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      ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

      By

      Richard Powers

      Waking up each morning to the latest episode of The Trump Show is a bit like taking part in one of those early Cold War–era unregulated experiments that induced psychic trauma in unwitting victims in order to study the lasting effects. This morning I awoke to the news that the White House is moving ahead with its plan to destroy the mandate for automotive fuel efficiency enacted by the Obama administration. Since Trump’s political thought has long consisted primarily of knee-jerk repudiation of anything accomplished by the world’s once-most-powerful black man, that proclamation, in itself, does not surprise me. But the announcement was accompanied by another one that makes a mockery of the core tenet of conservative ideology: Trump’s people have also moved to eliminate California’s freedom to set a fuel standard that improves upon the national goal.

      I blink while finishing my breakfast and read the story again. Even after a year and a half of incredulity, I’m struggling with this one. But yes: I’ve understood it properly. The leader of the party of States’ Rights, the champion for getting Big Government out of regional and local affairs, the man who pardoned ranchers for committing open, armed rebellion against federal overreach is telling California—a state that at this very moment is paying the crippling price of global warming—that Washington forbids it to clean up its air and reduce its carbon footprint. California’s cars must become dirtier and less efficient once again. Letting the elected representatives of that state ask for anything better would, Trump insists, be unfair to the American people and American business.

      Of course, this latest push to demolish environmental standards by unilaterally imposed executive fiat has little to do with business (which has been profiting nicely from the conversion of its fleets to more efficient models) or with the economy (certainly not the economy of a state that has long paid massive hidden costs in the health and well-being of its people). California now battles constantly for survival against the most deadly and destructive fires in history, fires bred and exacerbated by the global warming that the Trump administration prohibits the state from taking action against. Two dozen of these enormous fires are blazing through the West this very morning. Toxic air from fifteen million Californian cars and multiple runaway wildfires is killing people and shortening lives even as I struggle to absorb this bit of news. But Washington forbids the affected people to address the crisis.

      The Clean Air Act was passed half a century ago, with the understanding that each state must at least meet the national mandate for motor vehicle emissions. If any state wanted to do better on its own, the federal government has long declared, then more power to it. Now Trump is reversing that half a century of carefully coordinated, bipartisan protocol. And Republicans everywhere are once more caving to the blatant federal overreach, despite its crippling costs.

      This development should by now be old news to me, part of a broader pattern that, even in my daily traumatized state, I have come to understand all too well. Fighting back the weary nausea brought on by the story and hoping to get on with my own day’s work, I can’t help seeing this attack on the health of Americans as just another small assault in an enormous campaign against the future. Like so much else that our game show president has initiated—his trade wars, his Wall, his attacks on NATO allies, his rolling back of legal protections for the marginalized and disenfranchised­—­Trump’s war on California and his destruction of fifty years of environmental protocol have nothing to do with conservatism or the search for national prosperity. He is simply trying to revive an old idea of exceptionalism and privilege that has been moribund for decades now.

      George Lakoff, the University of California, Berkeley, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, has said it best: Trump’s political platform is based entirely on the appeal of “stern paternalism,” a vision of a bygone world that puts men above women, whites above all other races and ethnicities, America above all other countries, and humans above and against all other living things. Of course Trump hates California, that multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural state that has already committed itself to the world of the future. Of course he hates any mandate that asks Americans to accommodate the health of an atmosphere that we share with the rest of the world. Of course he needs to go on pretending that human enterprise knows no limits and is accountable to nothing.

      Henry Ford, the man who put the automobile within reach of the average American consumer, once famously said that the public could have a car painted in any color that it liked, so long as it was black. Trump’s daily message to his base may well be precisely this: America can have greatness in any hue that it wants, so long as it is dominant, unilateral, unaccountable, and white.

      By afternoon, Trump, the consummate “reality” entertainer, has rolled on to other, more exciting, more outrageous episodes in his never-ending Season One. His war against California’s efforts to save itself quickly gets buried under new and novel escapades: Battles with the Koch brothers and other alpha males within his own party. Tweets ordering his Attorney General to end the investigation into Russian election meddling, collusion, and obstruction of justice. So it goes, every day, on The Trump Show. It does not matter what the issues are, so long as the man in the White House has all eyes on him.

      By evening, shell-shocked and twitching as I fall asleep, I begin to see that I’ve gotten the formula slightly wrong. We, the American audience to this commandeering of democracy, are allowed to have a country in any color we want, so long as it’s orange.