The Opinions - 'Destabilize, Destabilize, Destabilize': What Trump Is Really Up To

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

President Trump has declared that his second term will begin with the “most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” To track, interrogate and challenge his most consequential actions during his first few months in office, Times Opinion’s deputy editor, Patrick Healy, is beginning a weekly series on “The Opinions” focused on Trump’s first 100 days. He kicks things off with the Times writer David Wallace-Wells, exploring the president’s executive orders on climate and energy as Mr. Trump prepares to tour the destruction wrought by the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Patrick Healy, Deputy Editor of New York Times Opinion. Okay, so it's become immediately clear that Donald Trump wants to start changing America and the world in the first hundred days of his presidency. He's trying to rewrite the history of January 6th by freeing the insurrectionists and excusing them, and excusing himself. He's trying to redefine identity and culture with his declarations on gender and DEI

and his control over Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other tech and media leaders. He's trying to remake executive powers by invoking national sovereignty and national security to crack down on immigration, to use the military and the Justice Department however he wants, and to appoint himself judge and jury

by pardoning it will. It's shaping up to be a first hundred days like America has never seen before. And that's a prime invitation for Times' opinion to interrogate and challenge the Trump agenda and help listeners stay focused on what really matters, not the sideshows, not the smokescreens that Trump loves to distract people with.

So think of this as the start of a Times Opinion audio series what Trump is really up to. And as part of this, I'm going to start a little countdown clock on what Trump isn't doing on the cost of living, on inflation, the economy, these issues that were so integral to his election, and really call BS on some of his actions and executive orders that suggest change, but really sound like study committees. We also want to dig into critically important actions and ideas from Trump that aren't getting enough attention, and that's where I want to start today. There hasn't been much said on what is one of

major problems facing America and the world. And that's Trump's orders on climate change and the environment. So I wanted to start our series with my opinion colleague, David Wallace Wells, about Trump's moves on climate and energy. Thanks for joining me, David. Really good to be here. So, David, I want to begin with Trump's actions on Monday and talk about spectacle versus substance when it comes to his agenda. He signed a bunch of executive orders on climate, you know, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, opening federal land up for drilling, declaring an energy emergency. Which of these are substantive matters, and which are spectacle? Overall, I think we're looking at a lot of showmanship, and we don't yet

know which of those gestures are going to ultimately end up in policy, like a lot of these executive orders. We're really seeing memos that are pointing towards studies or committees or policy actions, which haven't been implemented. And, a lot of cases, even what he's hoping to do is a little ambiguous. You know, he wants to end subsidies for green energy, but does that include tax incentives or is it just the direct subsidies? We actually don't know the answer to that, and it'll be resolved going forward, not just by his administration, but also through challenges in the courts. And so a lot of it is quite ambiguous. But when it comes to climate, you know, the kind of cultural signaling is pretty important. One of the reasons that

we are now kind of knee-deep, if not neck-deep, in decarbonization in the U.S. and indeed all around the world is because for the last five or ten years coming out of that Paris agreement, there was just a understanding that we were moving in this particular direction, towards greener energy, towards cleaner fuels. And when you have a leader like Trump standing up and saying, I'm going to flip the bird to all of those initiatives, even if there's not that much coming concretely behind it, it matters in terms of cultural momentum. It's going to shape the way that people think about whether they're going to buy an EV or not. And I think what we're about to see is a test of how much of the green momentum of the last half decade or decade is because of direct investment by green energy companies, how much of it is the result of policies like Biden's IRA, and how much of it is about this cultural momentum, which Trump is trying as hardest to stop.

It is part of that rewriting that I was talking about earlier, the flipping the bird. It's such the point of this, the degree to which he is trying to both destabilize what has been consensus in the scientific community. consensus among a lot of Americans who care about fact-based, science-based evidence, and really kind of thwart that. And I think it appeals to so many of his voters, not just the flipping of the bird action, you know, these smarty-pants people who want to tell you how to live your life, but also, I think what he sees as a power structure that he feels like has long opposed him, that has brought facts to bear on issues and conversations. that he wants to take control of. I am wondering, David, on the on the EV point,

this has been so central to both climate policy in America, but also, I think, early attempts to rethink and remake different industries in America. Based on what he's done so far, how destabilizing is kind of his EV change in thinking, and who is he trying to appeal to or drive toward? I mean, for me, the key question is whether this tax incentive survives or not. So it's a $7,500 tax incentive, which is significant, especially when you're looking at the lower end of the market for American-made cars.

