The view from Washington: Trump 2.0, power plays, and the battle for climate policy

This is the first in an occasional series on the transition from Biden to the incoming Trump administration—the early days. You can read part two, three, four, five and six here.

The former and future president is wasting no time in getting down to business. Given the pace that characterized the organization of his first administration, Mr. Trump has learned a thing or two in the intervening years.

Although Trump has gotten a jump on his nominations, chaos will still be a prominent characteristic of a second Trump presidency—especially in the first 100 days. This time around, he is nominating many MAGA fundamentalists to carry out the business of Trump 2.0 and looking to expand and consolidate the power of the presidency. It’s going to make more than the Democrats on Capitol Hill nervous.

“President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House in January with an agenda to slash government regulations, expand fossil fuel production and fire his critics in the federal government.” - R. Bravender (E&E News)

With thin congressional majorities, it will take few defections to trip Trump up. Although all the votes aren’t in, it looks like the House number will be 220 (R) to 215(D). A majority of the full House is 218 votes out of 435. The retirement of Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the appointments of Representatives Waltz (FL) and Stefanik to the Trump administration, as national security advisor and UN ambassador respectively, will slim the Republican House majority to only two votes until special elections can be held.

The Republican hold on the Senate is stronger—at least more disciplined—for the most part. The split is 53 to 47, with tie votes broken by Vice President-elect Vance. Although numerically more secure and disciplined, there is a cast of Republican senators who aren’t as MAGA-aligned as others and who have some serious concerns when it comes to Trump’s interpretations of the Constitution. The moderates most often mentioned include Senators Murkowski (R-AK), Collins (R-ME), and Tillis (R-NC).

Then, too, there is Senator McConnell (R-KY). The senator is no longer the leader of the pack, and he has a burning dislike for the president-elect. It’s expected that the former Senate leader has some payback of his own he’d like to dispense—if for nothing else, the racist remarks Trump has made about his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump’s first Transportation Secretary.

Whether Trump’s triumph over Harris and the Democrats is a mandate is arguable. That he interprets that way is not. Because he interprets his victory in November in such terms, he feels comfortable pushing constitutional boundaries on Day 1 of his second stint in the White House.

Trump’s victory had a lot to do with American voters being fed up with the “liberal establishment.” It used to be just the establishment. However, the president-elect has turned American politics into a binary— lumping together Democrats and the establishment as the enemy within. In Trump’s world, there is no gray—only black and white. He’s made the definitions of “Democrats” and the “establishment” murky.

The Democrats certainly didn’t help any this election cycle. With a billion bucks, you’d think the campaign could afford better messaging advice—of course, having an effective one requires knowing who you are and what you stand for.

The next months and more will see Democrats attempting to reflect on their losses and what went wrong. Over the next few months, signs to look for include who they elect as head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and changes in conference and committee leadership in Congress.

Look for the Dems to move some younger members into key congressional committee assignments and at the bottom of the leadership rungs in the Senate. Congressional Democrats will be playing the role of the minority party—trying to stop what they can, slowing down what they can’t, and promising to change things when they’re back in power. It’s the lot of the minority.

Something else to look for will be intra-party conflicts on both sides of the aisle. Although the Democrats were very cohesive over the past four years, tensions between progressives and moderates never went away.

The differences were simply held in abeyance—as long as it was possible to get things done—something the Republicans have yet to master. Had the Ds not maintained (relative) cohesion, it’s unlikely that any of the three historic climate-related laws—the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure and jobs bill, and the CHIPS and Science Act—would have been passed.

Now, it’s a matter of preserving the mandates and monies in the three laws. It should prove easier to keep them (mostly) as more red states than blue have profited from them. Moreover, the private sector is investing heavily in developing an integrated clean energy sector, including solar, wind, battery storage, electric vehicles, and needed infrastructures and domestic supply chains.

Before the Trump administration moves in, the Biden administration has been moving quickly to obligate as many project dollars as possible. It’s much harder to recapture funds already obligated.

The two most vulnerable pots of funding are electric vehicle tax credits and the Department of Energy’s loan program, which has been funding clean energy projects. Trump’s nominees for Energy (DOE) secretary (Chris Wright), White House budget office director (Russ Voight), and Treasury secretary (Scott Bessent) are all climate skeptics.

Bessent, a hedge fund manager, has termed the IRA a “doomsday machine for the deficit.” Vought has called climate activists fanatics. Wright is heralded as the “father of fracking” by Trump and has disparaged climate science. However, all areas project areas have private sector constituencies, as well as red states profiting from the various legislation. It could help soften any negative impacts.

Trump and Vought are going to make a fight of the impoundment issue. According to Dylan Matthews at Vox: “Their theory is that the president has a constitutional authority to withhold, or ‘impound,’ spending from projects after that spending has already been authorized by Congress.” The 1974 Impoundment Control Act stopped what was once a presidential power. The incoming administration is going to attack the prohibition as unconstitutional. Trump sees impoundment as a way to expand further and consolidate the powers of his presidency.

The corporate investments leveraged by the legislation achieve much of what Trump wants with tariffs and other MAGA-nomic theories. The problem is Trump has so closely aligned these technologies with “fake science” and the “woke world” that it could prove problematic for him to back very far off of those positions. Time will tell.

(Parenthetically, I would discount suggestions that Elon Musk’s new BFF relationship with Trump will do much for renewables in general or electric vehicles in particular. It will be interesting to see just how long two such large egos will be able to tolerate each other’s company.)

Something the clean energy and environmental communities could do to help their cause is to change the language of climate action. However, in doing this, I would urge an effort be made to test various “alternative phrases” on groups of opposition leaders and voters in the communities that need convincing—before trotting them out in Washington and around the country. The basic message is simple: the environment is the economy. How best to convey it, not so much.

As Roger Pielke, Jr. has noted, “there’s no such thing as a climate voter.” So without the support of enough Republicans, Earth’s environment will continue to be the victim of the culture wars. Without them, it can’t be accomplished—in anything approximating the time and scale required. It’s the inconvenient truth of today’s politics.

Power isn’t held long enough by climate-conscious politicians, and the differences between the parties are so great that US climate policy is the victim of seesaw politics.

Although Trump has learned a thing or two about putting loyal nominees forward weeks before taking office, many of his nominees may prove a step too far for some Republican senators. How the Senate processes his nominees in the first weeks of January will say a lot about the next two years of Republican rule in Washington.