Let us begin with the credentials.
The first candidate is Mellivora capensis, the honey badger, a solitary carnivore of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. It stands about thirty centimeters at the shoulder, which is roughly the height of a bread bin. It is not, despite the name, a badger; it is a mustelid, more closely related to weasels, and it is the sole member of its genus and the sole member of its entire subfamily, which means that at some point in evolutionary history the animal wandered so far from everything else that taxonomy simply built it a room of its own and closed the door.
The second candidate is Donald John Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, holder of the nuclear codes, and the man who in February of this year stood in the Roosevelt Room beside the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and repealed the finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health.
This assessment finds for the bread bin.
The résumé
The honey badger’s ecological contribution is not a matter of opinion and it is not something the animal is trying to do, which is a point we will return to at the end.
It digs. It digs constantly, for grubs and roots and small mammals and anything else beneath the surface, and it can excavate a functional burrow in a matter of minutes, and in the course of this it aerates soil, disperses seeds, and moves nutrients through the ground in a way that agricultural scientists spend entire careers trying to replicate with machinery.
Then it leaves.
The abandoned burrows become housing. Scrub hares move in. Bat-eared foxes move in. Mongooses move in. Researchers have taken to calling the honey badger an unintentional ecosystem engineer, which is the politest possible way of saying that the animal improves the neighborhood by accident, on its way to lunch, and never once submits an invoice.
The second candidate has also engaged in significant excavation, though the pattern differs. In March of this year his administration convened the Endangered Species Committee, an obscure panel known colloquially as the God Squad, whose sole function is to exempt species from the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Since Congress created it in 1978 the committee has considered three exemptions and approved one. It was convened this year to consider an exemption for oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. The species under consideration were not specified, which is a remarkable thing to leave out of an announcement about which animals will be permitted to stop existing.
The dwelling
The honey badger’s home is a hole. It is a hole the animal made itself, in an afternoon, using equipment it grew. It contains nothing. There is no gold in the hole.
The badger does not decorate the hole. It does not gold-plate the hole. It does not pave over the part of the hole that had grass on it, which is a thing that has now happened to the White House Rose Garden, an actual garden, in an actual house, which was replaced with a hard surface because a hard surface is easier to put chairs on.
The badger will also occupy a hole dug by somebody else if one is available and unoccupied, which is the closest thing to a shared behavior these two candidates exhibit, except that the badger vacates.
The consumption
The honey badger is an opportunistic omnivore of legendary indiscriminacy. It eats snakes, insects, birds, reptiles, bee larvae, small mammals, carrion, fruit, roots, young crocodiles, and, where available, garbage.
Note that last item. The honey badger eats garbage, which is a service, and represents a net removal of garbage from the world.
The second candidate’s dietary practice has been documented at length elsewhere and involves the well-done steak, the ketchup, the two scoops of ice cream when everybody else at the table receives one, and a volume of Diet Coke that would be alarming in a man half his age. His administration’s position on garbage, expressed through the reduction of Clean Water Act jurisdiction, is that many wetlands and streams should no longer be protected from receiving it.
The badger removes garbage from the ecosystem. The president has spent eighteen months arranging for more of it to be permitted to enter.
The venom
Here we arrive at the most instructive divergence between the two candidates and I want to walk through the biology carefully, because it is almost too neat.
The honey badger hunts venomous snakes. Cobras, puff adders, black mambas. It does this because snakes are protein with only one dangerous end, which is a better ratio than most prey offers, and it survives the encounter because of a specific and beautiful piece of molecular engineering.
Snake alpha-neurotoxins work by binding to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in muscle tissue, which paralyzes the muscles used for breathing. At some point in its evolutionary history the honey badger acquired an amino acid substitution at the toxin-binding site, swapping an uncharged aromatic residue for a positively charged one, and the effect is that the toxin arrives and finds it cannot get a grip. Hedgehogs and pigs independently evolved the same trick, which tells you it is a good one.
The badger is bitten. The badger has a lie down. The badger gets back up and finishes eating the snake.
The second candidate has evolved in the opposite direction along the same axis. He does not resist venom. He produces it, in industrial volume, continuously, without prompting, and it binds to everyone it touches, and there is no receptor modification available to the American public.
The badger has a defense against poison. The president is the delivery mechanism.
The temperament
The honey badger holds the Guinness World Record as the most fearless animal on Earth, a title earned by a documented willingness to confront lions, leopards, hyenas, swarms of bees, and cobras with what the literature describes as equal indifference. Its skin is thick and loose enough that when something larger seizes it, the badger simply rotates inside its own hide and bites whatever is holding it, which is the single most alarming defensive adaptation in the mammal world and also, unfortunately, an accurate description of how a small animal makes a bad decision work anyway.
