Trump would sell your grandkid’s future for $1B | Will Bunch Newsletter

Is there a better month of the year than May? The weather outside is not quite but almost perfect, and so are the 2024 Philadelphia Phillies, posting the best record in all of Major League Baseball and playing with the swagger they usually save until Red October. Any similarity to the mirage-like season starts put up most recently by the once 10-1 Eagles, the healthy Joel Embiid Sixers, or the formerly unbeaten Union is merely a coincidence. As Donald Trump might scream: Stop the count!

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Sometimes the movies that stay with you for decades aren’t the good ones, but the ones with an unforgettable ad or an utterly inane premise. That last category includes maybe the worst movie of Robert Redford’s long and distinguished acting career, 1993′s Indecent Proposal, in which a beautiful and desperately cash-strapped young wife (Demi Moore) reluctantly agrees to a one-night affair with Redford’s immoral billionaire for a $1 million payout.

It was a dreadful film, but the sequel is always worse. Last week, immoral billionaire-on-paper Donald Trump made his own indecent proposal to the barons of Big Oil who dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee told the energy moguls that he’s willing to get in bed with them and satisfy their wildest fantasies of crushing regulations, undoing the war on climate change, and cutting their taxes even more.

But inflation has ravaged even the world of political prostitution. Trump’s asking price was a cool $1 billion.

In a week that was dominated by wall-to-wall TV coverage of the 45th president’s felony election-interference-and-hush-money trial in Manhattan, Trump’s pay-for-play pitch to Big Oil was the biggest story on Planet Earth — even if the media didn’t cover it that way. Some who did follow the environmental story focused on the corruption angle, since a presidential candidate’s explicit promise to perform official acts like slashing federal regulations if the executives would fund his campaign sure looked like, well, a bribery solicitation.

That’s not wrong, but this politician who has learned how to talk like a mafia don also probably knows that without a more specific quid pro quo a jury would never convict him, especially in a corrupt America where Justice Clarence Thomas remains a free man. But the real problem, as I see it, isn’t so much the insane $1 billion asking price as what a former and perhaps future U.S. president is willing to sell off: A future in which your grandchildren can still breathe.

The “deal” — Trump’s own language, according to a couple of people at the dinner organized by oil billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm, as reported by the Washington Post — would involve reversing dozens of environmental regulations handed down by President Joe Biden. Most of those are aimed at halting the advance of climate change before it wreaks further havoc on U.S. coastlines and triggers inland drought, wildfires, and extreme flooding.

Trump and those around him continue to deny the seriousness and often the very existence of global warming. It’s hard to understand how. April was the 11th month in a row in which each month set a temperature record, with ocean temperatures at sizzling levels that have shocked climatologists. The five minutes of the hour that cable news doesn’t devote to Trump’s legal problems has usually been spent on the latest weather disaster, from floods swallowing small towns in Brazil to the flooding now inundating Afghanistan.

The Paris climate accords — from which Trump sought to withdraw before Biden reinstated U.S. participation — set a goal of holding the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, which requires about a 45% reduction in carbon pollution from 2005 levels. Even before his proposed corrupt bargain with Big Oil, Trump has laced his campaign with diatribes against wind turbines and electric vehicles. If the GOP candidate wins in November and avoids eating his terminal Big Mac, Trump will be in the Oval Office until January 2029, guaranteeing America will miss its climate goal.

In fact, a policy analysis by the site Carbon Brief suggested that a Trump victory over Biden would add a whopping 4 billion tons of carbon to the earth’s atmosphere by 2030, which it estimates would create an additional $900 billion in damages from climate change. That would be quite the negative return on Big Oil’s proposed investment in Trump — not for them, but for the rest of us. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but elections have consequences.

The question is whether 2024 voters will be pragmatic enough to see this. A new Siena College poll for The Inquirer and the New York Times found that despite...well, everything, Trump is still leading Biden in five of the six key swing states, including Pennsylvania. Some voters are put off by Biden’s age, some blame him for the post-pandemic price hikes, and some are mad, if not appalled, by his handling of the war in the Middle East. On that last issue, I am one of them.

But in November there will be only two serious choices. We know that Trump’s Middle East policies are even worse than Biden’s, and when it comes to climate change there’s simply no comparison. Peace between Israel and Palestine may look nearly impossible right now, but a steep rise in global temperatures could be irreversible. Soliciting bribes from billionaires ought to be illegal, but throwing away our planet just to win an election — the most indecent proposal ever — is simply unconscionable.

