Meet Trump's Brain: The Climate-Denying Group Inciting Violent Revolution
Should the convicted felon be re-elected, he'll institute a plan drawn up by a far-right religious organisation funded by big oil. But what does The Heritage Foundation actually want?
This is Edition #14 of The Climate Laundry. Please become a paid subscriber if you find my work valuable and you have the means.
Like it or not, when it comes to climate, America matters. As the world’s biggest economy, the preeminent petrostate and the biggest historical polluter, US domestic and foreign policies have huge ramifications for just about every nation, and for the planet.
As things stand in July 2024, the country faces a choice between the 78-year-old convicted felon Donald Trump, and the 81-year-old increasingly frail Joe Biden. There are good arguments for why neither man should be considered fit to run for office, but those arguments look set to be ignored.
Whoever wins, we have a pretty good idea of where they stand on climate policy. Biden has been lauded as the most climate-positive president in US history, even if that’s an awfully low bar. While the Inflation Reduction Act can be celebrated as a bold carrot-not-stick approach to boosting green investment, it should be remembered that the Biden presidency has also approved more oil and gas licenses than Trump did.
Nevertheless, a second Biden term would be infinitely preferable to a Trump sequel, which would explicitly—perhaps exclusively—represent the fossil fuel industries. The man who claimed wind turbines cause cancer and that climate change is a Chinese hoax has directly asked the oil and gas industry to bankroll his campaign to the tune of $1 billion, in exchange for preferential policies.
Yet, as with his first stint in office, Trump himself would not be the main problem with a Trump presidency. As the great Trump portraitist David Roth has observed, the man “doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself.” The characteristic that Roth calls Trump’s nullity is a vacuum into which the Orange One is more than happy to allow more interested, more committed actors. And among those actors, none is more interested or committed than The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank dedicated to “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense”.
The Heritage Foundation slithered its way into headlines this week when the organisation’s cartoonishly loathsome president, Kevin Roberts, declared that the US was now undergoing a “second American Revolution”, and indicated that any resistance to said revolution would be met with violence. Observers should note that Roberts’ language maps seamlessly onto the topography of Ur-Fascism, as laid out by Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay.
Roberts was reacting to a US Supreme Court’s ruling, announced July 1, to extend presidential immunity to any “official acts” committed by a president in office, in a stark attempt to prevent enthusiastic crime-doer Trump from being held responsible for further illegality. Legal scholars in general, and dissenting Supreme Court judges in particular, wrote that the ruling in effect made the president a de facto king, which would have disastrous consequences for democracy.
That’s music to the ears of men like Roberts, who is very proudly pro-authoritarian in the tradition of the Foundation’s late founder, Paul Weyrich, who famously stated: “I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Another Heritage-supported SCOTUS decision last week overturned the so-called Chevron deference, a foundational principle of administrative law which held that the federal agencies could and should interpret the law where required. Last week’s ruling was the culmination of a long-held wish of conservative groups to cripple the federal agencies: among other dire outcomes, the loss of the Chevron deference means that powerful individuals and corporations will now find it much easier to tie environmental cases up in interminable court proceedings.
All of this aligns with The Heritage Foundation’s decades-long strategy to make America a less tolerant, less equal, more violent super-polluter. The latest, most coherent incarnation of that plan, titled Project 2025, constitutes an atavistic smorgasbord of reactionary fantasies, which includes taking partisan control of the US Department of Justice and the FBI, and eliminating the Department of Education. Along with policies that will result in the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, it will ban diversity, equity and inclusion practices at the federal level, and cut funding for abortion services. Much like other conservative movements, Project 2025 claims to be about “small government”, but will massively expand funding for the arms of the state that reactionaries like, such as law enforcement. The “pro-life” plan will fast-track death sentences and, perhaps most bizarrely, use the power of the state to ban pornography.
