Here’s why the world should ditch Paris and let Trump put his name to a climate change agreement

Perhaps the public burning of the Paris Agreement on the Champs-Élysées and allowing Trump to win at his favourite game of competitive handshakes would help him feel a bit better about the rest of the world

Ian Johnston
Friday 02 June 2017 11:57 EDT
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Protesters hold up signs after Trump announces the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement
Protesters hold up signs after Trump announces the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement ((Getty Images))

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Trump Tower, Trump Model Management, Trump University, Trump Turnberry, Trump Natural Spring Water, Success by Trump… anyone notice a trend?

It seems that everything the US President touches turns to Trump. I mean, even his children wear Trump-branded clothing.

And it all comes with the same kind of braggadocio as the man himself. Success by Trump is a “masculine” fragrance that creates a “powerful presence” and “captures the spirit of the driven man”.

If Trump is driven to do anything at all, it is to put his name on everything he possibly can, like an un-neutered tomcat vigorously spraying his scent.

But, surely, on becoming the 45th President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force on the planet and, apparently, the “Leader of the Free World”, all this sort of thing could be left behind him.

The first sign that this would not be the case came when he decided to ditch Obamacare and replace it with something that he doubtless hoped would become known as the “fantastic”, “great” and “amazing” Trumpcare.

Instead people have just started calling it Obamacare-lite because it does much the same as Barack Obama’s original attempt to ensure people had health insurance in a country where this can be the difference between life and death (or poverty), except much less effectively.

Now Trump has ripped up the Paris Agreement on climate change, announcing the US will withdraw.

But a clue as to what he perhaps really wants came when he said he had promised to “renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America’s interests” and “if we can get a deal, that's great. If not, that's fine”.

So he is open a new kind of agreement, one imprinted with his personal stamp… you can see where this is going… the Trump Agreement, which will inevitably be the “greatest climate agreement in the history of the world”.

World leaders have swiftly ruled out renegotiating the Paris Agreement. Even “timid” Theresa May managed to belatedly pipe up that she was “disappointed” in her new best friend on the international stage.

Merkel calls Trump Paris agreement decision 'utterly regrettable'

But maybe, just maybe, the rest of us should reconsider.

Perhaps sorrowful expressions of remorse by European leaders – carefully worded to avoid sounding sarcastic – the public burning of the Paris Agreement on the Champs-Élysées and allowing Trump to win at his favourite game of competitive handshakes would help him feel a bit better about the rest of the world.

Shift a few paragraphs around, pinch a few more from his website (maybe this bit: “Donald J Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment. He is the archetypal businessman – a deal maker without peer”) and suddenly the Trump Agreement is born.

After all, Trump only reads things that have his name in it, according officials close to him who said even National Security Council staff had resorted to doing this in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he's mentioned”.

If this is true, he’s probably not read the Paris Agreement, which means he won’t know the Trump Agreement is pretty much exactly the same.

Admittedly one of his advisers might try to tell him, but if a source who spoke to CNN is anything to go by the President “doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts” and “lives within himself, which is a dangerous place of Donald Trump to be”.

Okay, I admit it, it’s a bit of a longshot. But giving it a go would be fun while it lasted.

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