TRUMP DOES IT RIGHT IN FRONT OF US

Donald Trump doesn’t have any money, and his campaign fundraising is being eaten up by legal bills and paying lawyers. Add the added wrinkle that Trump exhausted his donor base by constantly asking for money, so his small donor fundraising has shrunk, and you have the perfect storm for a serious threat to democracy.

Last month, Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club ad listened to one executive complain about how the industry continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration over the past year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. He then vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted on “day one,” according to people with knowledge of the meeting.

Trump said giving him $1 billion would be a “deal,”because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.

This remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how Trump is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. He has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, which includes rollbacks of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.

The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. While Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” with his administration finalizing over 100 new environmental regulations in the past three years aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters, Trump has continued to call climate change a “hoax;” while he was in office, his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies.

The Biden administration has raced in recent months to completely overturn Trump’s environmental actions and issue new ones before the November election. The administration has overturned 27 Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry and completed at least 24 new actions affecting the sector, such as the Interior Departmen recently blocking future oil drilling across 13 million acres of the Alaskan Arctic.

The oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies ring false. As of this month, the United States now producesg more oil than any country ever has, with 13 million barrels per day pumped on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year.

Trump went on to tell the representatives of the oil that they will see an even greater windfall from new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations, in a second Trump administration.

Trump specifically vowed at the dinner to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the recollection of an attendee.

Trump said he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and railed against wind power. He said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. “You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives, according to the recollection of the attendee.

Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s “mandate” on electric vehicles, once again mischaracterizing ambitious rules the Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized that require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes, but don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called the rules “ridiculous” in the meeting. The fossil fuel industry has aggressively lobbied against these tailpipe rules. The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry trade group, launched a seven-figure campaign against what it calls a de facto “gas car ban,” that includes ads in battleground states warning that the rule will restrict consumer choice.

If you want the right metaphor about who and what Donald Trump and the Republican Party are, think of him as Sauron and the party as the orcs and other creatures actively working to destroy Middle Earth in “The Return of the King.”

Hopefully, Joe Biden will be able to throw the One Ring into the Mount Doom volcano.

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