The Case For Ignoring Trump’s Daily Rage-Bait
Yet this is also eerily familiar. The sheer onslaught of news during the last Trump administration seemed to make every week feel like a month; the 2024 election itself feels almost like a distant memory now. Amid broader uncertainties there’s a comfort in the problems of the day—like a grotesque personnel announcement—being so comparatively discrete. I sympathize. The climate crisis is an overwhelmingly depressing subject. Choosing topics within that crisis to try to understand, write, and publish about a few times a week (i.e., doing my job) feels better than trying to reckon with it as a Cronenberg-esque mass of looming destruction. I enjoy this work and like to think that it can be helpful insofar as it informs or motivates.
Responding to the news about climate change is not a strategy for reducing emissions, though. And responding to every new and terrible thing Trump says isn’t the way to defeat him, particularly given how little leverage Democrats will actually have over the next four years now that Republicans hold both houses of Congress. Reacting to announcements and actions designed to anger Trump’s political opponents shouldn’t distract from longer-term strategizing around how to build a political force that’s capable of beating the right-wing movement that brought him to power. There’s a particular risk that establishment Democrats who just lost the election may treat the frenzy over everything Trump does and says as an excuse to double down on their losing strategy: “Look how terrible he is! Vote for us next time or it’ll get worse.”
Those eager for a more durable defeat of the GOP—the kind that Democrats have been unable to deliver—should resist getting sucked into this. While Democratic leaders probably won’t engage in productive reflection, the climate movement needs to: Why did so many green groups demand so little after the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the summer of 2022? Was it a mistake to endorse Joe Biden in June 2023? How can climate policy offer real relief to cost-of-living concerns, not just construction and manufacturing jobs building low-carbon technologies?