And whether his call to ban subsidies includes that or not is the most material question here. I do think in the bigger picture, we have one really successful American EV company, Tesla. We have a lot of legacy automakers who are inching towards a more EV focus, but have not taken the big of, steps that are really necessary to get us there on the timelines that say the Biden administration wanted. And we've seen from a lot of those carmakers over the last couple of years, some of them have directly walked back their promises to ramp up EV production. Others have just been really tentative about making new plans, partly because of uncertainty about the political environment, and partly because of uncertainty about tariffs and the competition from China.

And over this period, the last five years really since the pandemic started, China has, in addition to really, really rolling out a huge boom in solar tech has also really revolutionized the global EV landscape. They are now the dominant force for electric vehicles in the world, and they're really good cars, which are much cheaper than the American equivalents. My own view is that we're likely to see a continuation of the patterns that we've seen over the last five years, which is to say EV uptake growing slowly rather than shrinking, but not growing dramatically, probably an extension of the kind of cultural patterns we've seen in the past where it's primarily liberal-minded,

relatively well-off people who are buying these cars, and some change in the industrial landscape where some of these manufacturers are doing a little bit more on EVs, but nothing like the step change that our global and indeed domestic climate goals sort of require. And I think that's a pretty good synecary for the Trump program in general. I don't think we're going to be rolling back

to American energy policy of, 2017, certainly not of 2009. I think we're going to be continuing to roll out wind and solar, especially in red and purple places. It's just going to slow our progress going forward. David, Trump is such a showman, and part of his showmanship is a real understanding about timing. And I'm curious why you think he came so fast out of the gate, just on day one and day two, looking at energy and climate issues. Is it partly, you know, that, you know, that, kind of flipping the bird energy that he wanted to kind of infuse on day one, or is there something going on that I think gets at some of the points who just made about China, about setting kind of

expectation around what our energy and climate policy should be. So as he's approaching these other countries, whether it's China, whether it's the Middle East, whether it's about, frankly, domestic kind of oil and energy producers, whether he's trying to set him, up into a kind of a very dominant poll position to start negotiating terms. So talk a little bit about the timing of this and kind of as Trump is kind of a showman how he's trying to sort of set the table. Well, one of the things that's most interesting to me is that we actually heard pretty little on the campaign trail about climate, from really from both candidates. Very little, from both, right. But when the page turns to actual, you know, Trump is in office and he's performing now as

president, yeah, it's maybe not the first item on his agenda. But it's right up there. And I think that tells you that among his supporters, this remains a really charged set of culture war dynamics. There are a lot of threads that run through this. One of them is that inflation was in some significant way felt and powered by energy costs. And so Trump can say plausibly that the cost of energy in the U.S. contributed meaningfully to the cost of living crisis among his voters. I think it taps into a kind of this masculine impulse that he has in reimagining what the meaning of America and the future of America is.

Can I throw another theory at you about this? I mean, it's the notion that Trump has that climate activists, environmental activists, single issue climate voters, they're on the ropes. I think he really sees that group of people as not remotely decisive in a political, electoral coalition, and that it's a political, electoral coalition, and that it's a very. It is so easy to caricature and kind of demonize them, this notion of what they want to do to America, what they want to do to write offshore with kind of wind farms. And I don't get the sense, at least on the left or the Democratic Party, that there is a really persuasive pushback that kind of wins the day. I totally agree. I think one of the things that happened with the passage of the IRA in the U.S. is that it kind of split the climate coalition that brought it into being among, you know, energy centrists who want a green energy future but see a place for, you know, natural gas and some slow phase out of oil,

who are basically like, okay, we did our thing and now we just like let it, we're going to let it cook. And climate activists who want a lot more. And especially once that coalition splits, it's a lot harder to point fingers and laugh at the extreme, you know, the soy boys and the degrowth fan girls or whatever, which is sort of the language that Trump people would use. And the sort of policy position that he's advancing here is twofold. It's we are currently in an energy crisis and that we need to. pursue a policy of energy dominance. And that gets back to the masculine energy I was talking about earlier, this idea of dominance. Now, the truth is, there is no energy crisis. We are already in an energy dominant position. I mean, the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than it ever has before in its history. In fact, it's producing more than any other country in the world. We have seen major progress on investment in green energy, but it was on all carrots, no sticks program and approach. And so the Trumpist and right wing attacks on this energy question, I think, are really, you know, know, disingenuous and poorly informed.

