One of the most famous headlines in newspaper history is back.
All it took was one of the worst decisions by any president in history — President Donald Trump’s move to abandon the 190-nation Paris climate accord, America’s best chance of averting catastrophic climate change.
On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News published its classic “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” issue, when President Gerald Ford rejected federal loans to the city, which was near financial disaster.
Editor-in-Chief Arthur Browne did not bring back the famous headline casually. He told the Washingtonian that people have suggested reviving the “someone-to-someone: drop dead headline” many times over the years, but he rejected them.
“It’s to be reserved only for events that are momentous,” explained Browne, “And this one was.”
What could be more momentous than President Trump — a native son of New York — effectively ending our role as leader of the free world and replacing it with America the villain, the greedy and myopic country that says “to hell with science, Earth’s future,” as the paper puts it?
The Daily News is especially critical of Trump’s “premise that liberating the U.S. economy from carbon-reduction targets will unleash economic growth and create jobs — especially in depressed coal country.”
They explain this move is a “jobs con” and “a myth borne out of campaign demagoguery, utterly unrooted from economic reality.” The future of is in clean energy jobs: “The obvious economic promise of energy sources other than dirty fossil fuels is why the bulk of American energy businesses … strongly supported remaining in the Paris Accord.”
Ultimately, Browne says, he does not consider the headline to be “editorializing.”
“It is factual that Trump told the world leaders to drop dead on their thinking,” Browne explained, “and that he took an action that runs counter efforts to stem climate climate change.”
And if you’re wondering where the president is right now, after setting the world on course to burn? He isn’t fiddling, like some modern-day Nero, nor is he attending a celebratory rally outside the White House that staff had hyped.
He’s golfing for the umpteenth time.
President Trump is now at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. It's his 22nd golf course visit since taking office 19 weeks ago.
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 3, 2017
And why shouldn’t he — it’s not every week you set the human race on course toward self-destruction.