A summary of Trump/elite MAGA environmental policy: Tracking the flow of wealth and power, cost and benefit

 CONCLUSION

In summary, analyses of Trump/MAGA policy estimate that their deregulatory program sacrifices over a hundred billion dollars a year in public health and climate benefits, including thousands of avoidable deaths and tens of thousands of new asthma cases. That public cost saves a smaller number of fossil‑fuel and industrial firms their costs of complying with pollution controls. Legal scholars argue that the administration has deliberately rewired environmental law and cost‑benefit analysis so that regulatory power and wealth flow upward. That flow is from American society, which bears the pollution and climate damage, to a few elites and corporations who profit from polluting on us.

TRUMP AND MAGA ELITE ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY & TACTICS

Researchers show that major oil, gas companies, plastics and other pro-pollution companies knew about climate and related risks decades ago. Nonetheless, they poured large amounts of money into lobbying, political influence buying, and disinforming the public. The obvious pro-pollution propaganda goal, just like cigarette companies’ pro-lung cancer-for-profit propaganda goal years before, was to block, delay or weaken regulations that would affect their business models for as long as possible, preferably forever. Pro-pollution companies engaged in a well-funded, decades-long disinformation and mass deceit and political influence-buying strategy specifically to prevent significant climate laws and regulations from coming into effect, or from being enforced. By the 1960s, major oil companies knew that fossil-fuel combustion caused climate change, so they responded by funding political and social denial and delay campaigns to block regulations.
https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/climateenergy/defense-denial-and-disinformation-uncovering-the-oil-industrys-early-knowledge-of-climate-change/
https://www.ucs.org/climate/accountability

Tech and auto companies aggressively brand themselves as green while relying heavily on offsets and systems that allow continued pollution. Tesla and some other Big Tech actors use climate propaganda and market positioning enable them to profit off people’s climate anxiety while still engaging in pro-pollution businesses with their carbon-intensive supply chains.
https://gizmodo.com/five-of-2020s-top-climate-grifters-1845803712

The ask: At an April 2024 Mar‑a‑Lago dinner, Trump met with top oil and gas executives and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He told them it would be a great deal compared with the taxes and regulations they would avoid if he returned to office. A 2025 analysis of fossil‑fuel donors and Trump’s policy agenda notes that “Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fossil-fuel-industry-donors-see-major-returns-trumps-policies
https://blog.ucs.org/laura-peterson/trumps-handouts-to-fossil-fuel-industry-will-cost-public-80-billion-over-next-decade/

The payoff: Trump has (1) systematically gutted the EPA’s regulatory and enforcement capacity and authority, and (2) blocked or dismantled enforcement of essentially all major environmental and climate rules, especially greenhouse gas laws and regulations. In return of polluter payoffs, Trump and MAGA elites gutted the EPA’s scientific and legal backbone in what Trump bluntly calls the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. He gutted the EPA’s rule eliminating the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. That had been the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The final rule rescinds the finding and all federal GHG emission standards for vehicles and engines, and explicitly states that EPA “has no legal basis” to regulate GHGs under section 202 going forward. By revoking the Endangerment Finding, the federal government can no longer regulate greenhouse gases. That includes emissions from cars, trucks and power plants. That was a gigantic neutering of climate policy. Eliminating the finding completely stopped enforcement of carbon emissions limits. That is a huge payoff.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/president-trump-and-administrator-zeldin-deliver-single-largest-deregulatory-action-us
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0zdd7yl4vo
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-administration-plans-to-roll-back-epa-regulations-could-harm-health/

The deceit and betrayal: As we know by now, Trump and MAGA elites always do their best to deceive the public about whatever corruption and dictatorship/oligarchy/ theocracy they are up to. From a public interest, pro-democracy and pro-rule of law point of view, their lies, crackpottery, and emotional manipulation are shameless, blatant, malicious, and morally rotted. Trump and MAGA elites frame deregulation as re‑directing enforcement, not gutting regulations for polluters. An EPA news release describes gutting laws and regulations as redirecting enforcement resources to relieve the economy of unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. That is a clear signal of a deliberate shift away from enforcing certain pollution regulations and laws. MAGA propaganda casts it as efficiency, but in reality it’s cessation of enforcement.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/trump-epa-rollbacks-would-weaken-rules-projected-to-save-billions-of-dollars-