They're disingenuous, David, but it's like big lie after big lie after big lie. But it works. Like, it works. I mean, there is a – Trump is able to see the culture in America and the ability to control and manipulate both human behavior and public opinion for a vast number of Americans. Like, it's a sense of I want to marginalize this group, this group, this group, these activists, this sector. and I know how to do it in kind of a concerted way. And I just find myself wondering, are there policy solutions or leaders or maybe just simply, you know, a ticking clock of crisis that might force his hand?

And I got to say, you know, he was going to L.A. on Friday to see the wildfires. And I do wonder on that crisis point, if there are just natural disasters that may be the thing that finally catch up. up to him and kind of force his hand in some of this? Well, I mean, I think what you're seeing is his eagerness to use some of these issues for political purposes. And you can see that illustrated in the contrast between these two disasters, you know, Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires. You know, there was some, you know, online, you know, right-wing sort of paranoia in the response

to Hurricane Helene. But basically, we moved on. We didn't weaponize that. He didn't weaponize it at the national scale. The fires have, you know, are a different scale of story, and they've provided him a different kind of a weapon in attacking California governance. And it's actually a quite popular attack to the point that you're making many Californians, including pretty liberal-minded Californians, even if they don't think it's narrowly the fault of Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass that these fires destroyed palisades in at Altadena are at least taking them opportunity to think, like, are these really the people we want in charge of our lives and livelihoods in the face of these disasters? And we'll see how that all shakes out. But I think that the opportunity here to try to put a positive spin on it is the one that you are pointing towards, which is you see a lot of conservatives in California and nationally looking at the fires and saying very emphatically, much more should have been done by government to protect the people of California from this risk. Now, that's not exactly the same as acknowledging the climate contributions to the problem, but it represents an acknowledgement that there is a real problem here that needs to be addressed.

And more importantly, more strikingly, that it should be addressed. by public action and public leaders. And that is just not something that we've really seen from Republicans or Donald Trump in the past when it comes to natural disasters of this kind. It may represent a turning point. We'll see how it all shakes out. But it is possible right now to see the right-wing rage

about the human contributions to the wildfire destruction in California, which is horrifyingly large, to see that rage as a sort of inflection point past which we no longer continue to believe that we're invulnerable and instead insist that more be done on the adaptation of resilient side by proactive government investment to protect one another in the face of new risks. I don't know, man, I don't know about proactive with Trump. I mean, I just think his argument is destabilize, destabilize, destabilize, destabilize. I think you're exactly right about the question

of how does this shake out. But I think for him, it shakes out only in the sense of like, how can I undercut as many people as possible, tragedy be damned, you know, how do I go after my political opponents to get them to bend the knee kind of as much as possible and to take control of a narrative of, you know, Trump's favorite line as I alone can fix this. And I think we're going to see that in L.A. But I just, I find myself. I would say is a real favorite line is like, I am your voice. He loves I am your voice. He loves I am your retribution. But it's, yeah, he's got, he's got, he's a real favorite line. He's like, I am your voice. He's a real. He's. got like a top 100. But I just wonder when he goes to L.A., what we're going to see in terms of any kind of proactive ideas to your point, or whether it's simply going to be a messaging trip. You know, I am the strong leader. I alone can fix this. Yeah, I mean, what I would bet on is that it's a messaging trip, quite negative, quite full of personal attacks. But if what he does is say, we should have been doing more in terms of building codes,

we should have been doing more in terms of funding the fire department, building fire breaks, doing some fuel thinning in the Sanamanica Mountains. Even if he's invoking those programs in order to attack the relevant Democratic leaders, and even if he himself does very little to nothing to make those changes happen, the fact that he's allowing and even inviting conservatives to support that kind of action may make a positive break in terms of the national mood when it comes to climate adaptation. That's what I'm going to be watching for on Friday, because if he does any of the things that you're talking about, I'd be somewhat impressed if he's really sort of pushing at least

both parties, especially kind of the libertarians in California in his own party, to say, like, government has a role in crises. We may not want EV stations and wind farms kind of all around the country, but, you know, and this is a guy who never met a deficit he didn't like, you know, I'm going to spend or I'm going to take action to do that. I mean, what fascinates me in a big picture way about him is that I think he's very focused on resources. You know, I think that the Greenland play is sort of an obsession of his. And one thing we may just hear more and more is the sense that America doesn't have a climate crisis. It has a resource crisis.

