There's a lot we don't know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he's a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.
Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them "very fine people."
Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)
Some will come from the administration's continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren't getting the health care they need. If Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.
But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump's agenda of deregulation--or maybe we should call it "deregulation," because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.
Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what's going on.
One is the administration's plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It's not as if we've seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?
You could see the Trump administration's willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there's something to that, but it's not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump's declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.
You could put this down to personal derangement: Trump has had an irrational hatred for wind power ever since he failed to prevent construction of a wind farm near his Scottish golf course. And he seems deranged and irrational on so many issues that one more bizarre claim hardly seems to matter.
But there's more to this than just another Trumpism. After all, we normally think of Republicans in general and Trump in particular as people who minimize or deny the "negative externalities" imposed by some business activities--the uncompensated costs they impose on other people or businesses.
For example, the Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.
But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids--but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.
So it's deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What's going on?
Part of the answer is: Follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the GOP almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.
There are probably other things, too. If you're a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you're going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.
Whatever the Trump policy, the fact is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don't cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do--along with many other ailments. The Trump administration's estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda--not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn't like, such as renewable energy--the toll will be much higher.
So if you eat meat--or drink water or breathe air--there's a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he's turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.
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Paul Krugman, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, writes for the New York Times.
Editorial on 04/06/2019