Distraught Democrats, resistant Republicans and just about everyone else still not ready to accept Donald Trump as their president have tried to pacify themselves with two thoughts – that he isn’t capable of making any real impact, and that the moderates in the White House will sway him.

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is the latest, and biggest, smack of reality: they are wrong.


It’s not Republican. It’s not conservative. It’s not right-wing. But it is consistent—again diving deep into the nationalism that he campaigned on last year and has been driving for the last 133 days.

“Isolating America behind a wall, if you will—not just in terms of our southern borders, but globally,” is how Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman, summed it up.

As for the “maybe Trump will change” dream or “we’re playing the long game” protestations of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, those are exceptions, or maybe just strategic feints, Steele said.

Trump lives behind his wall of nationalism, Steele said, despite the occasional moments that seem like breaks.

“Like any medieval castle, there are slits for the bowman to stand there and shoot out their arrows,” Steele said. “You have these occasional slits.”

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Trump may not be passing much legislation, but he is governing, and governing straight out of his base. Like his now-routine early morning tweets undercutting what aides insisted on the night before, the unpredictability is predictable—his repeated claim in the Rose Garden speech that the Paris agreement was born of a global conspiracy to undermine the American economy, or that the money for the Green Climate Fund would be “raided” from America’s funds that would otherwise go to fight terrorism.

“The Paris Accord would undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty, impose unacceptable legal risks, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world,” Trump said, in a speech bookended by Vice President Mike Pence and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt taking the microphone to talk about the president’s courage.

Trump “has a good feel for where the base of the party is and appears to be unafraid of what the blowback will be from the media or critics in Europe,” said David Kochel, who was a senior strategist for Jeb Bush, who said that everything Trump is doing can be traced back to what skeptics spent last year insisting he’d never do—and imagining he didn’t really want to do.

Though many Republicans voiced problems with the Paris agreement, Trump’s approach is “like a funhouse mirror conservative—distorted in significant ways from what we’re used to seeing,” Kochel said.

The list is long: two Muslim bans, a reinstated “gag rule” that cuts funding for international organizations that offer abortion choice, a rollback in carbon emissions regulations, loosened requirements that companies comply with laws they disagree with where the rules conflict with “religious liberty,” a budget built on massive cuts despite lacking the math to pay for it, an Obamacare repeal too conservative for many Republican senators to support.

The counterargument: he was cowed into staying in NAFTA (for now), didn’t scrap Obama’s LGBT protection executive order (for now), kept the U.S. embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv (for now).

Pulling back on Paris, like many of the more significant moves Trump has made in office, isn’t like nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which almost any Republican running for president last year would have been likely to do. It puts him at odds with many in the corporate and establishment wing of the party who thought they were in charge before he took over.

“Affirmation of the #ParisAgreement is not only about the climate: It is also about America remaining the global leader,” tweeted Mitt Romney, who in four years went from GOP presidential nominee seeking Trump’s endorsement to supplicant hoping to get picked as Trump’s secretary of state to host of his annual conference next week in Utah that will amount to a support group for Republican holdouts.

Romney’s tweet has more in common with the statement from the man who beat him in 2012. In former President Barack Obama’s most aggressive statement about Trump since Nov. 8 Obama cited (though still without using Trump’s name “the absence of American leadership” in the wake of the Paris decision.

But the White House was ready with an avalanche of prepared quotes from Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and many more.

White House aides even included the lukewarm approval of the move from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in the promotional email to reporters, saying, “I support President Trump’s desire to re-enter the Paris Accord after the agreement becomes a better deal for America and business.”

That’s more optimistic than Trump’s “we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s separate statement praising the decision had less to do with Trump’s politics or Paris, and more to do with reviving a favorite fight they can always agree on: “I applaud President Trump and his administration for dealing yet another significant blow to the Obama Administration’s assault on domestic energy production and jobs.”

Among Democrats, there was hope that the decision would snap people out of simply snickering over Trump’s typos on Twitter, or salivating over the latest Russia revelations changes what the West Wing has been up to in between.

“This will wake people up,” predicted Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday afternoon. “It’s a decision with not insignificant consequences. There is drama of what he’s tweeted, [Sean] Spicer at the press conferences. But you make a decision like this, and all the other stuff is a distraction. It takes away from what he’s doing that will impact America not over the next two months but over the next 20 years.”

