‘Drill baby, drill’? Why Donald Trump’s presidency means ‘burn baby, burn’
In politics, a little optimism is good thing, and in sadly short supply in our 21st-century world. Yet for all that, Donald Trump’s inaugural address in the rotunda of the US Capitol on Monday – full of triumphal language about a new golden age for America – had a dream-like, hallucinatory quality that sets it far apart from most of the political language of the last half century.
At one level, of course, Trump’s willingness to claim that he is the man who can send “sunlight streaming across the whole world” by reasserting America’s rightful place as “history's greatest civilisation” is exactly what his supporters like about him. When he claims to be the leader who will not only rebuild a booming economy based on the “liquid gold” of America’s fossil fuel resources, but also “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars”, they believe him because his upbeat vision promises both a gleaming future, and a comforting return to easier times; and that has proved a winning combination, for tens of millions of Americans.
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Hide AdYet the problem with Trump’s vision is that in crucial ways, it bears more resemblance to a virtual-reality landscape created for some upbeat computer simulation – a kind of online “Trumpworld” – than to the real world in which voters still have to seek the physical essentials of life.


Picket-fence idyll
Trump portrays himself as a practical man, of course; but in fact, large parts of his policy programme are based on a series of hallucinations, not least the one which suggests that most new migrants now arriving in America are criminals and psychopaths recently decanted from prisons and mental institutions across the world, and therefore a threat that must be removed, for the sake of all decent folk.
In the Trumpworld game, in other words, these migrants are the “enemy” figures who appear on screen, only to be zapped and liquidated by the brave defenders of the picket-fence American idyll; whereas in truth, new migrants to America are mostly ordinary workers, without whom large and vital sectors of the US economy would collapse.
If Trump’s fantasies about immigration are dangerous, though, and could cost the American economy dearly, the truly frightening disconnect at the heart of his vision is his near-hysterical denial of the reality of climate change caused by human activity – even as its impact becomes ever more obvious across the United States itself.
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Hide AdFloods and wildfires
One of the strengths of Trump’s political position, of course, is that his impulse to ignore the whole issue and to dismiss climate science as a “hoax” is widely shared; and he therefore panders to the longing to make it all go away by chanting “drill, baby, drill”, in defiance of all talk of a green energy transition.
Yet out in the real world, some of the very Americans Trump has pledged to save and lift up are having their lives shattered by ever-more frequent extreme weather events, from colossal floods in the North Carolina hill country to snow in Florida and the dramatic California wildfires.
And one of the ugliest aspects of Trump’s recent pitch to the American people has been his willingness to tolerate or even promote elaborate denialist narratives about the reasons for these disasters – including the current fierce effort across the political right to suggest that the destruction caused by the California wildfires is nothing to do with climate change, and is entirely the fault of incompetence and corruption in the state’s administration and public services.
Now of course, these narratives are an easy sell, not least because they come at a time when ordinary workers have indeed too often been failed by politicians - although not in the ways that Trump and his corporate pals like to suggest. The popularity of these narratives, though, does not make them true; and just as Bishop Budde of Washington was right to tell Donald Trump to his face that most immigrants to the United States are not criminals, so meteorologists are right to point out that the predisposing cause of the current wildfires in Southern California is that the region is tinder-box dry after more than eight months of drought since May last year.
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Hide AdHigh-stakes political drama
In refusing to acknowledge or tackle climate change, in other words, Trump’s message to Southern California and other increasingly arid regions is not so much “drill, baby drill” as “burn, baby, burn”; and of course, his responses to immigration and climate change are only two of the many false narratives embraced by Trump, in his weird effort to conjure up an America powering into a magnificent future, while also somehow returning to an irretrievable past.
So now, a desperately high-stakes political drama begins, as we find out whether any part of the post-Second-World-War world we have known – its institutions, its claims to democracy, social justice, and the rule of law – can find the courage and strength to survive the firestorm of Trump’s reactionary scorn, his disregard for facts and evidence, and his evident belief that only he and his kind, as god-given leaders, can deliver any hope of peace and order in the 21st century.
And in the meantime, perhaps the best we can hope for, in this inaugural week, is that the strange and often delusional vision that Trump outlined in his address will at least end the age of merely managerial government, and compel his political opponents to describe with a little more eloquence the sustainable future towards which their policies should now be tending.
For they should be presenting it not as some slightly tweaked, more frugal version of what we have now, but as a far better and more joyful place; rooted in a new and more respectful relationship with the miraculous reality of life on Earth, and in a rediscovered sense of a long-term future towards which we can work and hope with confidence, and without illusions.
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