The impacts on public health and the flow of wealth and power: The Trump/MAGA environmental and deregulatory agenda is projected to produce major adverse environmental and health impacts, along with a massive shift in power and wealth toward fossil‑fuel and other regulated industries from the public and the public interest to special interests. The second Trump administration’s rollbacks of environmental and energy regulations could cost about $156.6 billion per year in net social benefits that existing rules would have delivered. Approximately 3,299 additional premature deaths annually, 7,461 new child asthma cases per year, roughly 3,922 extra hospital and ER admissions annually, and hundreds of thousands of lost work and school days as a result of weakened air‑quality and climate rules. Greenhouse gas regulations reduce co‑pollutants including fine particulate matter and ozone. Eliminating regulations will increase heat‑related mortality, wildfire smoke exposure, respiratory and cardiovascular hospitalizations, preterm births, and asthma attacks. Trump’s gutting of environmental deregulations walks back pesticide bans, weakens methane and CO₂ emissions rules, and narrowed the definition of waters of the United States, allowing for more a lot more pollution of fresh waters.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-administration-plans-to-roll-back-epa-regulations-could-harm-health/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-trump-administrations-major-environmental-deregulations/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-assault-on-environmental-protections-will-give-polluters-a-free-pass-while-causing-millions-of-asthma-attacks/

Trump and MAGA elites do not care about public opinion

By gutting rules and neutering enforcement that generated net economic and health benefits, the Trump Administration has taken away billions in benefits from the American public. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of cost savings from deregulation flow to a relatively small number of regulated firms and individuals. Meanwhile the foregone benefits or cleaner air, avoided deaths, lower medical costs, are spread across millions of people. Society eats the damage, while a few elites reap the rewards. Trump officials reshaped cost‑benefit analysis, cynically undervalued pollution harms, and adopted novel statutory interpretations that abdicate EPA authority to regulate. These moves created explicit preferences for the interests of regulated industries over communities most affected. The Trump/elite MAGA goal is to lock in a long‑term transfer of wealth and power from public regulators to private industry. Oil and gas firms will gain tens of billions in avoided compliance costs and new drilling opportunities. That will be financed in part by the loss of the public’s health and climate protections and the transfer of environmental and social damage back onto American society. Benefits flow up to a few elites and corporations, while costs and damages flush down onto society.
https://policyintegrity.org/tracking-regulatory-rollbacks
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/deconstructing-environmental-deregulation-under-the-trump-administration/
https://climatepower.us/news/new-report-oil-and-gas-industry-spent-450-million-to-influence-trump-and-the-119th-congress/
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/white-house-watch-tracking-attacks-our-environment-health

That stuff is toxic

Source: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/6/23/voters-are-concerned-about-rolling-back-epa-power-plant-regulations-want-current-pollution-limits-kept-in-place

Trump guts a major ocean climate science research project to hide terrifying inconvenient facts to protect polluters

Trump’s intense hostility to climate science is not merely irrational and stupid. It is mentally deranged and extremely dangerous to everyone. Various sources are reporting that Trump and ordered his MAGA goons to destroy the the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). That is a US funded, $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network that has been central to understanding climate-relevant ocean processes and coastal risks. Trump has ordered it to be taken out of the water. More than 900 instruments deployed off Alaska, Washington/Oregon, the East Coast, and the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland are to be removed and shut down. 

The system became operational in 2016. It was designed to last for about 25 years. The cost to operate it was ~$48 million per year. Trump repeatedly tried to slash the program’s budget by about 80 percent for 2025 and 2026. OOI instruments off the coast of Newport, Ore., and Grays Harbor, Wash., collected and transmitted temperature, acidity, and oxygen level data that is needed for predicting climate-related environmental changes, and the health of the region’s commercial fishing industry. 

An OOI data transmission buoy

Long-term observing systems like OOI are critical for detecting climate change because climate changes typically emerge over a period of decades from noisy weather patterns. Once a continuous record is broken, especially in key locations like the subpolar North Atlantic or deep sea upwelling locations, scientists cannot go back and reconstruct the missing years with anything close to the accuracy of direct ocean measurements. The OOI underpins our current understanding of marine heat waves, ocean heat uptake, and biogeochemical processes that directly affect fisheries and coastal communities. From a scientific-program point of view, shutting down a system designed for 25 years after roughly a decade is another example of Trump and MAGA politics gutting the public interest to pay off special interests who profit from continuing to pollute.

The shutdown of OOI cannot be rationally understood to be a claimed neutral budget decision. The shutdown fits squarely into Trump’s and MAGA elites’ objective of (1) dismantling climate science, gutting NOAA and NSF climate research, and (2) erasing data that document fossil‑fuel damage, all while pledging to end what Trump and MAGA elites like to call the Green New Scam.

Q: Is a deceived, ignorant electorate easier to deceive, exploit and profit from than an undeceived and informed electorate?

Q: What or who is the real scam here, climate science research or Trump, MAGA elites and their way of doing business?

