- Trump’s EPA now denies the worldwide scientific consensus about climate change;
- The history of Trump’s fake history;
- How Trump wins by suing institutions for absurd amounts and settling for relatively trivial amounts;
- How Europe took Trump for a ride;
- Robert Reich on what Trump thinks he’s doing;
- And stories about the white-supremacist settlement in Arkansas.
I mentioned this yesterday (posted this morning) but this is a big deal and deserves more notice. Let’s see, we’ve cancelled the insurance policies, taken out the smoke detectors, and now we’re tearing off our slate roof in favor of one with wood shingles. Because we don’t any woke regulators telling us what kind of roofs we should have on our houses. Never mind the wildfires due to climate change, which we refuse to believe in.
NY Times, 29 Jul 2025: In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding, subtitled “The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.”
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.
You can’t just *revoke* a scientific determination. Yet again, conservatives don’t understand that, and think they can dictate reality.
Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.
The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts. It marks a notable shift in the administration’s position from one that had downplayed the threat of global warming to one that essentially flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.
It goes on to describe rationale familiar from history (see books by Prothero and Newitz), especially the cherry-picking of renegade “scientists” to support a pre-determined conclusion, never mind the consensus of the vast majority of actual scientists around the world.
To justify the proposal, the E.P.A. cited a report that the Energy Department commissioned from five scientists known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, namely that it is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Note the Energy Department *commissioned the report* with a specific conclusion in mind.
Many environmental activists and lawyers criticized those arguments, noting that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. If the U.S. motor vehicle sector were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the E.P.A.’s own data.
“If vehicle emissions don’t pass muster as a contribution to climate change, it’s hard to imagine what would,” said Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.
You’d think with an existential danger like climate change, reasonable people would want to place caution over profit. Not Republicans; they’d rather remove any kind of regulations that make it more difficult for wealthy corporations to make even more money. Short-term profits, never mind long-term threats.
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The denial of reality in favor of ideology has a long history among conservatives.
CNN, analysis by Daniel Dale, 30 Jul 2025: Analysis: Donald Trump’s long history of fake history
Opening with this recent example:
President Donald Trump told a story on Monday about how he “made a correct prediction” about the outcome of the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum while he was visiting his golf course in Scotland “the day before the vote.”
“You remember?” he asked reporters.
They couldn’t have remembered. It didn’t happen.
Trump actually visited Scotland the day after the Brexit referendum, not the day before it. And while he did say about three months prior that he thought the UK would end up leaving the European Union, he made no public predictions in an interview the day before the vote – saying he personally favored Brexit but also that “I don’t think anybody should listen to me because I haven’t really focused on it very much.”
It’s an open secret that Trump is not very bright and so perhaps he simply misremembers things, confabulates them, to put himself at best advantage.
Trump’s imaginary story about these events nine years ago might be considered trivial compared to his lies about pressing topics like inflation and the war in Ukraine. But it’s part of a pattern – a long line of similarly fabricated tales from the president about his own history and world history.
And the pattern has a purpose. Trump’s stories serve to exaggerate his foresight about and knowledge of domestic and foreign affairs, embellish his biography and record in office, and diminish his political opponents.
The stories tend to be colorful even though they’re fake. Trump’s historical fiction is sprinkled with vivid details and make-believe quotes, all the better to make it seem authentic and get it to stick in the minds of voters.
The article goes on with many examples, including eight just in the past two months.
My own guess is that Trump has built up this reputation as a wheeler-dealer who always wins who has learned to bluster his way through life and, like most con men, his targets don’t notice his many business failures or are embarrassed to admit their defeats.
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One of his favorite tactics for “winning” is to sue institutions for absurd amounts (e.g. $10 billion), which are then “settled” with much smaller amounts (e.g. $200 million), which he claims as victories, and which add up.
