President Trump has declared that his second term will begin with the “most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” To track, interrogate and challenge his most consequential actions during his first few months in office, Times Opinion’s deputy editor, Patrick Healy, is beginning a weekly series on “The Opinions” focused on Trump’s first 100 days. He kicks things off with the Times writer David Wallace-Wells, exploring the president’s executive orders on climate and energy as Mr. Trump prepares to tour the destruction wrought by the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, the deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. It has become immediately clear that Donald Trump wants to start changing America and the world in the first 100 days of his presidency.
He’s trying to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 by freeing the insurrectionists and excusing them and himself. He’s trying to redefine identity and culture with his declarations on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion and his control over Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and all the other tech and media leaders.
He’s trying to remake executive powers by invoking national sovereignty and national security to crack down on immigration. To use the military and the Justice Department however he wants. To appoint himself judge and jury by pardoning at will.
It’s shaping up to be a first 100 days like America has never seen before. And that’s a prime invitation for Times Opinion to interrogate and challenge the Trump agenda and help listeners stay focused on what really matters, not on the sideshows and the smoke screens that Trump loves to distract people with.
So think of this as the start of an audio series on “The Opinions” looking at the first 100 days and what Trump is really up to.
And as part of this, I’m going to start my own countdown clock on what Trump isn’t doing on the cost of living, inflation and the economy — the issues that were so integral to his election. And I’m going to call BS on some of his actions and executive orders that suggest change but really sound like study committees.
We also want to dig into critically important actions and ideas from Trump that aren’t getting enough attention. That’s where I want to start today.
There hasn’t been much said on one of the major problems facing America and the world, and that’s Trump’s orders on climate change and the environment. So I want to start our series with my Opinion colleague David Wallace-Wells about Trump’s moves on climate and energy.
Thanks for joining me, David.
David Wallace-Wells: Really good to be here.
Healy: So David, I want to begin with Trump’s actions on Monday and talk about spectacle versus substance when it comes to his agenda. He signed a bunch of executive orders on climate — pulling out of the Paris Agreement, opening federal land up for drilling, declaring an energy emergency. Which of these are substantive matters, and which are spectacle?
Wallace-Wells: Overall, I think we’re looking at a lot of showmanship, and we don’t yet know which of those gestures are going to end up in policy.
Like a lot of these executive orders, we’re really seeing memos that are pointing toward studies or committees or policy actions, which haven’t been implemented. And in a lot of cases, even what he’s hoping to do is a little ambiguous. He wants to end subsidies for green energy, but does that include tax incentives, or is it just the direct subsidies? We actually don’t know the answer to that, and it will be resolved going forward not just by his administration but also through challenges in the courts. So a lot of it is quite ambiguous.
But when it comes to climate, cultural signaling is pretty important. One of the reasons that we are now knee deep, if not neck deep, in decarbonization in the U.S. and indeed, all around the world, is because for the last five or 10 years coming out of that Paris Agreement, there was an understanding that we were moving in this particular direction. Toward greener energy, toward cleaner fuels.
And when you have a leader like Trump standing up and saying: I’m going to flip the bird to all of those initiatives. Even if there’s not that much coming concretely behind it, it matters in terms of cultural momentum. It’s going to shape the way that people think about whether they’re going to buy an electric vehicle or not.
What we’re about to see is a test of how much of the green momentum from the last half-decade or decade is because of direct investment by green energy companies and how much of it is the result of policies like Biden’s I.R.A. and how much of it is about this cultural momentum, which Trump is trying his hardest to stop.
Healy: It is part of that rewriting , the flipping the bird. It’s the point of this: the degree to which he is trying to both destabilize what has been — consensus in the scientific community, consensus among a lot of Americans who care about fact-based, science-based evidence — and really kind of thwart it.
I think it appeals to so many of his voters. Not just the flipping-of-the-bird action — you know, these smarty-pants people who want to tell you how to live your life — but also, I think, what he sees as a power structure that he feels like has long opposed him, one that has brought facts to bear on issues and conversations that he wants to take control of.
On the electric vehicle point — this has been so central to both climate policy in America and early attempts to rethink and remake different industries in America. Based on what he’s done so far, how destabilizing is his eclectic vehicle change in thinking, and who is he trying to appeal to or drive toward?
