DONALD TRUMP, ENVIRONMENTAL HERO. To most of the people in the world concerned with the state of that world, those four words are more than a simple bit of irony: President Trump may be the quintessence of the climate change denial “movement”—ignorant (or duplicitous) and arrogant. Yet when perusing the latest email newsletter from Gizmodo, I was greeted by this headline and teaser: “Trump Has a Book Written By a Trump Advisor About How Trump Loves the Environment Actually.”
My first thought was that it was a joke but I thought I should check it out. The article opens with this paragraph:
“Known bookworm Donald Trump would like you to know he has a book. That book is about Donald Trump, known environmental champion. It’s written and self-published by known Trump lover and advisor Edward Russo. And that, my friends, is the circle of life.”
The book is Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero. The book was self-published by Edward Russo, an advisor to the president on the environment. Edward R. Russo is a Key West resident and member of the Monroe County Climate Change Advisory Committee. I could find very little about him except generalities.
Supposedly, he worked as an environmental consultant to Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization since 2002, responsible for significant environmental improvements throughout the Trump Organization’s global properties. *
Donald Trump – An Environmental Hero was published in 2106 using Amazon’s CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. It is one hundred pages in length.
A strange, mendacious little book
The link to the book’s title above takes you to an ad for the book on Amazon. The chart that accompanies each Amazon advertisement states that more than 80 percent of the customer reviews of the book awarded it either 4- or 5-stars. You would never know that by the first eight reviews are 1-star reviews and rather negative.
The first comment (as of January 10, 2020) lists fourteen things Trump has done or is doing that adversely affects the environment, including allowing coal mining to dump waste in streams again, gutting US commitment to the Climate Change Agreement, and advancing a bill to eliminate the EPA.
Other comments on the first page include these four observations from four commenters:
• What a strange, mendacious little book. Hard to believe it wasn’t intended as satire.
• This book contains one of the smelliest loads of horse poop money can buy.
• This book is obvious propaganda and misinformation, written by a Trump campaign staffer claiming to be an environmentalist.
• This book is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
One commenter even questions the authenticity of all of the positive 4- and 5-star reviews, implying they may be, ahem, fake reviews!
To read this article in its entirety, click HERE.
FEATURED IMAGE: The brilliant caricature at the top of this page is by Donkey Hotey, who states that it was adapted from a photo in the public domain from U.S. Department of State’s Flickr photostream.
FOOTNOTES:
* Curiouser and curiouser: Two weeks ago, the linked words in the second paragraph about Edward Russo above (“environmental consultant”) led to a reference to Russo. Now it leads to a 404 error page.
