“Did you see this story?” I asked Swamp Rabbit before reading aloud from the online Washington Post:

Unlike [Barack Obama’s] Clean Power Plan, which never took effect because of a Supreme Court decision, the Trump administration is not setting specific emissions cuts state by state in a way that would force utilities to switch from coal to lower-carbon sources of energy. Instead, the EPA is leaving it up to state regulators to improve the efficiency of coal-fired power — that is, to get more electricity for every pound of coal burned rather than closing coal plants entirely.

It’s not really news, I told him. Just more evidence that the grabber-in-chief remains determined to sabotage all Obama-era efforts to get the U.S. on the same page with other countries devising strategies to cope with climate change.

“It ain’t only about climate change,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s about Trump wanting to erase Obama from the history books. He can’t do that, so he’s trying to undo the good stuff Obama did when he was president.”

I quibbled with the rabbit. Obama wasn’t a disaster, but his record includes a lot of stuff that wasn’t good at all. He cozied up to the bankers who should have gone to jail for wrecking the economy. He wasn’t supportive of labor unions (remember those strikers in Wisconsin?) or of working people in general. He had grand ideas but was too much of a neoliberal to fight for policies that were truly progressive.

But all in all, I had to agree. Trump’s primary objective in making policy is to scuttle all policies Obama put in place, or tried to put in place. Exhibit A is that he fought tooth and nail to kill Obamacare without having a health care plan to replace it. Exhibit B is his perverse decision to scrap Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. There are many other exhibits.

“It goes back to that event where Obama made a fool of Trump in front of them reporters,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Trump got all stony-faced and looked like he wanted to kill him.”

I told the rabbit he was over-simplifying. He said, “Trump hates Obama because he’s everything Trump ain’t.”

True enough. Obama is smart, disciplined, thoughtful, eloquent, relatively honest, stylish, witty, popular with the elites and, most of all, rational. Maybe too rational — to the point where he didn’t understand how effectively a primitive like Trump, with help from the news media, could tap into the primitive forces that make him so popular with uneducated whites.

“Most Dems is like that,” the rabbit said. “They don’t get Trump, not even now. They were surprised when he turned the Fourth of July into a reality TV show about himself.”

“If they don’t wise up he’s gonna do the same thing with the election,” I replied.