The Daily 202: Trump reversal of elephant trophy ban underscores the need to watch what he does, not what he says

The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website March 8, 2018:

THE BIG IDEA: If you don’t like President Trump’s position on a particular issue, just wait a day. It may change.

It’s always suspicious when a federal agency quietly makes a major policy change and does not put out a news release about it. That’s what the Interior Department did last week.

Handing another win to the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service withdrew a ban related to importing elephant trophies from Africa. A March 1 memorandum, written in dense legalese, said the government will now allow hunters to receive permits on “a case-by-case basis” to bring tusks and other body parts back to this country.

This is notable because Trump chastised and then overruled his own political appointees at the department, led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, when they unveiled plans last November to lift restrictions put in place by Barack Obama. The president called the hunting of elephants for sport a “horror show.”

Just last month, Trump told Piers Morgan that what his team did last year was “terrible.”

“I didn’t want elephants killed and stuffed and have the tusks brought back,” he said.

Stories started trickling out this week as reporters discovered the memo that had been entered into the public record.

The NRA has been aggressively challenging the 2014 ban on elephant trophy imports from Zimbabwe and Zambia in court, and the D.C. Circuit ruled in December that the Obama administration didn’t follow proper procedures related to soliciting public comments when implementing it.

The Trump administration cites this finding as the justification for its policy change. But The Hill notes that Fish and Wildlife is simultaneously withdrawing other findings related to trophy hunting that stretch back to 1995. So that spin doesn’t necessarily pass the smell test.

The population of African elephants, the world’s largest land mammal, has declined from 5 million to 400,000 over the past century. That’s why they’ve been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1979. These are incredibly smart creatures and really amazing to behold up close.

In an apparent effort to minimize press coverage, the Trump team at Interior initially tried to push through the rule change last November during the week before the Thanksgiving holiday.

But they didn’t count on blowback from the right. Many conservative elites are against the senseless and barbaric murder of elephants, the symbol of the Republican Party, and they successfully used their platforms to get the president to overrule his subordinates and both of his sons. Most prominent among them were radio host Michael Savage and Fox News host Laura Ingraham. (I wrote a Big Idea about this at the time.)

Once again, these same thought leaders swung into action when the word got out about what Interior was doing:

Speaking for the first time about the Interior memo, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at her Wednesday afternoon briefing that the president’s views have not changed since November. She cited the litigation as the reason for the change and then referred specific questions about how the relaxed rules will work to the department. “The president has been clear what his position is, and that has not changed,” she said. Asked if he thinks there should be a permanent ban on imports of trophies, she ducked and repeated herself. “President Trump’s position on trophy hunting remains the same,” Sanders said.

When I followed up with Interior, spokeswoman Heather Swift replied with a one-sentence email: “Secretary Zinke is 100 percent in step with the president’s position on the issue.”

“Zinke recently told people privately that Trump has called him several times to discuss what to do about elephant trophies,” the AP’s Michael Biesecker notes. “Zinke is an avid hunter who after arriving at Interior last year ordered the arcade game ‘Big Buck Hunter Pro’ to be installed in the employee cafeteria at the agency’s Washington headquarters. … In June, the department removed longstanding protections for grizzly bears near Yellowstone National Park, a step to potentially allow them to be hunted. The Fish and Wildlife Service also quietly began issuing permits in October allowing African lions killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia to be imported.”

Bottom line: This is the latest illustration of the imperative with this administration to watch what officials actually do, not just what Trump says or tweets. The case-by-case standard means that officials could grant no permits or approve all requests. Officials at Fish and Wildlife say that applicants will need to meet conservation and sustainability requirements. (Advocates of big-game hunting argue that revenue from trophy permits helps preserve habitats, but many experts disagree.)

As always, the devil is in the details. The number of approved permits may not be known publicly for a while. It’s conceivable that Trump will do nothing as his political appointees clear the way for hunters to practice what he thinks is “a horror show,” especially if it means not running crosswise with the gun lobby. If Ingraham isn’t drawing his attention to the matter on her Fox show, which he watches, the inconsistency between his rhetoric and reality could be out of sight and out of mind.

Savage, a syndicated radio host and the author of several best-selling books, took credit last night for Trump appearing to once again overrule his political people at Interior. “I felt that someone had punched me in the gut when I saw that the ban … was secretly lifted,” he wrote on his blog. “I felt betrayed. I had spent a dinner talking to the president about environmental issues, and especially this, and this is what happened anyway. Well, they didn’t do it secretly enough, because I found out about it and I brought it to [my] audience. I made it clear that this was a red line that could not be crossed … I explained that the root of ‘conservative’ is the same as ‘conservation’ and the two do not need to be diametrically opposed.”

Savage said he sent Trump an article he wrote on this subject with the message, “Mr. President, you are just plain wrong.”

“People in the administration told me personally the president received this information,” he wrote. “I have a voice that was heard and was listened to. And it’s important because, who else will speak for these animals?”

View the post here.