A Broadside Against Trump and Praise for Obama

"[I watched] the front men for conservatism stand slack-jawed while the leading candidate for their party's nomination figuratively slapped George W. Bush across the face for starting the Iraq War and flushed 30 years of free-market trade policy down the toilet like schoolwork torn from the hands of teachers' pets. "[I realized] that all I or any of us were doing was losing whatever frayed threads of decency still held American life together." "There is so little fellow feeling left among us these days that we are compelled to seek it in our national leader." "Indeed, Trump's skill is precisely this: to create an entire national theater of shame in which he induces that very emotion in his followers, on the one hand, while on the other saving them from having to acknowledge its pain by publicly shaming others instead."

"His recent misogynist tirade against a former Miss Universe is just one in a series of instances in which he has figuratively offered up the bodies of women for public denunciation." "Just as physical violence monopolizes it in real time, so theatrical and rhetorical violence monopolizes it in the political spaces."

"It is an attack on the federal government and judiciary for its perceived sponsorship of the interests, and often simply the full citizenship, of African-Americans, women, and other racial and sexual minorities -- a sponsorship that, ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, has become more and more identified with the Democratic Party."

"And thus we arrive at the dominant trope of the endless attempts to account for Trump's rise: the seething, racially tinged anger of the white working class." "Yes, Trump is inciting racial hatred and mainstreaming white-supremacist politics more directly than any of his Republican predecessors dared to do. But for all the attention this does and must receive, it is not so much raw anger, but rather its more basic predicate: the shame of being lesser than." [1]

Praise for Obama's Environmental Record
"The [Obama] stimulus laid the foundation for a clean energy future by investing more than $90 billion in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and green jobs and technology." "Between 2009 and 2016, solar electricity increased more than 30-fold, while electricity generated by wind grew more than three-fold."

"The White House spurred car and truck manufacturers to agree to increased average fuel economy standards to 36.6 miles per gallon by 2017 and 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, avoiding millions of tons of carbon pollution and accelerating a transition to electric vehicles."

"President Obama designated 23 national monuments, protecting 265 million acres of land and water -- more than any of his predecessors. He has moved to clean up carbon pollution from existing coal-fired power plants with the EPA's groundbreaking Clean Power Plan. The United States and China issued a joint climate statement in 2014 that paved the way for a breakthrough global climate agreement in Paris." [2]

Footnotes
[1] Adam Haslett, "Vandal in Chief," The Nation, October 24, 2016.

[2] Michael Brune, "Yes, We Did," Sierra, November/December 2016.