Wallace-Wells: For me, the key question is whether the E.V. — electric vehicle — tax incentive survives or not. It’s a $7,500 tax incentive, which is significant, especially when you’re looking at the lower end of the market for American-made cars — and whether his call to ban subsidies includes that or not is the most material question here.
I do think in the bigger picture, we have one really successful American E.V. company, Tesla. We have a lot of legacy automakers who are inching toward a more E.V. focus but have not taken the big steps that are really necessary to get us there on the timelines that, say, the Biden administration wanted.
And we’ve seen from a lot of those carmakers over the last couple of years, some of them have directly walked back their promises to ramp up E.V. production. Others have been really tentative about making new plans, partly because of uncertainty about the political environment and partly because of uncertainty about tariffs and the competition from China.
And over the last five years, since the pandemic started, China has, in addition to rolling out a huge boom in solar tech, revolutionized the global E.V. landscape. It is now the dominant force for electric vehicles in the world, and they’re really good cars that are much cheaper than the American equivalents.
My view is that we’re likely to see a continuation of the patterns that we’ve seen over the last five years, which is to say, E.V. uptake growing slowly rather than shrinking but not growing dramatically. Probably an extension of the kind of cultural patterns we’ve seen in the past, where it’s primarily liberal-minded, relatively well-off people who are buying these cars. And some change in the industrial landscape, where some of these manufacturers are doing a little bit more on E.V.s but nothing like the step change that our global and domestic climate goals require.
I think that’s a pretty good synecdoche for the Trump program in general. I don’t think we’re going to be rolling back to the American energy policy of 2017 and certainly not of 2009. I think we’re going to be continuing to roll out wind and solar, especially in red and purple places. It’s just going to slow our progress going forward.
Healy: Trump is such a showman, and part of his showmanship is a real understanding about timing. I’m curious why you think he came so fast out of the gate on Day 1 and Day 2 looking at energy and climate issues. Is it partly that kind of flipping-the-bird energy that he wanted to infuse on Day 1, or is there something going on that I think gets at some of the points you just made about China, about setting kind of expectation around what our energy and climate policy should be? So as he’s approaching these other countries, whether it’s China, whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s about domestic oil and energy producers, whether he’s trying to set himself up into a dominant pole position to start negotiating terms.
So talk a little bit about the timing of this and Trump as kind of a showman, how he’s trying to set the table.
Wallace-Wells: Well, one of the things that’s most interesting to me is that we actually heard pretty little on the campaign trail about climate.
Healy: Very little from both.
Wallace-Wells: When the page turns to Trump being in office and he’s performing now as president, climate is maybe not the first item on his agenda, but it’s right up there.
And I think that tells you that among his supporters, this remains a really charged set of culture war dynamics. There are a lot of threads that run through this. One of them is that inflation was in some significant way felt and powered by energy costs. And so Trump can say plausibly that the cost of energy in the U.S. contributed meaningfully to the cost of living crisis among his voters. I think it taps into this masculine impulse that he has in reimagining what the meaning of America and the future of America is.
Healy: Can I throw another theory at you about this? It’s the notion that Trump has that climate activists, environmental activists, single-issue climate voters are on the ropes. I think he really sees that group of people as not remotely decisive in a political electoral coalition and that it is so easy to caricature and demonize them and this notion of what they want to do to America, what they want to do offshore with wind farms.
And I don’t get the sense, at least on the left or in the Democratic Party, that there is a really persuasive pushback that wins the day.
Wallace-Wells: I totally agree. I think one of the things that happened with the passage of the I.R.A. in the U.S. is that it split the climate coalition that brought it into being. You have energy centrists who want a green energy future but see a place for natural gas and some slow phaseout of oil who are basically like, “OK, we did our thing, and now we’re going to let it cook.” And then you have climate activists who want a lot more. And especially once that coalition splits, it’s a lot harder to point fingers and laugh at the extreme — the soy boys and the degrowth fangirls, which is the sort of language that Trump’s people would use.
And the policy position that he’s advancing here is twofold: We are currently in an energy crisis and we need to pursue a policy of energy dominance. And that gets back to the masculine energy I was talking about earlier and this idea of dominance.
