Jake Tapper Applauds
Now that's he's completed the journey from defender of Joe Biden's mental capability to acknowledger of Joe Biden's mental infirmity, CNN's Jake Tapper seems happy to serve as a gracious guest when media colleagues provide a friendly welcome on his book tour. Mr. Tapper, co-author of 'Original Sin,' can be most useful to his hosts by pretending that they were early and brave in reporting Mr. Biden's cognitive challenges.
This week Mr. Tapper shows up on Ezra Klein's podcast at the New York Times, and let no one accuse Mr. Tapper of being ungrateful. The two were discussing President Joe Biden's disastrous 2024 press conference in which Mr. Biden angrily and inaccurately responded to Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Hur. Mr. Hur had just completed a report detailing clear evidence of violations of law but concluded that Mr. Biden was too forgetful to prosecute.
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President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. 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'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." 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Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' 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Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. 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Washington Post
15 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Trump White House opens door to historic military deployment on U.S. soil
President Donald Trump is prepared to send National Guard troops into more U.S. cities if protests against immigration raids expand beyond Los Angeles, administration officials said Wednesday, potentially opening the door to the most extensive use of military force on American soil in modern history. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in testimony to Congress that the Pentagon has the capability to surge National Guard troops to more cities 'if there are other riots in places where law enforcement officers are threatened.' Press secretary Karoline Leavitt warned protesters beyond Los Angeles that more 'lawlessness' will only increase Trump's resolve. 'Let this be an unequivocal message to left-wing radicals in other parts of the country who are thinking about copycatting the violence in an effort to stop this administration's mass deportation efforts,' Leavitt said. 'You will not succeed.' The White House's message coincides with a rise in bellicose language from Trump, who in recent days has threatened the use of force not only against immigration activists but also against any protesters who attempt to disrupt the military parade scheduled in Washington Saturday to celebrate the Army's 250th anniversary. The parade, which Trump has wanted for years and will feature tanks, helicopters and Army parachutists, is shaping up to be a symbolic culmination of a dramatic week in which in which the president not only prepared for a historic deployment of armed forces against domestic adversaries but openly embraced shows of military force. In a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina Tuesday, the president reveled in the nation's military power as base leaders showcased several tactical demonstrations. 'Time and again, our enemies have learned that if you dare to threaten the American people, an American soldier will chase you down, crush you and cast you into oblivion,' Trump said. In threatening the use of force against protesters, Trump notably did not distinguish between those committing acts of violence and those peacefully protesting against his policies. Leavitt, at the White House briefing Wednesday, answered a question on the subject by saying that 'of course' the president supports the right to peacefully protest and declared the inquiry a 'stupid question.' The administration's escalating rhetoric has invited comparison to the language used by autocrats in foreign countries, where leaders more frequently deploy their military forces within their own borders. White House officials maintain that the president is showing strength and dominance — and standing up for 'law and order' as Democrats go soft on violent agitators. Trump and his advisers have highlighted footage of looting and cars being set ablaze to justify taking action over local officials' objections. 'President Trump is fulfilling the promise he made to the American people to deport illegal aliens and protect federal law enforcement from violent riots, said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. 'This kind of thing doesn't happen in democracies, and it's becoming a routine part of our politics,' said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, who has long warned that Trump poses a threat to American democracy. (Federal campaign finance records show that a person named Steven Levitsky who works at Harvard has made small campaign donations to Democratic candidates.) Trump has given himself more flexibility this term to escalate the military intervention and to upend democratic norms with fewer constraints. In his first term, military leaders prevented Trump from deploying troops within the United States. This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists — though he still could face obstacles in the courts. California has sued to block the administration from deploying troops within its borders. Protests over the administration's immigration policies are expanding to more cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco. More are scheduled this weekend as part of an event called 'No Kings Day,' which activists are holding in opposition to Trump's attempts to test his executive power and, protesters say, defy the courts. Amid protests in Chicago, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip, said it would be 'a serious decision' for Trump to deploy troops across the country. Durbin said he has not spoken with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker about the possibility of Trump doing so in their state. Durbin said Trump is treating the deployment of the National Guard 'as this routine decision.' 'It is not routine, using our military force to enforce criminal laws in our country,' he said. Earlier in the week, Trump warned that any protests against immigration raids in other cities will be 'met with equal or greater force' than used in Los Angeles. He said those troops would remain in the city 'until there's no danger,' providing only a subjective timeline for the length of their deployment. Trump and California leaders have sparred over whether the troops were ever a necessary response to the protests, which have been confined to several blocks and have included sporadic episodes of violence. He said he 'would certainly' invoke the Insurrection Act, which can be used by presidents to expand the role of the military in responding to domestic incidents, if he viewed it as necessary. The fact that he is even considering it is an ominous sign, several scholars said. 'In a democratic society, citizens don't have to think twice or think three times about peaceful expressions of opposition — that's what life is like in a free society,' Levitsky said. 'In an authoritarian regime, citizens have to think twice about speaking out because there is risk of government retribution. Maybe you'll be arrested, maybe you'll be investigated, maybe you'll have an IRS audit, maybe you'll have a lawsuit.' The showdown over the military intervention has intensified since Saturday, when Trump deployed the National Guard to California without the permission of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who believed sending troops would escalate the protests. Newsom warned in a speech Tuesday that the deployment marked the onset of a much broader effort by Trump to threaten democracy. 'California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next,' Newsom said. 'Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes. This moment we have feared has arrived.' Also Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was deploying his state's National Guard ahead of planned protests. An Abbott adviser said the decision did not result from Trump's rhetoric. The governor has previously deployed Guardsmen ahead of protests, such as during George Floyd demonstrations in 2020. 'This is not a frivolous thing. This is not a political thing,' said Dave Carney, a longtime political adviser to Abbott. 'If this was happening four years ago or eight years ago, he would have done the exact same thing. This is instinctively protecting people.' Carney said he suspects Republican governors will call up the National Guard only if they have 'good intelligence of what's being planned.' In other Republican-run states with recent clashes with ICE — either through protests or Democratic-leaning cities pushing back on enforcement — governors have resisted announcing any proactive deployments, despite GOP officials vowing to punish violent agitators. In Atlanta, where authorities used tear gas and made arrests Tuesday as anti-ICE protesters threw fireworks at police, state officials believe local and state law enforcement have been able to manage the demonstrations, according to a person with knowledge of the situation there who was granted anonymity to speak freely about plans. Likewise in Nashville, where Department of Homeland Security officials have clashed with the mayor of the heavily Democratic city, large protests have not materialized, and the Republican governor has not announced any deployment of military personnel. Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.
