Detrimental Donald

Ashton Reigner

Ms. Pahomov

English 3

9 October 2017

Detrimental Donald

Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States and has been in office since January 20, 2017. Since his election, he has done and said things that have never been done by a president before, none of which has put the country in a better place than it was before he came into office. From threatening other elected officials on Twitter to raising racial tension across the nation, it’s obvious that he is not fit for the job. For many reasons he has proved he is the most detrimental president in US history, but the most frightening is his attitude towards climate change. The biggest threat Trump poses is his threat towards climate change because of his censorship of science, his restruction of the EPA, and his choice in repealing previous environmental action made in the Obama era.

Being the president elected directly after Obama, Trump chose to undo a lot of the things Obama had done. One controversial decision Trump made was pulling out of the Paris agreement. This agreement was made to limit the amount of greenhouse gases released to help counter the climate change. Not only has he repealed this agreement, but he has also repealed a ban on offshore oil drilling. This ban was put into place after the spill caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil drill in 2010 and now Trump is repealing this ban opening the opportunity for another terrible spill to occur in the future. Choices like these put the US at a risk that even some of Trump’s own supporters don’t realize we have.

Along with the risk he has been imposing with the damage from his legal decisions, he has also been toying with the idea of nuclear warfare. Even before taking  office, one of Donald Trump’s favorite ways of talking to the public has been on the social media platform Twitter. On September 23, 2017, Donald Trump tweeted “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer”. This tweet was published because the Prime Minister said to the U.N. that tweets like the one presented have been interpreted as a declaration of war on North Korea and that tweet was Trump’s response. The U.S. has the capability to launch nuclear missiles and Trump would be able to make the call. Nuclear weapons instantly kill all life in the target zone. One example is when the US dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. When the bomb was dropped in 1945, it decimated everything within a 4.4 square mile radius of detonation. The 2017 U.S. Military Index shows that the U.S. still ha these nuclear capabilities but the public does not know the full extent of these capabilities. And since the time when the last bomb was dropped, technology has only improved which means any new bombs that could be dropped would be more harmful than anything the world has ever seen .Donald Trump’s immaturity and cavalierness about nuclear warfare can be more harmful to the U.S. than the citizens fully understand.

Since Trump has been in power, he has had the harmful opportunity to put more of his own relatives and closest allies in higher positions of power. One position that Trump has changed is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator. The role of the EPA administrator is to enforce and keep the environment clean and as healthy as possible. This is a very important position and Trump has selected a man by the name of Scott Pruitt to take that role. This man is not as known to the world compared to Trump but both of them have proven that they lack a full understanding of what is actually happening to the environment. Climate change is a very real thing and it is only going to get worse as time goes on. Humans in their entirety have caused a lot of the negative change and humans have to be able to realize that if they want to be able to improve the destruction they have already caused. By contrast, Scott Pruitt believes that the science proving climate change is “Far from settled.” Before being elected for the position he is in now, Scott Pruitt sued the EPA - the agency he now administers - because he wanted to remove Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Obama’s Power Plan was the first federal restriction on how much carbon pollution could be emitted from existing power plants. This was meant to reduce pollution levels up to 30%. This plan is now in the process of being completely removed now that Scott Pruitt has the power to do so. Donald Trump is the only reason Scott Pruitt now has this power.

The president’s full term lasts four full years. Donald Trump has yet to complete his first year and the U.S. is under more threat than most of its people realize. Climate change has the potential to destroy all of civilization on this planet and Donald Trump is making it worse. Not only is Trump making climate change more of a threat to the present, but he is bringing the destructive potential of nuclear warfare closer and closer to the country and other countries that don’t deserve it. Donald Trump is putting the U.S. at more risk for their lives than humans have ever been before.

SOURCES

“The Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb.” Khan Academy, www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-7/apush-us-wwii/a/the-manhattan-project-and-the-atomic-bomb.

“3 Things Scott Pruitt Has Actually Said About Climate Change.” Greenpeace USA, 19 Dec. 2016, www.greenpeace.org/usa/3-things-scott-pruitt-actually-said-climate-change/.

“EPA's Administrator.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 22 Sept. 2017, www.epa.gov/aboutepa/epas-administrator.

Zurcher, Anthony. “Donald Trump's nuclear fixation - from the 1980s to now.” BBC News, BBC, 10 Aug. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40879868.

“U.S. Nuclear Weapons Capability.” 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength, The Heritage Foundation, index.heritage.org/military/2017/assessments/us-military-power/u-s-nuclear-weapons-capability/.