Why Donald Trump's 'greatest con job ever perpetrated' risks destroying us all
The Trump administration’s efforts to bully European countries into slowing down the transition to renewable energy is not going to work ‘because the rest of the world is just on to the fact that it’s nuts’
It is the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. And I should know because I am right about everything. Oh, and I’m also really good at predicting things. Please don’t think I’m saying that in a ‘braggadocious’ way, it's just true.
However, I can tell you want me to interrupt my paean of self-praise (so rude) to reveal the nature of the greatest con job in the world, ever. Well, it’s obviously not climate change, as Donald Trump, that idiot pretender to my crown of omniscience (whose words I may have repurposed to my own ends above), would have you believe.
Global warming is clearly happening. Just ask an insurance company or a farmer or virtually anyone whose life is connected in some way to the natural world. Or even a scientist, assuming this word has not yet become firmly established as a synonym for ‘con artist’.
Foreigner-blaming, science-denying populists
Instead, one actual giant hoax that people all across the Western world are lapping up like there’s no tomorrow is about immigration. Feeling annoyed about your life? Blame a foreigner!
Want to make things better? Simply deport 600,000 people from the UK and, bingo, we’ll all be in clover. Who qualifies as a ‘foreigner’? Well, not you obviously. It would definitely be someone else, so that’s all right then.
But I can tell you, with no hint of Trumpian braggadocio, that the current malaise affecting the world’s democracies, dating back to the 2008 financial crash, has not actually been caused by immigration. And deporting vast numbers of people – deliberately decreasing our population and, therefore, our workforce – would make things worse, not better.
Those who see demons
The question then is where do the foreigner-blaming, science-denying populists, if they ever win power, go next? After their big idea proves to be the flop it will inevitably be, who becomes the new scapegoat for all our troubles, to be vilified with the sense of certainty possessed only by fools, zealots and Scotsman columnists trying to make a point?
Of course, the hard-left wants you to blame a different scapegoat: the super-rich. Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite slogan “for the many, not the few” was designed with those terrible oppressors of the huddled masses in mind.
However, returning the economy to the pre-crash times of growth will require something that sounds rather lame: co-operation. Instead of demonising migrants and the super-rich, we instead need to work with them to find solutions to problems – like climate change, for example.
There are plenty of environmentalists who love to demonise fossil fuel corporations. And, it has to be said, the well-documented attempts by some of these firms to undermine scientific research – which, in some cases, their own scientists agreed with – deserve condemnation in the strongest terms.
However, the simple fact remains that fixing climate change requires major energy companies, with billions to invest, to be part of the solution. We need wealthy people, big corporations and all the might that market forces – a manifestation of people power – can bring to bear.
A race for investment and jobs
There are signs that this is happening, for all Trump’s buffoonish bombast. In the US, more than half of the largest firms have plans to hit net zero, Forbes magazine recently reported. Thomas Hale, professor of global public policy at Oxford University, explained their reasons were as much to do with the companies’ bottom lines as any ideological commitment to ‘saving the planet’.
“US companies know they need to keep pace with the EU, China, and other regions where climate policy is increasingly shaping competitiveness. Net zero is less a political battleground and more a race to secure future markets, investment, and jobs,” he said.
According to the Sustainability Trends Report 2025, produced by Generation Investment Management, while “the sums flowing to global climate finance remain inadequate to meet the world’s temperature goals... they nonetheless show a steady trend in the right direction”, rising from $812 billion (more than £600bn) in 2018 to $1.9 trillion in 2023.
Generation’s chair, the former US Vice-President Al Gore, told the Financial Times: “The market forces that have been unleashed, especially in the last ten years since the Paris Agreement, are the most powerful agents of change.” Any Conservatives still interested in the economy, please take note.
Trump’s bullying tactics
Gore warned the Trump administration was putting pressure on European countries to “slow down the pace of the energy transition in every way that they can”. But he added that the effectiveness of such “bullying” tactics was going to be “a diminishing asset for [Trump] because the rest of the world is just on to the fact that it’s nuts”.
It is no coincidence that politicians who don’t like migrants also tend to think climate change is a hoax or something to be downplayed, vaccines are a threat rather than a medical miracle, and international cooperation is a bad thing. That’s because they live in a world of their imaginations, not the real one, which is best described by scientists and perhaps best understood by serious business people.
Climate change is not a “con job”, it is a reality, as revealed by the rising mercury in thermometers, the shrinking glaciers in alpine valleys and increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather. It is one that we must confront.
The best way to do that is by marshalling all of humanity. Instead of trying to turn other people, whoever they are, into demons, we need to summon our inner angels and do what is right.
It is Trump who is attempting to pull off the “greatest con job ever perpetrated”, on climate change, immigration, vaccines and more. If we fall for it, multiple disasters await.
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