Well-poisoners win again

In this post from before the election, I was marveling at the willingness of Trump’s inner circle to support and tirelessly explain any idiotic half-baked bullshit that suddenly and without warning erupted from the man-baby’s twitter. From the post:

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

When I wrote that, I didn’t really believe that anyone would actually take a job actually poisoning an actual well. Especially their very own actual well. How wrong I was.

Last week, the tiny-handed one signed legislation that would roll back the “Stream Protection Rule”,  to prevent it from “further harming coal workers and the communities that depend on them.” See, Obama, or as most apparently know him, the illegitimately-elected Kenyan Muslim devil,  thought he’d try to curtail the coal industry’s long-time practice of freely dumping their mining wastes down the hillsides of Appalachia, creating a hellish moonscape of many of the towns below. And poisoning their water.

With his characteristic impulsiveness, thoughtlessness and boasting, Trump claimed the rule had been costing “many thousands of jobs” because of the expense incurred cleaning up the mess.

This Failing New York Times editorial lays it out, but the gist is that the rule may have cost 260 mining jobs a year, but that those were offset by new jobs created to assure compliance.

It’s just an outrage, not just because it’s exactly the kind of thing you knew this idiot was going to do, but because it was done essentially out of sight as the massive clouds of chaos emanating outward from Trump at all times block the sun and the real news. There’s just no time or energy to pay attention to many of the things that we really should.

This comment on the piece hits the nail on the head,

The good news? You get to keep your job.  The bad news? Your job is going to poison your family.  Welcome to the Art Of The Deal. Maybe you should have read the book before you voted.

The fact is that the coal jobs won’t be coming back anyway, because there has been a gradual shift globally towards natural gas and the coal market has shrunk. From the editorial:

Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.

The point of today’s screed is that we got the government we deserved. Just like everyone else all over the world that stands by and lets the worst have their way.

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care about the environment or jobs or abortion or immigration or anything else. The only thing he cares about is adulation, up-votes, attention, flattery, and “winning”. If there were more of those things to be had in imposing  tighter restrictions on the coal industry, that’s what he’d do.

I don’t know how it can ever happen and I’m not optimistic, but for this disastrous course we’re on to be changed, Trump must be made to believe there are more of us that will love him if he behaves differently than if he doesn’t.