Axios, Zachary Basu, today: Trump’s billion-dollar settlement spree
President Trump has extracted more than $1.2 billion in settlements from 13 of the most powerful players in academia, law, media and tech, according to an Axios analysis.
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More on the open secret.
Paul Krugman, 30 Jul 2025: Fossil Fool, subtitled “How Europe took Trump for a ride”
Like many U.S. institutions, the European Union has abysmally failed the Trump test. The EU is an economic superpower and could have retaliated effectively against Trump’s illegal tariffs — illegal under both U.S. and international law. Instead, Europe did nothing and even made some apparent concessions.
But notice my wording: apparent concessions. The optics of the Trump-EU deal were humiliating, and optics matter. If you examine the substance, however, it starts to look as if Europe played Trump for a fool. Specifically, a fossil fool.
The EU made two sort-of pledges to Trump. First, that it would invest $600 billion in the United States. Second, that it would buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy, mainly oil and gas, over the next three years. The first promise was empty, while the second was nonsense.
About those investments: European governments aren’t like China, which can tell companies where to put their money. And the European Commission, which made the trade deal, isn’t even a government — it can negotiate tariffs but otherwise has little power. On Sunday Politico spoke with Commission officials, who effectively confirmed that the investment pledge was meaningless: …
So what the EU actually promised on investment was nothing, Nichts, rien.
With more details. And concluding:
Bottom line: Whatever Trump may think, Europe is not going to provide a big boost to U.S. fossil fuel production. He won’t like that, if anyone tells him. But the rest of us should be glad. As I’ve written before, renewables are clearly the energy technology of the future. Trump and his allies are Luddites, trying to stand in the way of progress and keep us burning fossil fuels. Their “burn, baby, burn” obsession is very bad for America and the world. But at least we can be reasonably sure that Europe won’t help, um, fuel that obsession.
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Well, Trump is very skilled at some things, like changing the conversation.
Robert Reich, 30 Jul 2025: Office Hours: Is Trump out of his f*cking mind accusing Obama of treason?, subtitled “Or does he know full well he’s lying to divert attention from Epsteingate?”
Last Tuesday, Trump claimed President Barack Obama committed treason, a crime punishable by death.
Trump’s stooge was Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who (presumably prodded by Trump) asked the Justice Department to investigate whether officials in the Obama administration faked evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.
When Trump was then asked at an Oval Office press availability whom the Justice Department should target in that investigation, he said:
“It would be President Obama. He started it. … This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.”
Trump’s history of baseless charges has earned him a perverse kind of immunity. The more outrageous his claims, the faster they tend to be dismissed.
But words have consequences. Trump is president of the United States. Accusing his predecessor of treason goes well beyond anything he has said before. It is itself treason.
Reich goes on to consider the three possibilities: Trump truly believes Obama committed treason and is delusional; He knows what he’s saying is crap, but puts this out as a deflection from the Epstein crisis; Obama really did commit treason, by colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. And asks readers to vote… And I’m voting for… #2.
Which, I can now see, is by far the most popular option. 85%.
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Then there’s this. I’ll pick this link.
The Times of Israel, 26 Jul 2025: ‘Return to the Land’: White supremacists building whites-only settlement in Arkansas
A group of white supremacists is founding a settlement in Arkansas that will only allow in white Christians.
The 160-acre community in the Ozark hills near Ravenden, Arkansas, named “Return to the Land” (RTTL), was founded in 2023 by Eric Orwoll and Peter Csereby, according to a Sky News report that aired this week.
It is explicitly declared a whites‑only settlement, excluding Jewish people, followers of non‑European religions, and LGBTQ individuals, vetting members based on European ancestry via interviews and membership screening processes, Sky News reported.
Also covered by Boing Boing here.
This story is likely very fringe; the major papers haven’t covered it. And there are lots of fringe racist and survivalist groups out there, from Arkansas to Idaho, that we never hear about. But they are expressions of base human nature, which will never go away. How does a modern democratic society deal with them?
