronavirus supplies and ventilators – because the governors weren’t groveling obsequiously enough to him.
When Congress passed its Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act last month, he and his cronies wanted to make it harder for Social Security recipients to get their $1,200 and required that they would need to file tax returns to get their money (most people on Social Security don’t file tax returns because they earn so little money). Such a windstorm blew up that Trump, for once, had to honor the original intent of Congress.
But even after signing the coronavirus legislation, Trump danced his sidestep and declared he could reinterpret it as he pleased.
He also had ideas about using coronavirus money for building the wall on our southern border, but Congress headed him off on that – specifying that it wouldn’t happen.
Shameless.
As Kimberly L. Wehle of the University of Baltimore School of Law points out, “As hundreds of Americans lie dying and thousands more grieve their dead, President Trump remains busy acting on his grudges and consolidating power for its own sake, while thumbing his nose at the rule of law.”
Among many of his other sidesteps is an undercutting this month of automobile mileage and emissions rules that would have been the biggest single step any nation has taken to fight climate change.
By his action, in a retaliation against President Barak Obama, vehicles will burn an additional 142 billion gallons of gasoline between 2021 and 2040, and emit 1.5 billion more tons of pollutants.
Those numbers are not good for consumers, who will pay $3,200 more in fuel costs for a 2026 model-year vehicle than they would under the Obama rules, according to Consumer Reports.
Trump ignored long-established health threats that gas guzzlers pose. The lung-damaging soot produced from the refining of additional gasoline to power those vehicles will lead to an estimated 18,500 premature deaths by 2040.
Under the cover of the pandemic crisis, Trump has rolled back rules that are essential to the fight against global warming and reduced the toll of air pollution on public health.
Making more fuel-efficient vehicles with modern technology is a competitive necessity. With overseas governments setting rules tougher than those established by the Trump administration, European and Asian drivers will reap the benefit of technologically advanced vehicles. So will Americans, and they will be mostly buying them from foreign manufacturers.
Robert P. Bomboy has written for more than 60 national magazines and is the author of six books, including the novel “Smart Boys Swimming in the River Styx.” He taught for more than 30 years in colleges and universities, and he has been a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago and in Washington, D.C.
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