It’s not just former Republican officials from security agencies who don’t trust Trump to keep the world in one piece. Republicans who headed up the EPA all the way back to the Nixon administration are also signing up for Team Clinton.
“Donald Trump has shown a profound ignorance of science and of the public health issues embodied in our environmental laws,” William Ruckelshaus, who served as the EPA administrator under presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and William Reilly, who served under President George H. W. Bush, said in a joint statement. “He hasn’t a clue about Republicans’ historic contributions to science-driven environmental policy.”
The former officials note that being insanely anti-science is a relatively new addition to the Republican platform.
Nixon created the EPA and signed the 1970 Clean Air Act into law. Reagan ratified the Montreal Protocol, which began phasing out chemicals that deplete the ozone layer. And George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, addressing acid rain.
But now Trump is promising to bring back coal—whether we need it or not—as well as remove what few rules exist on fracking, empty the rivers for big agriculture, and put the EPA under control of people whose main qualification is hating the EPA. That is, when he’s not threatening to eliminate the EPA altogether.
Both Ruckelshaus and Reilly are endorsing Hillary Clinton.
That’s the EPA, the security agencies, and a fair portion of Republicans in the Senate. Who’s next?