Trump Withdraws From The Paris Agreement; Keeps Embassy In Tel Aviv

Yesterday, in typical deal-making mode, President Trump made two major decisions, one certain to please conservatives and the other just as certain to assuage liberals. He announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015; and, earlier in the day, signed a waiver that kept the American embassy in Israel in Tel Aviv, rather than moving it to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem, as he had promised repeatedly during the presidential campaign.

So, one promise kept, another broken. Sounds like a typical day in the presidency of Donald Trump.

I agree with the conservative conventional wisdom that the Paris agreement was a bad deal for the country, and that the embassy should move to Jerusalem immediately. Persuasive arguments for both positions are fairly easy to find, and I won’t rehash them now. But what I find interesting is that the announcements of both decisions occurred on the same day, fitting what has become a pattern for this administration: bad news is regularly paired with good, or, more specifically, the announcement of one policy guaranteed to find favor with those on the Right is always paired with the announcement of another guaranteed to unsettle conservatives.

In general, this isn’t an unusual strategy in politics, or for that matter in any business involved in public relations. But I find it interesting how closely the Trump administration has been keeping to this form of one good thing for the Right, coupled with one bad. Before the Paris withdrawal and the keeping of the embassy in Tel Aviv, it was the (good) federal budget blueprint, coupled with the (bad) push for the American Health Care Act. The pattern even dates back to Trump’s cabinet announcements from the transition period, where one pick that might be greeted unenthusiastically by many Republicans was often announced alongside another guaranteed to excite the base. And there have been many other examples of the same basic pattern over the course of the Trump presidency to date.

So the next time the administration makes an announcement that is cause for celebration, wait to see what the bad news is going to be. Conversely, if there is an announcement of a policy conservatives are guaranteed to disagree with, expect some good news to emerge soon after. On this, at least, the Trump White House seems to operate like clockwork.