Is there any limit to the Trump administration’s willingness to endanger public health and safety for political purposes?

First, it weakened environmental protection standards, despite clear evidence that the air we breathe is irreparably harming us and our children. Then it began the formal withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, despite its being the only available option to help address our worsening air. Now the president has walked back his promise to regulate the vaping industry and ban most flavored e-cigarettes, even as they render an entire generation more vulnerable to nicotine addiction — not to mention life-altering severe lung injury.

And that’s just in the past month.

You have to mine the deepest depths of shamelessness to understand the prevailing motives for these actions. In the case of the proposed flavored e-cigarette ban, the vaping industry has engaged in a vigorous defense campaign. Its products just help smokers get their nicotine fix more safely, it says. (As it turns out, we have no long-term safety data on the effects of vaping on lung tissue, and what small studies we do have are ominous and suggest vaping might even be more harmful to vital organs than traditional smoking.) Businesses could be hurt by a ban, the industry said; Trump voters might turn on their president.

Attempts by the Trump administration to appease everyone in the room have failed miserably, most likely because they are so intellectually dishonest. The facts remain clear: A vast majority — over 70 percent — of our youth who decide to vape do so because they want to experiment with flavors. Why are we surprised that candy flavors like cherry and bubble gum appeal to youth in ways that tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes do not? As these products have become more accessible, youth vaping rates have risen: Today, one in every four high schoolers report at least occasional use of a vaping device. Between 2017 and 2018, e-cigarette use among high school students increased by nearly 80 percent.