I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

There are clear benefits. They just refuse to see them. You can show a mountain of evidence based on peer reviewed research and they'll hand waive it away and say "Private enterprise could do it better" or some nonsense.

> I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

The Trump GOP has no reflexive opposition to government. Trump won the nomination in 2016 because he abandoned the GOP orthodoxy on free markets and declared there would be no cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. https://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9159117/donald-trump-moderate

Tariffs are government. Border security is government. Police are government. The Trump GOP supports all those things.

On the environment, Trump is an incrementalist. He’s not proposing on repealing the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. But in the 50-60 years since those laws, we have adopted numerous rules and regulations that don’t provide the same level of benefit. In his first term, he was focused on rolling back those regulations.

He doesn't need to repeal the Clean Air Act when his EPA conveniently changes how they interpret it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-clean-air-policy-trump-admi...

Sure he does. You can only tweak around the edges of a law by changing interpretations like that, especially after Loper Bright. That is all he’s trying to do on the environmental front, mostly repealing g regulations the Obama administration adopted in its last year.

This is not a president that’s afraid of blowing things up. If he wanted to defund the EPA he would.

Just like Obama didn't need to add to the Clean Water Act, just conveniently change how they interpreted "Navigable Waters"

As I stated I know some reasonable answers to the question. The point made was not about answering the question or doubting that there were plausible answers. Clearly the point was that the original phrasing ought not cause someone to think of it as provocative.