John Kerry Compared Donald Trump to OJ Simpson
John Kerry, whose political muzzling during his tenure as Secretary of State is now decidedly over, used a potent analogy when he sat down with NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend. Speaking about Donald Trump’s approach to combating climate change, he compared the president to acquitted murderer O.J. Simpson, referencing the ex-football star’s hunt for his ex-wife’s killer.
“When Donald Trump says, well, we’re going to negotiate a better deal, you know, he’s going to go out and find a better deal?” Kerry, the former Massachusetts Senator and climate advocate who helped negotiate the accord in 2015, said on the air. “That’s like O.J. Simpson saying he’s going to go out and find the real killer.”
Trump announced last week that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris accord, the agreement among some 200 nations to reduce carbon emissions in an effort to curb the effects of climate change, saying it hurt the U.S economy and threatened non-green energy jobs. Trump also said in his MIT-disavowed Rose Garden speech that his team was open to re-entering the agreement after negotiating new terms. But Kerry, clearly, isn’t buying it.
“Everybody knows he isn’t going to do that because he doesn’t believe in it,” Kerry said in the NBC segment. “If he did believe in it, he wouldn’t have pulled out of Paris. America has unilaterally ceded global leadership on this issue, which for years, even Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush pushed in this direction.”
Among the many quirks of the Trump administration’s climate policy, it’s not exactly clear whether Trump believes in climate change. He has previously called it a “hoax,” but UN Ambassador Nikki Haley this weekend said he “knows that [the climate is] changing and that the US has to be responsible for it and that’s what we’re going to do.” Asked about Trump’s feelings on whether climate science is real late last week, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and other aides either didn’t know or wouldn’t say.
Kerry last week criticized Trump’s decision in a fiery and widely shared Facebook post, calling it “big mistake” that will “cost us influence, cost us jobs, and invite other countries to walk away from solving humanity’s most existential crisis.”
