Why Trump Won

And why we need divided government

As a result of my previous employment with the Washington State Legislature, I often receive notice about interesting job openings in and around Washington State government.

This week was no different.

I received notice of a job opening at the Department of Natural Resources. (DNR)

Photo by Lou Levit on Unsplash

The DNR is an interesting State agency. It operates independently of our Governor, managed by an independently elected Commissioner.

Washington State is a land of vast forests. Those forests, and the logging of them, were long the basis of our economy. I remember, as a kid, the freeways and highways filled with logging trucks, hauling timber to the mills.

Logging isn’t as important to our economy as it once was, and timber is a much smaller industry here now, so those trucks are a lot fewer today. But, it is still really big business, and a business that many communities truly rely upon to thrive.

Ultimately, it is an agricultural enterprise. Forests are logged, replanted, and then ready to be logged again a few decades later. This makes for vast, beautiful forests, filled with game and woodland creatures of all types.

Indeed the State’s unofficial motto is ‘The Evergreen State’ and when I was a child the saying ‘Keep Washington Green’ was everywhere.

That brings us to the DNR.

The State owns forestlands. Lots and lots of them. Other, smaller governments, primarily schools, own forestlands too. Vast acreages of trees.

This is a part of our heritage going all the way back to Washington’s creation as a State. The State, schools, and other ‘junior taxing districts’ would own forestlands. (Primarily K-12 schools.) Those forestlands would be used to grow and harvest trees, thereby providing a steady income stream for operation of those things considered to be important for the people of the State.

And the DNR would manage those forestlands.

It would manage the forests that the State owns, and it would manage the forests owned by ‘junior taxing districts’ holding and managing those lands in Trust.

In a nutshell, the DNR would, and does, plant trees, manage those forests until the trees reached marketable size, then sell them. The proceeds from the harvest would then be delivered to schools (or another ‘junior taxing district’.) These moneys would then be used locally to supplement the operations of the schools.

This goes on every day, as Washington manages its forestlands.

But, the Commissioner has another job as well, one that is of higher profile in today’s world. The Commissioner, through the DNR, is responsible for putting out the wildfires that start each and every summer.

That’s it.

That’s what the DNR does. It manages State owned forestlands, and forestlands held in Trust by the State, and it puts out the fires that would otherwise consume those forestlands.

The other day I received a posting for a new job over at the DNR.

I’m not actually looking for a new job, but I opened it, because I have a great deal of experience working with the DNR, and find its mission to be interesting.

The job is for an:

Environmental Justice Advisor.

It pays somewhere between 94 and 114 thousand dollars a year.

It reports to The Director of Equity, Environmental Justice, and Civil Rights within the Office of Commissioner of Public Lands.

Well, golly.

This is so far from the DNR’s mission of growing trees to raise money for schools and putting out forest fires to be patently absurd.

And the absurdity grows when one considers that the position is housed within the Commissioner’s own office instead of within Human Resources or some other sub-department.

Given that the DNR funds its own operations out of the moneys it generates, that 94 to 114 thousand dollars a year (not to mention whatever the Director of Equity, Environmental Justice, and Civil Rights, plus the support staff that goes along with such jobs make) will be held back from our schools as an expense of growing trees.

Ultimately, those are school teachers not hired. Not working in classrooms, not educating our youth. Because the DNR decided that these positions are somehow more important than classrooms for kids.

This when, according to the New York Times yesterday “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows.”¹

Ultimately, even if we might be in favor of a job titled Environmental Justice Advisor within Washington’s timber harvesting Department, this is clearly a failure of prioritization. For Washington to thrive well into a bright future, we need new teachers a heck of a lot more than we need new Environmental Justice Advisors.

It was widely reported after President Trump’s election that Washington State is the only State in the nation that didn’t move, at least slightly, towards the Red side of the spectrum. We chose to remain solidly Blue.

But that won’t remain forever. Even here, the pendulum eventually swings.

And this choice to fund an Environmental Justice Advisor over teachers is exactly why President Trump won. It is exactly why every state but mine moved towards the Red side.

Because of priorities so misplaced as to reach absurdity. Over and over again.

It also shows why here in the United States we function better with divided government.

Here in Washington we currently have complete one party rule. Our Governor is Blue, as is every single statewide elected official. Both chambers of our Legislature are solidly Blue. Our Supreme Court is Blue.

As a result of this sea of Blue, misplaced priorities, even absurdly misplaced priorities are not questioned. Nothing can ever be meaningfully challenged.

When I left our Legislature, Washington was then as now, a sea of Blue, but there was one little small island of Red in the middle of all that Blue. The Red side controlled the Senate by a small margin.

That meant that I worked for the Chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

Had this job opening been posted then, the Chairman would have called the Commissioner. A meeting would have been set up and the Chairman and I would have sat in his office along with the Commissioner and one of his policy people or two. All of this would have been hashed out. Maybe the Senator would have prevailed on the Commissioner that this priority was badly misplaced. Maybe the Commissioner would have convinced the Senator otherwise.

But whatever was decided in the end, the challenge would have been made.

And that would have led to a better decision for the citizens of this State.

Ultimately it would have led to a decision that perhaps neither the really Blue people liked, nor the really Red people liked, but a decision that most people as a whole could live with.

That can’t happen when one political party controls all of government. There are no meaningful checks and balances.

That leads to extremes.

We are all worse off when governed from the extremes.

And extremes make the pendulum swing.

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1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html