Donald Trump struggled at times to boost international U.S. investments during his first term, but as the president-elect prepares to return to the White House, the Republican is apparently getting creative in exploring possible new solutions.
“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits,” Trump wrote in a message published to his social media platform. He added in the same missive that this would include waiving “all Environmental approvals” for such investors.
He concluded, “GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
In other words, as Trump sees it, there are international entities that might be inclined to invest in new business opportunities in the United States, but they might not want to bother with inconvenient public safeguards such as the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. As far as the incoming American president is concerned, he can set their minds at ease, declaring in writing that these foreign investors will be able to do as they please, just so long as they commit the capital.
Such an approach, the Republican apparently believes, will help the country “ROCK!!!” during his second term.
Conspiratorial billionaire Elon Musk, who’s helping lead Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), described the president-elect’s message as “awesome.”
To be sure, an administrative policy along these lines might very well be “awesome” for wealthy interests like Musk, who might find regulations such as pollution controls inconvenient to their bottom lines, but whether regular people — the folks who would have to deal with the consequences of ignored public safeguards — find this “awesome” is another matter entirely.
It also calls to mind reporting from the spring when Trump huddled at Mar-a-Lago with some of the country’s top oil executives, who complained about “burdensome” environmental safeguards. According to The Washington Post’s report, which was not independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the then-Republican candidate said the executives should raise $1 billion to return him to the White House.
If so, the article added, Trump promised his guests that he would “immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.”
But just as important is the fact that presidents can’t simply snap their fingers and unilaterally scrap public safeguards for billion-dollar investors. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explained in his latest analysis:
Such an awesome idea that one might ask why it had never been done before. And the answer (as is often the case when Musk embraces some insight into how government works) is that it’s more complicated than it looks. There are a lot of laws in place that a president cannot simply sidestep and some very good reasons those laws are there. For example: given their druthers, some business leaders would ignore environmental rules entirely if it made them money. Good for the businesses, but not necessarily great for the citizens whom the government is meant to serve.
If Trump believes his country’s environmental laws are flawed and are standing in the way of necessary business development, he and his team can roll up their sleeves, do some unglamourous policy work, take their case to the public and their representatives, and try to have those laws changed. But he doesn’t want to. As Bump’s analysis added, the president-elect does not appear to believe that he should be encumbered by such a process. “He sees a bureaucracy that limits how and where businesses can operate and — operating from the point of view of a business owner and lacking close advisers empowered to offer a countervailing perspective — insists that he will simply make it all go away,” the analysis concluded. When we talk about Trump’s authoritarian vision, we’re not just talking about his hostility toward elections, voting and resolving differences at the ballot box (as important as those attitudes are). Just as notable is the Republican’s vision that policymaking power must be consolidated in the Oval Office and should be shaped entirely by his uninformed whims and preferences. That’s not how the slow and often difficult process of policymaking is designed to work in the United States. By all appearances, the president-elect, who’s never shown the slightest interest in how to govern responsibly, simply doesn’t care.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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