While White House staff were packing the executive residence into cardboard boxes last year, President Obama was busy setting tripwires for his successor inside the Oval Office. Up until the end, the last president engaged in administrative sabotage by extra-legislative means.
Now almost a year later, President Trump is flying to Utah to try his best defusing one of Obama’s lingering landmines. Trump will shrink Bears Ears National Monument in what’s expected to be one of the largest reductions of protected land in modern history. That’s no accident — it’s according to plan.
Forget that everyone from Utah Gov. Gary Herbert to Sen. Orin Hatch have asked Trump to reverse Obama’s designations. Disregard the fact that designating the red rock canyons a national monument could actually spur more traffic to the region and thereby ruin the pristine landscape. The real goal of the past administration is to embarrass the current one.
As this site editorialized last December, America has seen this play before. President Bill Clinton wrote the book on administrative sabotage:
Just days before President George W. Bush’s inauguration, Clinton weaponized EPA regulations to set a trap for the new administration. Despite complaints from rural communities about crippling compliance costs and a lack of a scientific consensus, Clinton adopted aggressive arsenic standards for drinking water. When Bush eased the mandate, it unleashed a torrent of criticism that had been long planned, most notably from Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
Despite the science, Bush couldn’t shake accusations that he wanted to poison little children. It was, he later remembered, one of the worst mistakes of his presidency.
Anyone with eyes to see the monument can just as easily see Trump is at risk of falling into the pit Obama dug for him. Thousands of protestors materialized Saturday to protect the nation’s youngest national monument. Environmental groups are waiting in the wings to file suit. And already many in the media have run with the narrative that Trump is a dirty, no-good polluter.
Had all of this gone down back in 2001, back when Bush was president, caution would be in order. Disarming a bomb requires a steady and slow hand, after all. But that’s not Trump’s style.
On Monday morning, Utah’s Republican Sens. Hatch and Mike Lee boarded Air Force One with the president. When they land, the one-man bomb squad of a president will bull rush the trap, taking unavoidable collateral damages in the process but perhaps flinging it far enough away in the process to make the injury minimal.
All of this is within Trump’s prerogative and well within common sense. The president would take care to remind the electorate that he isn’t carelessly putting the environment at risk. He is disposing with Obama-era regulation left behind to debilitate and discredit his administration.