The second candidate did not visit troops in a combat zone for nearly two years, and a White House official told the Washington Post that he had never been interested in going, that he was afraid of those situations, and that he was afraid people wanted to kill him. He also declined to attend a ceremony at an American military cemetery in France because it was raining.
More recently, after a NATO summit in Turkey, he was removed from Air Force One inside a catering cart used for loading meal trays and flown out on a separate aircraft while the press corps sat on the decoy with the blinds down.
The honey badger weighs about as much as a car tire and picks fights with lions. The Commander in Chief of the United States military left a country inside the food.
The intelligence
A honey badger named Stoffel, resident at a South African wildlife rehabilitation center, became internationally known for escaping every enclosure built to contain him. He stacked rocks. He used a rake as a ladder. He rolled mud into a ball and stood on it. When the handlers built a cage specifically designed to defeat him, he recruited a female honey badger and the two of them coordinated to open the gate.
That is tool use, problem-solving, and the delegation of labor, performed by an animal with a brain the size of a plum, against professional zookeepers, repeatedly, and on video.
The second candidate has taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a ten-minute dementia screening test, and has described it in public at least four times over six years. The test shows the subject drawings of a lion, a camel, and a rhinoceros. Across his four tellings he has produced a giraffe, a tiger, a whale, an elephant, a bear, an alligator, and a squirrel. Seven animals. One of them, the lion, is on the test, and he named it last.
Stoffel escaped by building a ladder. The president has been unable, on four attempts, to remember which animals he was shown.
The footprint
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the honey badger as Least Concern. Its populations are stable. It occupies enormous territories at very low density, takes only what it eats, hoards nothing, and has never in the history of the species removed a protection from anything.
The second candidate’s administration has, in the past twelve months, repealed the Endangerment Finding for greenhouse gases, loosened restrictions on mercury and arsenic emissions from coal and oil plants, moved to shrink the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act, eliminated the blanket rule that extended protections to threatened species, revised critical habitat designation to require weighing the economic cost of an animal’s continued existence, and convened the God Squad. The species that conservation biologists have flagged as most exposed include the monarch butterfly, the Florida manatee, the California spotted owl, and the North American wolverine.
The Interior Secretary explained that the Endangered Species Act had been weaponized.
The accommodation
One more item, and it is the one that decides the assessment.
Honey badgers raid beehives. They are extremely good at it and they have been a genuine problem for beekeepers across southern Africa for as long as there have been beekeepers across southern Africa.
The response of the human beings involved was not to exterminate the honey badger. It was to design elevated hive stands, mounted on greased poles, that the badger cannot climb. Conservation organizations then promoted the design regionally. The beekeepers keep their honey. The badgers go and eat something else. Nobody had to die and nobody had to leave.
That is what stewardship looks like when it is actually practiced. Somebody has a conflict with an animal, and instead of removing the animal they change the shape of a pole.
Compare the current American approach, which was to redefine the word harm.
In July, the administration finalized a rule narrowing the definition of harm under the Endangered Species Act so that it now refers only to an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Destroying the place an animal lives is no longer, by itself, harming that animal. You may remove the forest. You may remove the wetland. You may remove the whole of the ground beneath a species, and provided you have not personally struck any individual member of it, the law now holds that no harm has occurred.
The verdict
The honey badger is not a good steward of the Earth. It is important to be accurate about this. The animal is not trying to steward anything. It is a bad-tempered solitary carnivore with a plum-sized brain that spends its entire life digging holes and eating snakes and has no concept of the planet whatsoever.
And yet the net effect of one honey badger, across a full life, is aerated soil, dispersed seed, cycled nutrients, removed carrion, controlled snake and rodent populations, and a scattering of abandoned burrows that other animals move into and raise their young in.
It leaves more housing than it takes. It cleans up. It has never asked for a dollar or a permit and it has never once been convened to decide which species may be allowed to stop existing.
That is the whole finding. Stewardship is not a stated intention, and it is not a speech in the Roosevelt Room, and it is not a set of remarks about environmental leadership commissioned after somebody looked at the polling. It is a net effect measured after the animal has gone.
One of these two candidates spends its life wrecking things and leaves the world with more homes in it than it found.
The other has spent eighteen months arranging for the destruction of an animal’s home to no longer count, in law, as harming the animal.
The badger is not trying.
That is the difference, and it is the entire difference, and it does not favor the president.
Wicked good, you are a true Wordsmith my Friend!
Team Honey Badger! At this point, Stoffel would make a less destructive President and might even eat Nosferatu McGoebbels as a service to the planet.