I suppose the magical moderating influence of Ivanka still can kick in at the last minute and keep the president* from lining up on the side of eventual human extinction, but this is not something I am counting on too heavily. And I will be more upset if the president* pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords, joining Nicaragua and Syria on the sideline, if I didn't remember that Hillary Rodham Clinton once said something complimentary about fracking once, so clearly there was no real choice last fall between the two major party candidates. Green New Deal!

I held off on the various Tuesday scooplets about how the president* is preparing to abandon the first real international response to the climate crisis because, frankly, I don't think he'd recognize it from a KFC placemat on his own, and because he is liable to say anything and equally liable to do anything. There's no question that he dislikes the Paris Accords, if only because they were negotiated by the man who hurt the Trumpian fee-fee at a banquet six years ago. (You will note that he's also rumored to be ready to blow up the Obama initiative to normalize relationships with Cuba. He's quite the portly vandal, he is.) He also dislikes it because his EPA director, energy-industry sublet Scott Pruitt, thinks it's a bad idea. He also dislikes it because he doesn't know any better.

And that's the rub right there. The White House policy shop is such a gooey cluster of fck, and the president* is so abysmally ignorant of, well, everything, that anything and everything that comes leaking out of this administration is liable to be true at any particular time. The one thing we all should have learned about this guy and his operation is not to assume anything until he actually does something. It will almost assuredly be bad for almost everyone.

For now, we've still got Ivanka.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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