The truth is there is no energy crisis. We are already in an energy dominant position. The U.S. is producing more oil and gas than it ever has before in its history. In fact, it’s producing more than any other country in the world. We have seen major progress on investment in green energy, but it was an all-carrots-no-sticks program and approach. And so the Trumpist and right-wing attacks on this energy question are really disingenuous and poorly informed.
Healy: They’re disingenuous, David. It’s big lie after big lie after big lie, but it works. Trump is able to see the culture in America and has the ability to control and manipulate both human behavior and public opinion. It’s a sense of: I want to marginalize this group, this group, this group, these activists, this sector, and I know how to do it in a concerted way.
I just find myself wondering: Are there policy solutions or leaders or maybe simply a ticking clock of crisis that might force his hand? He’s going to Los Angeles on Friday to see the wildfires, and I wonder if natural disasters may be the thing that finally catches up to him and forces his hand on some of this.
Wallace-Wells: I think what you’re seeing is his eagerness to use some of these issues for political purposes. And you can see that illustrated in the contrast between these two disasters — Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires. There was some online right-wing paranoia in the response to Hurricane Helene, but basically we moved on. He didn’t weaponize it at the national scale.
The fires have a different scale, and they’ve provided him a different kind of a weapon in attacking California governance. And it’s actually a quite popular attack — to the point that you’re making — many Californians, including pretty liberal-minded Californians, even if they don’t think it’s narrowly the fault of Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass that these fires destroyed Palisades and Altadena, but these people are at least taking the opportunity to consider if these are really the people we want in charge of our lives and livelihoods in the face of these disasters.
And we’ll see how that all shakes out. But I think that the opportunity here, to try to put a positive spin on it, is you see a lot of conservatives in California and nationally looking at the fires and saying emphatically: Much more should have been done by government to protect the people of California from this risk.
Now, that’s not exactly the same as acknowledging the climate contributions to the problem. But it represents an acknowledgment that there is a real problem here that needs to be addressed and, more important, more strikingly, that it should be addressed by public action and public leaders.
And that is just not something that we’ve really seen from Republicans or Donald Trump in the past when it comes to natural disasters of this kind. I think it may represent a turning point. But it is possible right now to see the right-wing rage about the human contributions to the wildfire destruction in California as a sort of inflection point, past which we no longer continue to believe that we’re invulnerable and instead insist that more be done on the adaptation and resilience side by proactive government investment to protect one another in the face of new risks.
Healy: I don’t know about proactiveness with Trump. I think his argument is: Destabilize, destabilize, destabilize. I think you’re exactly right with the question of “How does this shake out?” But I think for him, it shakes out only in the sense of “How can I undercut as many people as possible? Tragedy be damned. How do I go after my political opponents to get them to bend the knee as much as possible and to take control of a narrative?” Trump’s favorite line is, “I alone can fix this.” And I think we’re going to see that in L.A.
Wallace-Wells: I would say his real favorite line is, “I am your voice.”
Healy: He loves “I am your voice.” He loves “I am your retribution.” He’s got a top 100.
I just wonder when he goes to L.A. what we’re going to see, in terms of any kind of proactive ideas, to your point, or whether it’s simply going to be a messaging trip — “I am the strong leader. I alone can fix this.”
Wallace-Wells: Yeah. What I would bet on is that it’s a messaging trip. Quite negative, quite full of personal attacks.
But if what he does is say we should have been doing more in terms of building codes, we should have been doing more in terms of funding the Fire Department, building firebreaks, doing some fuel thinning in the Santa Monica Mountains, even if he’s invoking those programs in order to attack the relevant Democratic leaders and even if he himself does very little to nothing to make those changes happen, the fact that he’s allowing and even inviting conservatives to support that kind of action may make a positive break in terms of the national mood when it comes to climate adaptation.
Healy: That’s what I’m going to be watching for on Friday. I’d be somewhat impressed if he’s really pushing both parties, especially the libertarians in California in his own party, to say: Look, government has a role in crises. We may not want E.V. stations and wind farms all around the country, but I’m going to spend or I’m going to take action to do that.
What also fascinates me in a big-picture way about Trump is that I think he’s very focused on resources. I think the Greenland play is sort of an obsession of his, and one thing we may hear more and more is the sense that America doesn’t have a climate crisis; it has a resource crisis. And where can I go in America or around the world to grab, grab, grab?
