THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION, 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE — A virtual civil war has been going on in the West Wing between ultranationalist Steve Bannon, on the one hand, and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on the other. Bannon’s been losing out.
After November 8 and before January 20, Kushner’s wife, Ivanka, arranged a meeting between her father at Trump Tower and Al Gore, who received more popular votes in the presidential election of 2000 than did Bush Two. Gore’s environmental activism, as illustrated in the film An Inconvenient Truth, based on his book, An Inconvenient Truth: the Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, won him the Nobel Prize for Peace, which he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, in 2007.
Trump will soon pass the 100 day mark, as an occupant of the White House, with no legislative victories. He is the least ideological occupant of the White House in modern memory, but he did campaign on a platform of restoring the coal industry to financial health at the expense of clean air. But Kushner, who is not stupid, is well aware that his father-in-law has approval ratings which reveal him to be the least popular occupant of the White House in modern history as of the first few months of his term.
So, in yet another astonishing development, Kushner and Ivanka met with Trump yesterday, with associate solitary reporter Joanna Jones as a silent observer.
“Sir,” Kushner began, “Tomorrow is Earth Day.”
“I don’t like Earth Day. The main purpose of the earth is to put buildings on so I can do bigly deals”
"Ivanka is very concerned about climate change.”
“That’s right, Daddy."
“I know, Honey.”
“When you picked Scott Pruitt to run the EPA,” Kushner continued, "that was a deliberate choice on your part to stick it to the environmentalists.”
“Damn straight.”
“Ivanka and I were talking things over when we were skiing in Aspen, and we were so enthralled by the beauty of the Colorado mountains, and we got to talking about how Pruitt’s policies will accelerate global warming so that by the time your grandchildren go to college, much of the Arctic and much of Antarctica will be gone, and the skiing in Aspen will be nonexistent.”
Trump listened for once.
“Sir, Pruitt is from Oklahoma where everybody is already a Republican. Find him another job like, for example, make him ambassador to the UK or something, and then show all your critics that you are a flexible leader, and replace Pruitt with Gore.”
This came as a considerable shock to Trump, but in the end, after deliberating on the matter, Trump called Gore and offered him the EPA job, and Gore immediately fell out of his chair in astonishment.
Gore then called Bill Clinton, who laughed his best down-home Arkansas laugh and said, “Al, I never thought I’d see the day. Now you need to go back to Washington, send Pruitt packing to London, and get down to work. But watch out for Bannon. He’s really a fascist.”
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