The Instant Trump decided to leave the Paris accords [UPDATED]
By Spocko
Watch this video.
UPDATE BELOW
At about 23 seconds in you can see the moment when Trump decided to leave the Paris accords.
I'm quite serious. The "President of Paris" humiliated him on the world stage. They all laughed at him. Trump strikes back in the biggest way he can.
"You all got together with Obama and made a deal? Guess what? I'm the big dog now and I'm going to piss on your deal."
Any talk you hear later about saving coal jobs is simply backfill--after the fact reasons to make the decision seem reasonable to others.
I've seen this behavior many times with powerful men, a decision is made for purely emotional reasons then the people around him scramble to create an acceptable reason for why it was done.
This is revenge for a personal slight. It will end up hurting America economically and could lead to the death of millions around the world. But the important thing is that Trump "won" the handshake game.
If he needed a nudge, though, one came from France over the weekend. Macron was quoted in a French journal talking about his white-knuckled handshake with Trump at their first meeting in Brussels, where the newly elected French president gripped Trump’s hand tightly and would not let go for six long seconds in a show of alpha-male fortitude.
“My handshake was not innocent,” Macron said. He likened Trump to a pair of authoritarian strongmen — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and said that he was purposefully forceful because he believed his encounter with Trump was “a moment of truth.”
Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said.
A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
Trump will punish the whole world over a slight.
It was fun to poke the bear during the campaign. We now know what he does when he has power. This isn't fun.
Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter talked about it this morning on the Majority Report and came to the same conclusion that I did about Trump's BS reasons, but whereas Sam thinks it's okay for Marcon to keep trolling him, I don't.
There is a line from the movie Broken Arrow
How many times do I have to tell you, please don't shoot at the thermal nuclear weapons.
This is real life example of the old, "maybe he is crazy enough to do it" strategy about nukes. Only I don't think it's a strategy.
This is Trump pushing the red button. It's just in slow motion.