I think the rewriting of the narrative about what America is and what America needs is one of his major projects. He’s trying to get people to, if not believe what he’s saying, at least wonder if he has a point.
What is your sense of a bigger theory of the case, in terms of Trump and his relationship to power or Trump and how he executes power?
Wallace-Wells: I think you did a pretty good summary. I think he is essentially a mercenary, acquisitive person who understands in a mercantilist way that the job of a president is to accumulate wealth and power on behalf of his people at any cost and using any strategy to achieve that.
One of the things that’s interesting about this dynamic is that since the pandemic, as the kind of cold war with China heated up, the U.S. has effectively made a big bet on artificial intelligence as the future of the global economy. China made a really big bet on green tech and hard tech.
And one of the things that we’re starting to see as the Trump second term comes into focus is that he is actually interested in doing some of the things that Joe Biden was trying to do: Revitalizing the industrial sector. Not betting entirely on A.I. but figuring out how to source critical minerals, in part, for green energy. Finding new opportunities for drilling in federal lands as well, so it’s not a pure positive for climate advocates.
But one thing that may ultimately prove to be a silver lining in the executive action onslaught of his first day was that he did draw a red circle around permitting problems, which have frustrated and angered people, on both the dirty energy side and the clean energy side for a number of years.
And if it is true that among all the things that Trump is doing on climate, he achieves some dramatic reform on permitting, who knows? It may well be that the effect on how quickly we can electrify our energy systems may even outweigh some of the bad stuff that he’s going to do through drilling.
I’m not sure how that math will ultimately shake out, and I don’t want to sound too optimistic, but if he is in a position where he’s just like, “I want more and more and more” — on some level, the more and more and more, all-of-the-above energy strategy was Joe Biden’s. It was Barack Obama’s, and you can see a kind of a continuity there if you squint.
Healy: One of the things I’ve always liked about the guy is his impatience. It’s sort of “Time’s a-wastin’.” If we’re going to change things — and he is someone who sees himself as a real change agent — he wants to change as quickly as possible. How the change works is worrisome.
What you got at earlier, with accumulation and acquisition — those are two such important words when it comes to Trump. When you accumulate, when you acquire, when you want to make all these changes, what do you do with it? It feels like he’s all front-end talk and energy, but where’s the follow-through to some idea that leads to his golden-age idea? I’m just not sure.
Wallace-Wells: One thing that’s interesting to me is just to compare the makeup of his coalition in 2017 to 2025. I think it’s notable, as many people have pointed out, the degree to which Silicon Valley has moved to Trump.
It really is the case that in 2017 his coalition seemed dominated by working-class discontents. Those were his voters. He had the petite bourgeoisie, like car dealers, too, but it wasn’t an oligarchy that brought him into power.
In fact, all of these people who showed up at the inauguration and paid a million dollars were outspoken critics of his not all that long ago. Elon Musk himself, when Trump pulled out of the Paris accord last time, publicly protested and said: This is a mistake. And now they’re all on board.
So he has moved from a coalition of the discontented working class, representing a complaint with the American establishment — one that implied a sort of class-based redistribution of power to the poor — to one in which he is basically representing an alliance of the very rich and the working class against the professional managerial class, against the educated elites, the middle managers. Groups who are resented both by the owners of companies and by their workers simultaneously. How that changes what his ultimate goal is actually quite clear. This is meant to be a rule by and for the oligarchs.
I think on some level the American public is likely to respond with revulsion to an outright rule by these billionaires. But Trump has committed, in many ways through the campaign and in his first days in office, to giving those people access and power. And not just as wealthy people who’ve always been powerful in American politics but in a new sort of way. Elon Musk will have a staff of 20 people in the White House. All of these people are going to have direct lines to Trump himself. It is a new era.
And you spoke earlier about how little resistance you see on the American left on the climate front. It worries me just as much to see how little resistance we’re seeing on the income inequality and wealth and power front.
I think that is just as dark, just as worrying and maybe considerably more central to the way that Trump tries to navigate his second term than any climate or anti-climate policies that he implements.
Healy: David, I want to thank you so much for coming on. I’m grateful.
Wallace-Wells: Thanks for having me.
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