And where can I go in America or around the world to grab, grab, grab, grab. And again, I think that rewriting of the narrative about what America is and what America needs is one of his major projects to get people, if not to believe what he's saying, to at least sort of wonder, hmm, does he have a point? I mean, I'm really curious. What's your sense of kind of a bigger theory of the case in terms of Trump and his relationship to power or Trump and how he, executes power. I think you did a pretty good summary. I think he is essentially a mercenary, acquisitive person who understands in a mercantilist way

that the job of a president is to accumulate wealth and power on behalf of his people at any cost and using any strategy to achieve that. One of the things that's interesting about this dynamic is that really since the pandemic, as the kind of cold war with China heated up, the U.S. has effectively made a big bet on AI as the future of the global economy.

China made a really big bet on green tech and hard tech. And one of the things that we're starting to see, I think, as the Trump's second term comes into focus, is that he's actually interested in doing some of the things that Joe Biden was trying to do to revitalizing the industrial sector, not betting entirely on AI, but figuring out how to source, you know, critical minerals, in part for green energy, how to find new opportunities for drilling, you know, in federal lands as well. So it's not a pure, positive sum game for climate advocates. But one of the things that may ultimately prove a kind of a silver lining in the executive action onslaught on his day one was that he did, you know, draw a red circle around these permitting problems which have frustrated and angered people both on the dirty energy side and the clean energy side now for a number of years. And if it is true that among all the things that Trump is doing on climate, he achieves some dramatic reform on permitting, who knows it may well be that that effect on how quickly we can electrify our energy systems may even.

outweigh some of the bad stuff that he's going to do through drilling. I'm not sure how that math will ultimately shake out, and I don't want to sound too optimistic, but if he is in a position where he's just like, I want more and more and more, on some level, the more and more all of the above energy strategy was Joe Biden's. It was Barack Obama's. And you can see a kind of a continuity there if you squint. Look, one of the things I've always liked about the guy is his impatience, frankly, is sort of time's wasting. And if we're going to change things, and he is someone who sees himself as a real change agent. He wants to change it as quickly as possible.

How the change works is worrisome. What you got at earlier with accumulation and acquisition, those are two such important words when it comes to Trump. When you accumulate, when you acquire, when you want to make all these changes, what do you do with it? It feels like he's kind of like all front-end talk and energy, but where's the follow-through to some idea that leads to his golden age idea?

I'm just not sure. Well, I mean, one thing that's interesting to me is just to compare the makeup of his coalition in 2017 to 2025. And I think it's notable, as many people have pointed out, the degree to which Silicon Valley has moved to Trump. It really is the case that in 2017, his coalition seemed dominated by working-class discontents, that those were his voters. Like, he had the, you know, the petite bourgeois, like, you know, car dealer too, but it was not an oligarchy that brought him into power. In fact, all of these people who showed up as inauguration and paid a million dollars were, you know, outspoken critics of his not all that long ago. Elon Musk himself, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord the last time, publicly protested and said this is a mistake. And now, now they're all on board.

So he has moved from a coalition of the discontented working class representing, you know, a complaint with the American. establishment, but one that implied a sort of class-based redistribution of power to the poor. He's moved from that to one in which he's basically representing an alliance of the very rich and the working class against the professional managerial class, against the educated elites, the middle managers, who are resented both by the owners of companies and by their workers simultaneously. And how that changes what his ultimate goal is, I think, you know, I think it's actually quite clear. This is meant to be a rule by and for the oligarchs. I think on some level, the American public is likely to, you know, respond with revulsion to an outright rule by these

billionaires. But Trump has committed in many ways through the campaign and in his first days in office to giving those people access and power, not just as wealthy people who've always been powerful in American politics, but in a new sort of way. Yelan Musk will have a staff of 20 people in the White House. All of these people are going to have direct lines to Trump himself. It is a new era. And, you know, you spoke earlier about how little resistance you see on the American left on the climate front. It worries me just as much to see how little resistance we're seeing on the sort of income inequality and wealth and power front. I think that is just as dark, just as worrying, and maybe considerably more central to the way that Trump tries to navigate his second term

than the climate or anti-climate policies that he implements. David, I want to thank you so much for coming on. I'm grateful. Thanks for having me. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Veshaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McInty.

Kusker, Carol Sabarro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.