Score one for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 Senate Republicans. Less than a week after they urged the White House in a public letter to finally pull out of the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has conceded.
At that time, the Washington Examiner characterized the letter as a litmus test of family loyalty that forced Trump to reveal who he trusted more: his daughter Ivanka Trump or the elder statesmen of his party. In this case, Trump has said no to the people he loves.
This decision shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. Sure, Trump promised on the campaign trail to tear up the agreement. Once in the Oval Office though, the president began to get cold feet on global warming thanks largely to Ivanka.
Along with her husband, Jared Kushner, Ivanka has lobbied her father to keep the United States in the treaty. For a while, those family ties were the left’s saving environmental grace. Even former Vice President Al Gore counted Ivanka in December as an ally, cheering “the fact that she is very concerned about this.”
Ivanka has worked hard to merit that confidence. According to multiple reports, Ivanka recruited Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to convince the president that leaving the agreement early could have serious unintended consequences, ostensibly for U.S. business operating under foreign regulatory frameworks.
Liberals quietly cheered, hoping that they’d always have Paris. If the agreement stayed intact, the thinking seems to go, the next Democrat president could use it as leverage for the U.S. to hold up their end of the environmental bargain and impose sweeping regulations.
But alas that hope proved unfounded. Trump didn’t give his daughter what she wanted and listened instead to McConnell and company, signaling that in his Oval Office blood isn’t always thicker than water.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
