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NRaleighLiberal

(59,940 posts)
Mon Feb 19, 2018, 02:11 PM Feb 2018

interesting read - Slate - "How has trump changed America"

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/how-has-trump-changed-america.html

A year ago, a bunch of us made predictions for what this presidency might bring. Now, we’ve reassessed—and found many of them were surprisingly accurate.

By SLATE STAFF

Despite the overwhelming evidence that time is a flat circle, Donald Trump has been in office just a hair past one year. Prior to his inauguration, we asked Slate staff and other experts to make predictions on how his presidency would change America. We recently asked the contributors to reassess those predictions, as a window into just how influential—and unpredictable—this presidency has been so far. We weren’t able to evaluate every original prediction here, but we aim to revisit them each year for as long as Trump is in office.

Environment
Prediction, Polar Bears: The Trump administration’s refusal to accept the role human-caused emissions play in climate change will stall meaningful action. The U.S.’s withdrawal from collective action plans including the Paris Agreement will destabilize progress toward emission reduction around the world. As a result, the polar bear, which the Fish and Wildlife Service recently reported as being existentially threatened thanks to diminishing sea ice, will go extinct.


One Year Later: Too Soon to Tell. Trump did take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, though how destabilizing that has been to international efforts is unclear. (Given the rest of the world’s feelings about America, perhaps our exit will ultimately serve as a perverse motivation for everyone else to act.) Polar bears are still hanging on for the time being.
—Susan Matthews, Slate science editor

Prediction, Drinking Water: Despite big talk about improving infrastructure, Trump’s pick for the Environmental Protection Agency has a penchant for suing the very agency he will lead and a worldview that the states should really be responsible for ensuring that our pipes deliver clean water. With Scott Pruitt in charge, we’ll see one or more public health disasters like the one in Flint, Michigan.

One Year Later: True Enough. It wasn’t Scott Pruitt’s doing, but the inadequate federal response to Hurricane Maria—to which the president’s biggest contributions were throwing paper towels into a crowd and getting mad at the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who is not coincidentally a woman who supported Hillary Clinton—has certainly created a public health crisis that’s unfortunately affected even more Americans than the tragic situation in Flint.
—Ben Mathis-Lilley, chief news blogger


snip - lots more - covers the gamut.
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interesting read - Slate - "How has trump changed America" (Original Post) NRaleighLiberal Feb 2018 OP
hell, a blind man could have seen this shit coming... Blue_Tires Feb 2018 #1
yup. I suspect only much of the media is surprised (or maybe just acting like they are) NRaleighLiberal Feb 2018 #2
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