Last night, there was a fire in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower in New York city, which sadly resulted in the death of one resident and injuries for six firefighters. That’s a terrible enough event in itself, but it also shines a painfully obvious light on Donald Trump’s ridiculous and dangerous political rhetoric about regulations.
It’s not that Trump started the ludicrous idea that government regulations are inherently harmful—Republicans have been beating that drum for quite some time—but as with all of the worst ideas that prioritize “feels true” over “is true,” Donald Trump really ran with it. He pushed the idea to its final form with the pronouncement that, for every new federal regulation, two would be removed. Never mind that government regulations are often put in place to accomplish specific things like protecting citizens. I mean, who needs clean air or water, or safe building standards?
The area of Trump Tower that caught fire isn’t equipped with a sprinkler system that could have minimized the damage and injuries. That would be against building codes, except that Trump Tower was grandfathered in when those new codes were put in place. It’s bad enough that a man who constantly brags about how rich he is was too cheap to update his building’s safety standards just because he technically could get away with it. That’s not just my interpretation. He contacted city officials to argue against sprinkler system legislation decades ago, with the excuse that it would be too expensive to install them.
What’s worse is that mentality is now running the country. Everyone understands how businesses work, and that they try to maximize profits by minimizing costs, but it’s the job of the government to protect its citizens and make sure that business owners don’t achieve that goal in ways that are unnecessarily dangerous to the average person. Even if rampant deregulation could allow businesses to grow more easily and generate more money, that’s not a trade we should make for our health or safety. In a better world, business owners would be concerned with these things on their own, but there’s no reason, even in the much worse real world, the government can’t act as a failsafe—unless we elect someone who has specifically vowed to dismantle that function.
Trump’s own response to the incident predictably involved praising his own building:
Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2018
(image: Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images)
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