Donald Trump must be torn. He promised to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement during the campaign, only to drag his feet on the issue once he entered the Oval Office. Now an administration debate over global warming policy has become a litmus test of family loyalty.
Soon Trump will decide who he trusts more: his daughter Ivanka or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 20 other Republican senators, who urge him to make “a clean break from the Paris Agreement.”
Remaining in the deal, the senators wrote in a Thursday letter to the president, “would subject the United States to significant litigation risk that could up-end your administration’s ability to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan.” In other words, by allowing the Paris agreement to fester could allow Obama-era regulation to metastasized.
What the elder statesmen neglected to note in the letter was that the next president, perhaps as early as 2020, could use the Paris agreement to reverse all of Trump’s deregulatory success. It’s not difficult to imagine the Democrat argument, if you try.
“It’s time,” a President Kamala Harris might say, “that the United States hold up its side of the environmental bargain. It’s time for us to restore the green regulation needed to meet our Paris agreement obligations.”
Not only would such regulation have a disastrous effect on American industry, it would also flood Trump’s deregulatory legacy. So why hasn’t Trump torn up the global warming agreement already? According to multiple reports, Ivanka Trump won’t let him.
It’s a family affair: According to the Los Angeles Times and others Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are warning the president that getting out of the agreement could have unintended consequences. Some worry that the international community could move forward with new regulations without U.S. buy-in, which could displease U.S. businesses that operate overseas.
That’s a fair enough argument on its face. But cynics will rightly remember that Ivanka harbors plenty of liberal opinions and has promised to be “a moderating influence” on her father. And if Trump doesn’t tear up the Paris agreement, it’ll mean that Ivanka trumped not only the Republican Senate but also the American electorate.
Trump’s time for choosing on climate change will offer a key insight into who really runs the show over at the White House.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
