Here's an interesting perspective in an opinion piece entitled "MAGA Elites Who Live on Their Phones Are Ruining the Outdoors." The premise being that the Republican Party's environmentalist side, most memorably embodied in the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt 120 years ago and greatly atrophied since the 1970s, had still lingered in the form of a love of the outdoors among conservative hunters and recreationists. Of all people, it was "avid outdoorsmen" Donald Trump, Jr. and Tucker Carlson who in 2020 had helped stop a proposed mine that threatened salmon habitat in Alaska.
In the second Trump term, according to the opinion piece's author Stephen Lezak, this lingering conservation ethic has eroded, as the outdoor Republicans of the west have been replaced by indoor Republicans of Palm Beach in the east.
For me, the distinction between indoor and outdoor sensibilities is a useful distinction beyond its relevance to the Republican Party. It plays out in suburbia, where homeowners manage their properties as if the yard were an extension of the indoors. Essentially, nature is banished even from the outdoors as yards are fumigated to kill mosquitoes, and lawns are mass-sprayed to kill weeds. The aim is to make a lawn as clean and uniform as an indoor carpet, and the outside air as insect-free as a screened porch.
Trump's paving over of the Rose Garden, mentioned by Lezak as rationalized by a desire to spare women's high heels from morning dew and porous ground, represents the next step, moving beyond lawn to remove the last vestiges of annoying nature from our lives.
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