The Breakage Machine Meets the Climate Crisis: Trump's response to this existential planetary threat has been uniquely destructive.

• Date: 01 October 2020
• Author: McKibben, Bill

Besides using a GOP majority to pass a massive tax cut for the rich, Trumps tangible accomplishments are puny. Mostly he's a master of making things worse, of destruction for its own sake. He's a breakage machine.

And the timing of his quest to break things could not have been worse, because the Trump era came at the moment when the planet was already beginning to crack.

His tenure in office has coincided with the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on planet Earth--130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius), this summer, in Trump's nation. It has coincided with the largest rainfall in U.S. history--Hurricane Harvey, which dropped more than five feet of rain on southeastern Texas in 2017. It's seen massive Midwest floods, endless West Coast fires, and unprecedented storms like Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

And Trump's response to all of that has been the equivalent of...