President Donald Trump's anti-environmentalist policies will have a damaging long-term impact on humanity, two-time Democratic senator and Medal of Honor recipient Bob Kerrey has warned.
Kerrey was discussing Trump's first term in office with former Democratic Senator Al Franken on the latter's eponymous podcast. Kerrey, who also served as governor of Nebraska, told his host Trump will be hard to beat in the 2020 election despite his litany of "terrible" policies.
"I don't want him to be re-elected," Kerrey told Franken. In both policy and behavior, the former senator argued that Trump has damaged the standing of the presidency and done harm to U.S. politics and society.
"His environmental policies are terrible, I think his social policies are terrible, I think his economic policies are not good," Kerrey explained. "They are many arguments I would use against him."
Trump's administration has overseen a dramatic rollback of environmental regulations. The president campaigned on an avowedly pro-fossil fuel, pro-business stance, and has consistently been skeptical towards the concept of human-driven global warming and its impacts.
Indeed, one of his first major policy decisions was to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement that had committed the U.S.—along with 195 other countries—to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
The president has been critical of renewable energy and made multiple confusing statements about the ineffectiveness of wind power in particular, for example that the sound generated by the turbines causes cancer.
Kerrey suggested Trump's climate policy "may be his worst legacy. It may be the thing that he is going to be remembered for the most. All the backtracking that is occurring on environmental policies I think are going to add up to a disaster at some point down the road."
For this reason and others, Kerrey told Franken he wanted Trump out of the White House come 2020. "The swamp's gotten bigger under him than it was before," he suggested. "I don't want him to have four more years."
Some of the blame, Kerrey argued, lies with Republican lawmakers who have refused to stand up to some of the president's worst impulses. Citing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford, Kerrey declared: "If you walk by something that is substandard and you don't do anything about it, that's the new standard."
Though Kerrey accepted it was difficult for Republicans politicians to stand up to a Republican president—noting his own past clashes with President Bill Clinton—he argued that complicit senators have "lowered the standard for behavior, they've lowered the standard for telling the truth."
But Kerrey acknowledged that Trump, who enjoys huge approval ratings among Republican voters, is a "formidable" opponent who "will not be easy to defeat."
His political clout is amplified by his social media outreach, particularly on Twitter, Kerrey said. "He is a dominant force" on the platform, he explained. "He has a loyal following of people who want to shake things up."
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