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Where is the wise Sancho Panza who is able to talk some sense into the delusional Don Quixote of the White House who is doing more than tilting at offshore windmills? He wants to blow them up.
In Cervantes' classic novel, Sancho serves as a faithful squire, but doesn’t buy Don Quixote’s delusions and magical thinking. Sancho, the realist, gets his master out of some scrapes.
Donald Trump has launched an all-of-government approach to destroy the offshore wind industry.
The New York Times reports that he has enlisted the Pentagon, Dept. of Health and Human Services, Transportation Dept., EPA and Interior Dept. as allies in his crazed fight against offshore installations. Don’t those agencies have better things to do then to humor the boss?
And what’s Trump’s beef about wind turbines? He thinks they are ugly. That’s it.
Because Trump doesn’t like the look of offshore windmills near his Scotland golf course, he throws a tantrum directed at offshore wind development in the US. Is that a valid reason to shut down a clean energy source that holds the potential to employ tens of thousands of Americans?
In the run-up to Labor Day, Team Trump hung a giant banner with a portrait of the Dear Leader on the Dept. of Labor. It carried the words “America’s Workers First.”
What about the more than 5,000 Americans who work in the offshore wind sector?
Norway’s Equinor is spending more than $850M in my old Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park for a facility to receive and ship giant wind turbines to its $5B Empire Wind complex off the coast of New York.
The Interior Dept. issued a stop-work order for Empire Wind in April, but then allowed it to proceed after negotiations with Gov. Kathy Hochul.
The White House last month ordered a stop to the construction of the Revolution Wind facility off the cost of Rhode Island, a $4B project that is already 80 percent complete.
That’s insane in a country that needs all the power it can get to serve the needs of massive data centers.
Denmark’s Orsted sued the Trump administration on Sept. 4 in an effort to restart work on Revolution Wind, which is designed to power 350K homes in the northeast. It claims the Trump administration “acted in bad faith.” Sounds right. Let's hope that Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee can cut a deal with the dealmaker-in-chief.
A modern-day Sancho would know how to deal with Trump’s pigheaded opposition to offshore wind. He also would talk some sense to Trump’s cabinet of sycophants.
Who is this guy? Joe Lockhart worked as press secretary for President Bill Clinton. Robert Gibbs and Jennifer Palmieri had the job in Barack Obama’s White House.
But if you check their biographies on LinkedIn, you will find Donald Trump’s mugshot as representative of their White House jobs. What’s up with that?
Johanna Maska, who served as Obama’s director of press advance, isn’t too happy with the Trump image. She sent the following note to LinkedIn.
“The White House appears to have broken your rules by changing the official White House institutional emblem to a photo of the current President.
“Now all of us who worked for the White House at any time, including for different Presidents, have Donald Trump's face on our profiles, though we worked for the institution of the White House and not the individual photographed.
“I served as President Obama's Director of Press Advance, not President Trump's. Can you please enforce your rules and make sure institutions are accurately represented on this platform?”
Not every White House communications director/spokesperson’s bio has been Trumpified yet.
That includes Dee Dee Myers (Clinton), Ari Fleischer/Scott McClellan (George W Bush) and Jay Carney (Obama). I guess the White House is working on it.
What could possibly go wrong? Does the White House still want to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and shift disaster relief to the states?
Talk of eliminating FEMA has died down in the aftermath of the disastrous floods in Texas. FEMA, though, faces in budget cut in the $1B range.
America thinks it’s a bad move shortchanging FEMA, according to a USA Today/Ipsos poll. It found that 57 percent of us want more money for FEMA.
Nearly two in five respondents believe the federal response to a hurricane like Katrina would be worse today than it was 20 years ago. Katrina was responsible for 1,392 deaths and property damage of more than $125B.
FEMA is in desperate need of some confidence-boosting PR measures.
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