Question: What would happen if between now and the convention Trump suffered a stroke or other significant health issue and was unable to run? — John Temporal Investigations (@johnnyjets1) via X/Twitter

Answer: A great question, John, and one I’ve thought about myself. What’s important to remember is that such a choice would be made at July’s Milwaukee convention by the delegates who are being elected in this spring’s primaries — who are maybe the 2,000 or so most pro-Trump fanatics in all of America. Thus, I think the seemingly obvious choice — runner-up Nikki Haley, who still gets as much as nearly 22% of the primary vote two months after dropping out — wouldn’t stand a chance. The real question would be whether Milwaukee would toast a semi-conventional far-right Republican — like Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio or Tom Cotton of Arkansas — or channel its inner insanity by picking Donald Trump Jr. or someone else from Trump’s inner, inner circle. Don’t bet against the crazy.

It turns out that newsletter readers are as underwhelmed by the vitally important yet somehow boring Trump trial as I am. But James Roan weighed in with this plausible prediction: “Sadly, I think that at least one juror will vote for acquittal so it will result in a hung jury. I think the right-wing ecosystem has been very successful in portraying the trial as politically motivated, if not election interference.” Joseph Witkowski called juries “a crapshoot,” adding: “I am a longtime horseplayer and I wouldn’t place a bet on this one even if you gave me a $2 stake.”

📮This week’s question: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s dog won’t hunt in her failed bid to become GOP vice presidential nominee. So who do you predict Trump does pick? The boring Doug Burgum? The annoying J.D. Vance? The obsequious Marco Rubio? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Trump VP” in the subject line.

Ever since the famous “small hands” incident in the 2016 primaries, we all know that Donald Trump is obsessed with size. But especially the size of his crowds. The provable lie that his thinly attended 2017 inaugural was in fact that largest crowd ever for the event was America’s first real signal that we were in for four years of extreme weirdness. In hindsight, Trump’s 2024 campaign may have chosen the beach in Wildwood — in the unwinnable-for-national-Republicans state of New Jersey — a) to draw a nice crowd on a sunny May Saturday and b) to be able to lie and say that a massive throng of more than 100,000 people had come to witness an unstoppable Trump.

“We have a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen, right?” Trump asked the masses who attended his Saturday rally, referring to the liberal New Jersey bard who routinely fills the 82,000-seat MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands. Soon, officials worked to make Trump’s boast a reality. A spokesperson for Wildwood’s GOP government told reporters that 80,000 to 100,000 people did show up for Trump, a figure that was repeated in multiple media accounts. There was just one problem — it was a thin slice of boardwalk baloney. The event had initially been permitted for just 20,000, and an aerial shot showed the set-aside area wasn’t quite full. On Monday, a skilled crowd estimator told The Inquirer “the most generous” figure he could attach to the crowd was 41,000.

That would be an awesome turnout for a political rally. Even 15,000 to 20,000 would be. As a legion of Trump fans made sure to tell me on X/Twitter, President Joe Biden couldn’t match it. But Trump World could not leave well enough alone. On Sunday, multiple Trump supporters — peaking with the legendary political fixer Roger Stone — posted photos they claimed showed the Jersey Shore throng but were in fact taken at a 1994 Rod Stewart concert in Rio de Janeiro, requiring viewers to believe in the spectacular seaside mountain peaks of North Wildwood. Arriving Monday for his trial in New York, Trump himself even upped the crowd size a tad. “I think we’re leading in New Jersey,” he told reporters (although he isn’t). “We had a rally of over 100,000 people this weekend.”

Team Trump’s crowd boasts are a classic example of what political scientists, in trying to explain 2024, are calling “high dominance” politics — caring little about actual issues to instead craft a narrative around strength and power, even if the story gets wildly exaggerated as has happened around the Wildwood rally. In other words, Trump’s vanity and narcissism actually makes for good politics, as America found out, for better or worse, in 2016. Boasting about 20,000 to 40,000 people at a campaign rally in a blue state is an OK story, but outdrawing New Jersey’s “The Boss” with over 100,000 is an invented tale of greatness. Even if you had to climb a mountain in Brazil to see it.

Looking back through old columns and blog posts to produce this item every week, it can be surprising how much America has changed in little more than a decade. On May 14, 2012, I was obsessing over a Newsweek cover which, in the heat of that year’s presidential election, described Barack Obama as “America’s first gay president.” The newsmagazine article did reflect something real — rapidly rising support for same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ rights was a phenomenon then, and hadn’t yet triggered the kind of backlash we’ve seen in the 2020s — but with a bizarre framing that must have delighted right-wing conspiracy theorists. Even worse, I wrote 12 years ago, the whole premise was false; I introduced Attytood readers to James Buchanan, Pennsylvania’s only POTUS and an LGBTQ icon of the 1850s. Read the evidence: “Pennsylvania’s First Gay President.”

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