“There is no rational reason to have oil rigs off of the Outer Banks but not off of Palm Beach,” Mr. Stein said. “Tourism and fisheries generates billions of dollars in economic activity in North Carolina, just as it does in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.”
Mr. Trump’s up-is-down claims about his environmental record — he touted himself as “the No. 1 environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt” — were the latest example of the gaslighting campaign he is running to win over voters in battleground states by trying to ignore or misrepresent his own record.
During the Republican National Convention last month, the president’s advisers featured more than a dozen Black speakers vouching for the president’s character. But there was little discussion of Black victims of police violence, nor was there any reckoning with the protests across the country all summer dealing with systematic racism in the United States.
In an effort to win just a few more percentage points with Black voters than the 8 percent he won four years ago, Mr. Trump has underscored his support for changes to the criminal justice system. His hope is that Black voters, as well as white suburban voters turned off by his incendiary racial language, will focus on the First Step Act on criminal justice while overlooking the rest of his record on race, advisers said.
The president last month signed into law the Great American Outdoors Act, a conservation bill that guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use. On Tuesday, he pointed to that one bill, passed in large measure to bolster two endangered Republican senators, Steve Daines of Montana and Cory Gardner of Colorado, hoping to avoid a broader examination of his environmental record.
Mr. Trump also made inaccurate claims about his environmental achievements.
For instance, he said his administration was “strengthening standards to prevent vulnerable children from being exposed to lead and copper and drinking water, including in our schools.” But experts have said the Environmental Protection Agency’s new lead standards would actually slow the replacement of pipes and leave more children vulnerable to exposure.
And while the president promoted his extension of the offshore drilling moratorium, he assailed Mr. Biden’s promises to curtail some hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a method of extracting natural gas that conservationists strongly oppose.