The president and his party are laying claim to a political monopoly on convenience and consumer choice.
The president and his party are laying claim to a political monopoly on convenience and consumer choice.
D emocrats and Republicans alike who have marveled over Donald Trump’s resurgent popularity attribute that remarkable phenomenon to, among other conditions, the president’s ability to zero in on “80-20 issues” and align himself with the 80 percent. The president’s approach to the political opportunities he has exploited is clever but not necessarily revelatory. It is not as though Democrats did not know that, for example, letting men compete in women’s sports or allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flood the country were broadly unpopular. They understood the risks they were courting, but the 20 percent to whom Democrats shackled themselves pounded their tables until they drowned out the 80 percent.
That dynamic explains the bewilderingly foolish Democratic crusade against single-use plastics, which the president has taken aim at in an executive order this week that focuses on one of the more unpopular manifestations of this campaign: the scourge of the paper straw. But the political issue here is bigger than straws. Rather, the president and his party are laying claim to convenience and consumer choice.
Trump’s February 10 executive order is straightforward. The “irrational campaign against plastic straws” has proven costly and inconvenient to consumers, and the dubious environmental benefits that this policy was designed to achieve have proven elusive. Therefore, the federal government will stop procuring or stocking federal facilities with paper straws, withdraw all rules and regulations that “disfavor plastic straws,” and put together a “National Strategy to End the Use of Paper Straws” before the end of March.
The “fact sheet” accompanying the order promotes the notion that this administration has secured a monopoly on “common sense,” capably challenging the notion that paper straws represent a “clean and healthy” alternative to plastic. And the president isn’t drawing the line at straws. In a post on his proprietary social media venue, the president announced that he would direct Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin to restore sanity to the regulations governing sinks, showers, toilets, washing machines, dishwashers, and lightbulbs.
The president wouldn’t have so much to take aim at here if Democrats hadn’t provided him with such a target-rich environment. The Democratic Party’s “War on Things That Work” was a multi-theater campaign that justified making your life perceptibly more complicated and expensive in the pursuit of illusory environmental objectives.
Trump is right that previous administrations have displayed an obsessive interest in the amount of water you’re allowed to access from your shower and sink. “The Obama administration refined the restrictions and applied those limits to the water that comes out of the entire showerhead, even ones with several nozzles,” the Associated Press noted. You are supposed to thank them for the “efficiency” they’ve imposed on you — a word that no longer describes doing a job well and in short order but how many inputs (gasoline, oil, water, air, etc.) are required for an appliance to do the bare minimum. Ironically enough, though, these regulations have resulted in more water waste, not less, and all while providing consumers with an experience they don’t appreciate nearly as much.
Trump is right about dishwashers, too. As Bloomberg reported in 2023, the dishwashers of the future will “use 27% less power and 34% less water — no more than 3.3 gallons during their normal, default cycles.” Consumers have long complained that these ultra efficient dishwashers no longer, you know, wash dishes — forcing appliance owners to devote more time and resources to pre-washing their dishes and, therefore, using more water than even those hopelessly inefficient dishwashers would have.
Trump is also right about light bulbs. Supporters of the ban on incandescent bulbs are quick to note that the restriction on their sale has resulted in a sharp increase in the uptake of LED alternatives, but this is a tautology. Banning light bulbs is a great way to ban light bulbs. But consumers — not just Republicans — have objected to the sterile quality of the light they produce. Even the “warm” varieties, they maintain, cannot mimic filament. The high-efficiency alternatives are costlier, sure, but they have their uses. The problem to which consumers objected is that they were deprived of the ability to apply discretion when determining which bulb works best to solve the impossibly various lighting challenges Americans confront on an individual basis. Choice was taken out of the equation.
I could go on and on. And I will.
Trump shouldn’t stop with straws and low-flow appliances. Democratic state and municipal officials committed to a gleefully dishonest campaign aimed at restricting access to natural-gas-fueled appliances and banning gas hookups in new construction. But the Democrats and progressive activists who advocated and implemented it would only admit to its existence so long as you approved of their objective. If you didn’t, you would be bombarded with sneering condescension and accused of succumbing to paranoia. That abuse of the public trust should not be a consequence-free proposition, and Trump should take aim at the Democratic officials who engaged in it.
He should also withdraw federal efforts to create incentives for consumers to replace their home heating appliances with costly heat pumps, which require more maintenance because they never take a season off. He should pull back a Biden-era EPA regulation aimed at limiting hydrofluoro-carbons produced by refrigeration — deliberately limiting the supply of refrigerants to make alternatives to the green ideal cost prohibitive.
The president may be limited in his ability to dissuade dark-blue state and local governments from pursuing their monomaniacal crusade against gasoline-powered lawn equipment, but he would be well served by casting scorn on municipal officials who have put leaf blowers and lawn mowers in their crosshairs. A scratch at the surface of arguments in favor of substituting efficient and cheap combustion-powered equipment with less powerful, more expensive electric alternatives quickly exposes the hollowness of the environmental arguments in their favor. What is left in the wake of that exercise is an argument over lifestyles — the blue state contention being that everyone should live like they do in Mendocino County, in which small plots are managed by grounds crews whom residents would like to see “use rakes” instead.
In much the same way that corporate America jumped at the opportunity to avoid throwing money at the extortion racket enabled and empowered by the DEI regime, even the American Left seems to welcome the “liberation” that Trump promised in his inaugural address. These and many more avenues to both embarrass the Democratic Party and, simultaneously, restore to the public the creature comforts that ideological environmentalism stole from them is an obvious political victory for Trump. But it’s one he was handed on a silver platter, and Democrats know it.
Joe Biden’s administration spent four years eagerly fashioning cudgels with which Republicans could one day bludgeon them. It is a testament to their foolishness that Democrats now cannot even object too loudly to their own bludgeoning. If Democrats are confused as to why Trump’s honeymoon with voters seems to have staying power, they could start by looking into a mirror.