Welfare reform? Not a subject he even mentioned on the campaign trail in 2016, but different people are aiming that flamethrower now. The Hill reports the scene as Trump talked to a group of lawmakers in the Capitol basement:
"Ticking through a number of upcoming legislative priorities, Trump briefly mentioned welfare reform, sources in the room said.
"'We need to do that. I want to do that,' Trump told rank-and-file lawmakers in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol. The welfare line got a big applause, with one lawmaker describing it as an 'off-the-charts' reception."
We know that getting "big applause" guarantees that a Trump line will also get repeated.
At a time when "entitlement" has become a dirty word, we'd do well to remember that not so long ago it wasn't crazy to think that the government existed to help people do collectively what they couldn't do as individuals. As a friend said to me recently, taxes are a more organized way of crowd-funding human needs.
Who even remembers that ancient time when candidate Trump, not yet an arsonist on the home front, promised to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? President Trump is a different matter.
It seems likely, however, that at least for now the Republicans won't push him on Social Security because, as Paul Ryan told the Washington Post's "Wonkblog," the Republicans don't have enough votes to overcome a Senate filibuster and the program is too popular back home for a super-majority of Republicans to go after it.
Why can they pass a tax "reform" bill with only a simple majority, but not Social Security cuts? The tax bill is being rushed through Congress using the "reconciliation" process by which differences in the Senate and House versions are smoothed over to produce a single bill. This only requires a simple majority to pass in each house. The Senate's "Byrd Rule," adopted in 1974, prohibits the use of the reconciliation process to make changes to Social Security. Thank you, former West Virginia senator Robert Byrd!
In addition to the programs that made up Johnson's "War on Poverty," he also signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is already hard at work setting fire to the latter, as the president continues to demand evidence for his absurd claim that he won the popular vote in the 2016 election. He must be having an effect. At least half of all Republicans now seem to believe that he indeed did win that vote.
And before we leave the subject, just a couple of final notes on literal fires in the Trump era. His Department of Transportation has been quietly at work making those more likely, too. In a move supported by fans of train fires everywhere, that department has quietly reversed an Obama-era rule requiring that trains carrying crude oil deploy, as Reuters reports, "an advanced braking system designed to prevent fiery derailments... The requirement to install so-called electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes was included in a package of safety reforms unveiled by the Obama administration in 2015 in response to a series of deadly derailments that grew out of the U.S. shale boom."
Government data shows there have been 17 such derailments of trains carrying crude oil or ethanol in the U.S. since 2006.
Then there's the fire that has probably destroyed my friend's house in southern California even as I wrote this. Donald Trump can hardly be blamed for that one. The climate in this part of the world has already grown hotter and drier. We can certainly blame him, however, for turning up the heat on planet Earth by announcing plans to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, overseeing the slashing of tax incentives for alternative energy (amid a bonanza of favors for the fossil fuel industry), and working to assert an oil, gas, and coal version of American "energy dominance" globally. From the world's leading economic power, there may be no larger "match" on the planet.
A Flame of Hope
What hope is there of quenching the Trumpian fires?
There is the fact that much of the world is standing up to him. At this month's climate accord follow-up meeting in Paris, billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson announced "a dozen international projects emerging from the summit that will inject money into efforts to curb climate change." The head of the World Bank insisted that the institution would stop funding fossil fuel programs within the next two years. Former American officials spoke up, too, as U.S. News & World Report observed:
"One by one, officials including former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, billionaire [and former New York City mayor] Michael Bloomberg, and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted the world will shift to cleaner fuels and reduce emissions regardless of whether the Trump administration pitches in."
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