Roughly halfway into his White House term, Donald Trump said he was “skeptical” of his own administration’s National Climate Assessment. Asked why, the Republican president said, “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.” Part of the problem with the answer was that Trump was plainly wrong: Air and water quality in the United States got worse, not better, during his presidency. His frequent boasts on the issue got reality backwards.
As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the issue knows, that doesn’t make any sense — and that the Republican has peddled this line repeatedly for several years makes matters worse. What’s more, the idea that air and water quality improved during his presidency is still demonstrably wrong. As for the argument that the United States “had H2O” during Trump’s term, I will gladly concede the point, though this was an odd thing to brag about during a debate.