It is a strange time in America. Our military — the most powerful in the history of civilization — is led by people unfit for command. The man we have installed as president openly discusses turning it against our people.
He claims he has “brought back free speech,” but people and institutions who speak too freely find themselves deprived of federal funds, under federal investigation, being sued or even deported without cause, perhaps to a hellish prison in El Salvador.
Voters expect President Trump’s economic policies to force consumer prices up, even though he promised to bring them down. He bragged he would end the war in Ukraine on “day one,” but more than 100 days later he has yet to do so. Instead, he has humiliated Ukraine’s president, attempted to extort concessions from him, and taken the position that Vladimir Putin, who has been charged with war crimes, should be able to keep the Ukrainian lands he has stolen.
Trump promised his immigration policy would focus on deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. Instead, he’s deporting legal immigrants with no criminal records and denying them their constitutional right to due process because that would take too much time.
The president’s team has fired thousands of public employees in his war against government waste, yet he spent more than $20 million playing golf on 24 of his first 100 days in office. He is contemplating a military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C., next month to celebrate his birthday, at an estimated cost of around $92 million.
When he isn’t taking mulligans on one of his 17 golf courses, Trump engages in conflicts of interest and schemes to make himself and his family richer. There used to be rules against this, but they apparently don’t apply now.
The president has declared an energy emergency, claiming our domestic supplies are “far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.” He says we need “reliable, diversified, and affordable” energy. But he is doing everything he can to promote our most unreliable energy resources — oil, natural gas and coal. We don’t control the price or global supply of oil or gas, which has created insecurities that have drawn us into wars, economic crises and the global climate crisis.
Meanwhile, Trump is suppressing the nation’s investments in the cleanest, cheapest, most easily obtained and rapidly deployable resources: sunlight and wind. In the first two months of this year, the administration clawed back over $5 billion in federal funds for clean energy development, according to Clean Economy Tracker, an organization that monitors clean energy manufacturing in the U.S.
This contradicts Trump’s statement that he wants to return manufacturing to the United States. His plan to do this by imposing stiff tariffs on imports has created chaos in the nation’s business climate. Yet Trump’s attempt to help Big Oil by suppressing its competition interrupts the nation’s most significant manufacturing opportunity.
Between 2018 and 2024, private and public investors poured more than $1 trillion into America’s clean energy and decarbonization economy and created nearly 350,000 jobs. Republican-leaning states that helped elect Trump received about 64 percent of the money. Now, companies are canceling plans to build new solar and battery manufacturing plants. Recent examples include the cancellation of a $2.6 billion battery plant in the suburbs of Atlanta, the suspension of construction on a $200 million solar-cell manufacturing plant in Minnesota, and the cancellation of a Swiss solar panel maker’s 2 gigawatt plant in Colorado.
Trump says climate change is bunk, BS, and a “hoax,” but he wants to build a half-mile-long sea wall at his golf course in Ireland to protect it from rising sea levels. He claims that climate science is unsettled but he isn’t interested in settling it. With weather disasters growing in size and frequency, he has dismissed the 400 researchers who studied climate change and reported every two years on what it’s doing to the U.S. Their ongoing research would be indispensable to the nation’s understanding of what’s happening and preparation for what’s coming.
Trump’s attack on federal climate science is part of his sweeping attack on science in general. That, in turn, is part of his attempt to cripple institutions whose work gets in the way of his authoritarian impulses, including the press, the courts, Congress, law firms and universities. As the politically moderate writer David Brooks points out, Trump and other conservatives view scientists as part of the liberal elite they want to destroy in America. However, their agenda threatens the health and safety of all Americans, as well as national security and U.S. competitiveness in rapidly emerging areas of science and technology.
In short, Trump’s indiscriminate campaign to carry out the Grover Norquist agenda — reducing government to the size where he can “drown it in the bathtub” — threatens to cause a brain drain in America. The journal Nature reports that more than 75 percent of the 1,650 scientists it surveyed have considered leaving the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s cuts to research.
The president and his acolytes promise to bring about a new Golden Age in America. But the fate of the U.S. is intimately connected with the fate of other nations. That is an existential reality in everything from preventing pandemics to benefiting from international trade, strengthening national security, and protecting biodiversity, ocean health and the planet’s other critical ecological systems.
Nevertheless, Trump has alienated NATO, annihilated the U.S. Agency for International Development, withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and rejected the United Nations’s sustainable development goals. He is turning America into a heartless pariah in world affairs, more interested in intimidating and extorting other nations than collaborating with them.
Trump is flooding the zone with so much undemocratic behavior that watchdog groups are springing up to track his lawsuits, executive orders, appointments, deregulation efforts and campaign promises.
It is indeed a time of exceptional strangeness in America. If it continues, we may soon not recognize ourselves or remember who we are supposed to be.
William S. Becker is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director and executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which is not affiliated with the White House.
