Pr*sident Trump symbolically cuts the ribbon on regulations, comparing what we have now with what was the case in 1960.

In a political stunt Thursday from the Roosevelt Room at the White House, P&#@*&^%t Trump announced that he wants to cut federal regulations back to where they were in 1960. That’s 185,000 pages in 2017 vs. 20,000 pages 57 years ago, according to the White House. This announcement no doubt brought big smiles to certain barons of industry who have already toasted the regime’s trashing of regulations that began practically the minute the man first sat in the big chair in the Oval Office.

If you’re old enough, or have read a bit of history on the subject, you may remember that in 1960 there was no Clean Air Act, no Occupational Safety and Health Administration, no Environmental Protection Agency, no Mine Safety and Health Administration, a highly limited Clean Water Act, no Department of Energy, no Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, no Office of Energy & Renewable Energy, no Commodity Futures Trading Commission, no Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And then there’s the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

About the only surprise is that Trump didn’t say 1930 instead of 1960. Then he could also have lopped off regulations developed by the Securities & Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Soil Conservation Service. Give him a second term and he’ll skeletonize those as well. Eric Lipton and Michael Tackett report: