President Donald Trump has returned to his long-held disdain for paper straws, and says he will upend Joe Biden’s effort to curtail single-use plastic versions in a new executive order next week.
Taking to Truth Social as he so often does, the president on Friday said we are headed “BACK TO PLASTIC.” Blasting off against his predecessor, he raged: “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!”
In November last year, Biden announced a national effort to reduce the country’s dependency on single-use plastic. If pushed through, this will be just one of many executive orders signed or promised by the new administration designed on rowing back on Biden’s environmental efforts.
In a flurry of official directives after taking office in January, Trump ramped up domestic oil and gas production and revoked an electric vehicle mandate designed to promote the sale of battery-powered cars.
He has also been a vocal critic of the Green New Deal, which calls for public policy to address climate change. And this is not the first time the president has railed against paper straws. During a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in Sept. 2020, the Republican nominee went on a bizarre rant on the topic.
“They want to ban straws. Has anybody ever tried those paper straws? They are not working too good. Right?” Trump said. “I said, I have had a couple meals at McDonald’s, etc, over the years. Wendy’s. A friend of mine owns Wendy’s, I will give it a plug. Right? Burger King.”
Getting laughs from the crowd, he went on: “What about the carton? What about the plate? What about the knives and the straws and the spoons and the plastic?”
However, around a year earlier he was far more balanced when quizzed about plastic straws at a press conference.
“I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws,” Trump said. “You know, it’s interesting about plastic straws: so, you have a little straw, but what about the plates, the wrappers, and everything else that are much bigger and they’re made of the same material? So, the straws are interesting. Everybody focuses on the straws. There’s a lot of other things to focus on. But it’s an—it’s an interesting question.”
At the same time his campaign website was also selling packs of 10 plastic straws with Trump’s name on them for $15, with the tagline: “Liberal paper straws don’t work.”
