Bannon camp beat Ivanka to convince Don

Trump’s decision to exit Paris climate pact followed debate between moderates, anti-globalists

US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal followed an internal debate that pitted antiglobalist advisers like Steve Bannon against more moderate voices such as Trump’s daughter Ivanka and top economic adviser Gary Cohn.

In the end, Trump stuck to a promise that he had made on the campaign trail last year aimed at helping blue-collar workers who, he feels are under siege in a changing economy.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Pars,” he said on Thursday in making his announcement.

But Trump’s intentions concerning the Paris accord were unclear even to some of his aides until the last day or so since he has shown flexibility on some campaign promises and had gotten an earful about the need to stay in the agreement from key allies at a Group of Seven summit last week in Sicily.

At the White House, the behind-the-scenes debate about whether to stay in Paris or bolt was an intense one that dragged on for weeks.

Ivanka, whose husband Jared Kushner is a senior White House adviser, had been quietly urging her father to keep the US in the Paris agreement, and had sought to ensure her father heard all sides in the debate, an official said.

Cohn last week suggested Trump might be softening on his outright hostility towards the accord telling reporters the President’s position was “evolving” based on input from world leaders who wanted the US to remain in the agreement.

Kushner, on the other hand, came around to the view that the standards set out in the agreement did not work for the economy, a senior administration official said. The official said the question for Kushner was whether to try to change those standards within the agreement or pull out.

Consistently in favour of pulling out were Bannon and Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller, who was involved in writing Trump’s Paris remarks, and Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Both Bannon and Miller are seen as key architects of Trump’s “America First” agenda.