When it comes to climate and environmental policy, the excellent Dharna Noor last year enumerated what Project 2025 has in store. Needless to say, as recipients of massive fossil fuel industry donations, the project’s authors are committed to eliminating climate action at the federal level, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, and cutting funding for the deployment of and even research into renewable energy. The plan would be to completely remove net zero targets, and massively expand oil, gas and coal extraction. In his first term Trump appointed 234 federal judges who represented conservative and fossil fuel interests. A second Trump term would see even more extreme, “brazenly anti-climate” appointments.
As a policy platform, Project 2025 is a weird chimera; a chauvinistic pie with a gloopy filling of backward, ultra-orthodox neoliberalism, seasoned with racism and homophobia, all baked in a crust of religious nonsense. But while the Foundation has named the plan’s objective as that of “institutionalising Trumpism”, that’s just a marketing gimmick (or as one colleague puts it, “new glitter on an old turd”). Project 2025’s tenets are broadly consistent with those of The Heritage Foundation’s founders: an arch-neoliberal called Edwin Feulner, and the aforementioned conservative operative Paul Weyrich, who was a leading proponent of the post-war effort to transform white evangelical communities into a politically active, Republican-voting bloc.
Feulner and Weyrich founded Heritage in 1973, with Weyrich hitching his vehemently homophobic and anti-abortion religious stances to Feulner’s calculating, greed-is-good neoliberal ethos. The Christian America of the 1970s just happened to be primed for such a project: when Heritage appeared on the scene, various iterations of the prosperity gospel were already being preached across the US. This is a quintessentially American credo that holds that personal enrichment is inherently virtuous, while poverty is the fault of the individual, in essence a sectarian manifestation of neoliberalism. While Feulner’s economic ideology meshed perfectly with the revisionist notion of Christ as some sort of business douche, Weyrich’s zealous social conservatism helped galvanise the power and political clout of specific Christian in-groups.
Thus, the through-line of The Heritage Foundation passes directly from its roots to its modern-day incarnation. In Project 2025, the organisation has created a formal political platform that combines and weaponises a set of mutually-reinforcing, self-serving ideologies. To read its manifesto, and to listen to the words of its president, is to understand that Heritage flatly rejects John Maynard Keynes’ portrayal of capitalism as “the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone”. Heritage and its contemporaries have not the faintest interest in the good of everyone—only in a select, mostly white, few. Trump is merely the otherwise hollow vessel that will carry the Foundation’s atavistic payload up the Potomac, with the explicit goal of detonating any remaining vestiges of equality, fairness or collective action to which the States cling.
Should The Heritage Foundation achieve power in November, the rest of us can take cold comfort in the fact that their project of authoritarian individualism is doomed to fail. From their aggressive rejection of compromise, to their backward economic prescriptions, to their refusal to understand that diversity is the source of America’s strength, they will only serve to accelerate the country’s precipitous decline. But in the process of failing, they will ruin yet more lives, more ecosystems, and more futures. Those harmed the most will be those who already possess the least.
A lot can happen in the four months between now and a US election that will, once again, have an outsized impact on the world. In Project 2025, the forces of reaction have developed a well-funded, coordinated, cohesive plan for an increasingly brutal and unliveable future. Those opposing that plan must understand that that the true opposition isn’t the opposition, but apathy. The Democrats, therefore, need an equally aggressive, cohesive call to action: one that makes the positive case for a just, sustainable and multiracial democracy; one that embraces not the bigoted past but a kinder future. Anyone with even a passing interest in justice or maintaining an inhabitable planet ought to be fighting for such a plan. The clock is ticking.
For more on Project 2025, you might want to check out this episode of Chris Hayes’s podcast Why Is This Happening?, as well as Thomas Zimmer’s authoritative breakdown of the plan.
Britain had a general election this week, and my Forbes colleague Carlton Reid has written a valuable summary of how a whole cluster of anti-net zero Tory MPs—18 of them in all—got booted out of their seats. The Green Party, boasting a progressive, climate-centric manifesto, won a historic four seats, mirroring dissatisfaction, particularly among young voters, with the main parties’ lack of climate leadership. (Forbes)