Info sources: Link, link, link, link, link

Trump subverts the rule of law — federal law is now the rule of the tyrant

The first pardon on the list is Jan. 21, 2026, the day after Trump was sworn into office

Trump and MAGA elites have made clear that they use the rule of law as a special interest-serving partisan tool. To them, it’s not a neutral institution for vindicating laws or defending the public interest. AP-Frontline reporting makes the painful truth undeniable.

In this instance of Trump personally, directly subverting the rule of law, he has quietly ordered his personal DoJ to stop investigating Venezuela’s acting president and major drug dealer, Delcy Rodríguez. Rodriguez has been a target of the US Drug Enforcement Administration due to her drug kingpin activities. As can be expected from our now corrupted DoJ, they lie to us about it, a spokesperson saying “there was never an investigation into her to shut down”. This is an example of how Trump and MAGA elites have degenerated our rule of law into corrupt, cruel rule of tyrants.

AP and other sources have reported that Delcy Rodríguez was on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar for years. She was designated a DEA “priority target” in 2022. That label is reserved for suspects believed to have a significant impact on the drug trade. Link

By now, Trump has a solid track record of sympathy for drug dealers, which Rodriguez seems to be. That is in addition to sympathy for rioters, tax cheats, inside stock traders, fraudsters and various other criminal miscreants and thugs who can afford to buy a pardon from Trump for their crimes. The going rate for buying a Trump pardon is estimated to be least about $1 million/pardon (and this). The DoJ still keeps track of his pardons. The DoJ makes the pardon list public at this link. At least until March of 2026, the DoJ updated the pardon list. Since then, public updates to the list have stopped. Of course, that is exactly what one would expect from Trump hiding his deep moral rot from the public.

Anyway, Trump’s protection for criminals is not new or out of character. Trump is a criminal with his own track record of criminality and contempt for the rule of law. Here are more of Trump’s pardons for criminals convicted of selling or trafficking marijuana, cocaine, or other drugs.

Trump loves pardoning criminals, assuming they can afford to pay him his pardon fee.

Q: Why do you think that the DoJ no longer publicly updates Trump’s list of pardons and commutations?

Q: Given Trump’s rock solid track record as a criminal, chronic liar and morally rotted tyrant who demands loyalty to himself over all other things, is there any solid reason to believe that (1) his loyalist DoJ is not protecting his pardons-for-profit business by no longer updating the public pardons list, or (2) Rodriguez has not engaged in any drug dealing activities?

Congress and Trump sell out the US to Israel

Fusing the US taxpayer and US military with the Israeli military

Something new has gone terribly wrong. This is just as bad as most awful things Trump and MAGA are these days. In its cowardice, corruption, staggering incompetence and seething hostility to democracy and the rule of law, our MAGA congress has quietly started a horrible, taxpayer-funded process of aggressively integrating the US and Israeli militaries.

An article by Responsible Statecraft, Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries, reports that buried in the House 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), there is a section entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”. The provisions there do more to intertwine the US and Israeli militaries than anything the $200 billion+ in inflation adjusted military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948. 

Section 224 provides for expanded bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and basically all kinds of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. That greatly expands already major cooperation on missile defense. In essence, 224 greatly expands coordination to all areas of defense tech. That includes AI, quantum, and autonomous systems (drones, weaponized robots), directed energy weapons, cyberwar, and biotech (WTF, germ warfare???). Section 224 also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion”. US military data will also be Israeli military data.

Worse than all of that, the MAGA House bill strips away political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the US-Israeli relationship publicly accountable. Section 224 guts the current visible annual aid vote into an opaque, basically secret machinery of taxpayer-funded defense acquisition. Section 224 limits oversight, and meaningful, honest political accountability is minimal to non-existent. The result is a defense deeper defense relationship that is basically run in secret.

Unlike other weapons agreements where the US supplies weapons and the buyers sometimes make some parts for them, Section 224 is nothing like that at all. This deal fuses US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas that are vital to future battlefields, e.g. autonomous systems and cyberwar. The House has also tucked provisions in 224 that would create extraordinary Israeli influence in the US, far beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its social media influencers. Section 224 gives the Israeli government the option to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics, namely jobs. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil (at taxpayer expense), thereby corrupting members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs are.

The US political system is already highly susceptible to the whims of the Israeli government. This proposed deal would secretly entangle the US with the Israeli war machine which has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East, whether it makes any sense or not for America and its interests. In essence, the MAGA House is proposing a full-blown secret sellout of American interests, its military independence, and the taxpayers to a brutal Israeli government. 

One has to wonder what payoff to Trump Netanyahu has promised, and how much of it has already been delivered. Also, what did MAGA House members get in return for their sellout, and how will Trump/Israel bribe the Senate? Enquiring minds want to know.

Not to worry, corporal Bone Spurs 

is on the job and in charge 

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah, that could go wrong