Donald Trump got off lightly in the US presidential debate last month, which will be forever remembered for Joe Biden’s disastrous brain-fades.
Media reports skated over Trump’s response to the question asking whether he will take any action as president to slow the climate crisis, but we have to assume that his reply is what he wants voters to know about his climate policy. It went like this:
“So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did – we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever.”
Let’s pause for a moment. This is the man widely expected to become America’s 47th president – at a time when the global scientific consensus is that the viability of human life as we know it hangs on what world leaders can achieve in this decade, the 2020s.
Reading between the lines of Trump’s odd response, he doesn’t need to consider climate because under him everything will be okay – “the best environmental numbers ever.” Let’s face it – he couldn’t care less about it. And his party agrees – climate change didn’t get a look in at last week’s Republican National Convention.
I haven’t previously taken much notice of US party conventions with their razzmatazz and puffery. But this year’s events are unusually consequential – especially given Trump’s near-death experience two weekends ago and Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday not to seek a second term.
Biden’s successes should not go unrecognised, notably his remarkable “Inflation Reduction Act” which has seen massive investment in getting the US off fossil fuels and building renewable energy capacity. The Democrats will determine their new candidate at the party’s convention starting on August 16; Vice President Kamala Harris is the front-runner.
Trump is currently favoured to win, which begs the question, what will that mean for America and the world?
On climate change, the US will revert to its position from 2017 to 2021, when it abandoned constraints on extracting and using fossil fuels and ignored the Paris Agreement before withdrawing from it completely. It will be the end of any hope that the world might soon turn around its rising carbon emissions.
If that isn’t massive enough, a Trump victory is shaping up as a hammer blow to US democracy. Ever since he told Fox News last December that he would be a dictator just on “day one” of his presidency, the idea of absolute power has taken root in his party. A subsequent national poll found that three-quarters of registered Republicans thought a period of autocracy would “probably” be good for the country.
Any notion that an American dictatorship was just a passing whim vanished this month when a 920-page document published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, came into the public spotlight. “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is a thoroughly considered political manifesto with the giveaway subtitle, “Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project”.
Two things are clear: this is not Trump’s work, but his claim that he had known nothing of it or its authors is undermined by a video showing his familiarity with the leading author, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D Roberts. Roberts warned darkly on a right-wing podcast early this month that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The document declared itself to be “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” It went on to outline how a Republican administration would radically cut the powers of federal regulatory and expert agencies – people Trump has described as the “deep state” – and concentrate executive power in the person of the president and his closest advisers.
The sharpest sting is in Project 2025’s plans for federal elections. It seeks the removal of guardrails that protect electoral integrity including oversight of campaign finances, protection of voting rights, protection of political dissent – and crucially, federal powers to police disinformation and otherwise ensure free and fair elections.
A compliant, politicised Supreme Court would vastly empower a victorious Donald Trump and allied political operatives. On the other hand, the Democratic Party now has the opportunity to rewrite the playbook with a younger candidate.
Before politics, Harris – nearly two decades younger than Trump – had a long career as a prosecutor. Prosecutors are not Trump’s favourite people; nor are women if we’re to believe those who’ve stood up to him in court. So if Harris is his opponent we can expect the campaign ride to get even rougher. Buckle up, everybody.