At last, after spending weeks teasing his decision as if he were promoting a reality TV show finale in which all the contestants burn to a greenhouse gas-aided crisp, Donald Trump made it official today, announcing from the Rose Garden that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris agreement. A jazz quartet merrily serenaded the assembled crowd as they waited for the announcement to begin, because no summertime garden party heralding the president's embrace of a hotter, poorer, darker future for the entire world is complete without a funeral dirge.

It's genuinely difficult to decide which of the myriad farcical lies uttered by this science-denying simpleton is most galling. He pledged that his decision would bring relief for coal miners, even though there are twice as many solar jobs as coal jobs in America today. He kicked off the speech by crowing about the booming domestic economy before ominously declaring that the Paris accords were dragging it down. He promised to ensure that the United States has the cleanest air and water in the world, even as he tore up something designed to accomplish exactly that. When President Obama signed the agreement just over a year ago, the country became a party to the most ambitious and most comprehensive international effort to address the effects of man-made climate change in history. It now joins Nicaragua and Syria as the only three nations in the world that are on the outside looking in.

Trump's decision is petty, irrational, and morally bankrupt. For God's sake, even the shadow Trump PR lackeys at Fox News sound shook, writing that the decision "alienates America and diminishes its standing as a global leader." Unchecked climate change, by the World Bank's estimate, currently stands to plunge 100 million people around the world into poverty by 2030. But most of the people who will be affected by climate change are poor already, and most of them are not Americans. And as President Trump has ably demonstrated at every opportunity, those are two groups of people about whom he does not give a shit.

The news comes as an embarrassing failure on the part of those vaunted Trump confidantes that we've been repeatedly reassured would serve as the badly-needed "voices of reason" within the administration: Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson, who reportedly urged Trump to reconsider until days before this announcement; business leaders like Elon Musk, who threatened to quit the president's various business advisory councils if Trump withdrew from the agreement, and followed through; and, of course, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whose much-hyped efforts to block Steve Bannon and his gaggle of ethnonationalist sociopaths from convincing Donald Trump to pile-drive America's future into the fucking ground proved as illusory and pathetic as ever.

In an unusual move, President Obama released a statement that rebuked Trump's decision before confidently predicting that "even in the absence of American leadership" and as the administration "joins a small handful of nations that reject the future," this country's "states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way." This is about as sharp as a former president's criticism of a sitting president gets, and today, it's richly deserved.

When discussing how unfair to the United States he believes the Paris agreement is, Trump asked, presumably rhetorically, "At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us?" Before today, the answer was Election Day 2016. After today, though, none of them are laughing. Everyone is just afraid.

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