In the New York Times, scholar and activist Bill McKibben calls Trump’s decision to cancel U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Accord “stupid and reckless.” 

It’s looking more and more as if Pres. Trump is doing things, making decisions, and appointing people just because he can—not because the purpose is right or good for the country as a whole. It seems that he is compelled to act out on the basis of his executive power as president because in so many other instances he cannot control what’s happening to him in the White House. Congress is making the passage of legislation complicated, the federal courts are blocking his attempts to make immigration policy, a large segment of the free press hammers him every day, and the FBI and a Special Counsel are trying to find out if his campaign aides helped Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential election—and on top of that he is suspected of obstructing that very investigation.

All this is out of his control. He’s raging about it, according to sources in the White House who are talking to reporters. And so he goes to Europe and kicks around our NATO allies and comes home to announce on the White House lawn that he’s blowing up the pledge made by the previous president to cooperate with 195 other countries in efforts to slow down global warming that threatens to disrupt life on the planet. Because he could. Because he can. Because he is mad. Because he is angry. Because he wants to show his core supporters (35 to 40 percent in voter surveys), plus 22 GOP Senators who urged him on, that he is not going to be pushed around by know-it-all scientists and tree huggers who have no understanding of business realities and a person’s right to pollute, no matter the impact. He has put America in the company of Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations not signed on to the Paris Climate Accord. What an embarrassment.

You elect a clown, and you get a circus, somebody said. He’s made the U.S. such an outlier on this subject, that the situation just looks ridiculous. It’s likely that Trump will be the fool waving his arms and shouting in an echo chamber of science-deniers while corporations, individuals, cities, and states in the U.S. go forward with policies and programs in line with the Paris objectives. It’s a big country, and he can’t stop California or Boston or the Apple company from doing what’s smart regarding climate change. He used Pittsburgh to take a cheap shot at the French, and the mayor of Pittsburgh immediately tweeted to say he was all for the Paris plan and was doing innovative green things in Pennsylvania.

Don’t you wish you could binge-watch the Trump-Russia scandal to find out how it all ends instead of waiting for the episodes week to week?

President Ford called the Nixon-Watergate scandal “our long national nightmare.” We’ve got another political horror show streaming 24/7.