Politics

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics. A man-made famine in Gaza On Tuesday, a United Nations-affiliated organization released a damning report about the “worst-case scenario for famine” occurring in the Gaza Strip. Over 20,000 children have been treated for severe malnutrition, and at least 16 child deaths have been tied to starvation. Israel’s blockade of aid is the primary cause of the crisis, with the director-general of the World Health Organization referring to the mass starvation as “man-made.”  And yet, last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely claimed, “There is no starvation in Gaza”—a lie too brazen for even noted liar President Donald Trump. “Some of those kids are—that’s real starvation stuff,” Trump said on Monday. “I see it, and you can’t fake that.” And the vast majority of America sees it too. New polling from YouGov finds that 68% of Americans agree there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. That includes majorities of Democrats (84%), independents (65%), and Republicans (55%). Just 5% of Americans say there isn’t a crisis. Datawrapper Content Pluralities of Americans also think Israel (46%) and the U.S. (43%) should be doing more to end the mass starvation. All of this hits as fewer Americans than ever before support Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which have claimed the lives of 60,000 Gazans, including 18,500 children, though studies suggest the true number of deaths is higher. Sixty percent of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, according to new data from Gallup. Only 32% approve of it, beating the previous low of 36% in March 2024. Datawrapper Content Republicans are most supportive of Israel’s campaign, with 71% approving. But support has tumbled among independents (25%) and cratered among Democrats (8%). In the previous poll, conducted last September, support among independents and Democrats was 16 percentage points higher for each. Datawrapper Content However, Gallup’s poll finished fielding on July 21, before the latest round of high-profile reporting on the budding famine in Gaza, and before a prominent Republican lawmaker called the crisis there a “genocide.” So it’s easy to imagine that support for Israel’s action in Gaza is even lower now. Burning down the house Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency no longer wants to protect the environment or the people living in it. On Tuesday, the agency announced it will move to rescind the primary legal grounds it has used to curb the emissions that fuel climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, shown in 2019. But the Trump administration is doing this with virtually no public mandate.  Majorities of every demographic—men, women, every race, age group, and income bracket—want the government to maintain or expand its restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, according to the latest YouGov/The Economist poll.  Well, every demographic save one. Only Republicans are below majority level, with just 36% saying the government should maintain or expand emissions restrictions. Twenty-nine percent want to see them reduced, and 18% want them eliminated—which, when combined, is also not a majority of Republicans. Meanwhile, a plurality of every other demographic wants to see restrictions not just maintained but also expanded. Datawrapper Content The same phenomenon repeats across other questions in the poll.  Is the government doing too much or not enough to fight climate change? A majority or plurality of every demographic says “not enough”—except for Republicans, 32% of whom say it’s doing “too much” and 38% of whom say it’s doing “about the right amount.” Is the climate changing because of human activity, as the universal scientific consensus says is the case? A majority or plurality of every demographic thinks so—except for Republicans, a plurality of whom (46%) admits the climate is changing but claims that humans aren’t to blame. The sun sets at wind farm in Texas during a heat wave in July 2022. One reason for this head-in-sand resistance to addressing climate change is that the issue cuts to the root of conservatism itself. To accept the gravity of the crisis requires people to see their actions as potentially harmful and to think outside of themselves. To address the crisis will require large-scale collective action—government action, to be specific. It will require us to change, which conservatism, in its very name, opposes. But perhaps “conservatism” is a misnomer. Conservative actions on climate change, like those taken by Trump’s EPA, will lead to habitat collapse, environmental destruction, and the loss of human life. How does that “conserve” anything? Through the looking glass A new poll shows Trump with his worst net approval rating yet: +2 points. Fifty percent of voters approve of the job he’s doing as president, and 48% disapprove. Wait, what?  Yes, while most polls show Trump’s approval rating in the dumps, not every poll does. The results above are from a poll conducted by two right-wing pollsters, InsiderAdvantage and the Trafalgar Group. The latter firm has notoriously secretive methods, but it retains just enough credibility that mainstream polling averages, like those from The New York Times and election analyst Nate Silver, don’t outright disregard them. (Thankfully, those averages are smart and adjust polls for firms’ partisan bias.) However, these polls tell us something key about the right-wing media ecosystem: You gotta keep the big guy happy. In the world of right-wing polls, Trump’s approval rating is underwater but just barely. In a simple average of polls in July, 47.4% of the country approves of Trump’s job as president, while 49.8% disapproves, according to polls that political analyst Mary Radcliffe aggregated and that Daily Kos identified as coming from Republican-aligned firms. (Radcliffe is a former colleague of mine at 538.) The use of the decimal point in those numbers is important because in no month has this average of GOP-aligned polls shown that a majority of the country disapproves of Trump.  Datawrapper Content Meanwhile, in a simple average of all polls from all pollsters, Trump

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | New poll finds Trump in hot water over Epstein scandal

Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined a national lawsuit to halt Republicans’ war on Californians. By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main The framers of the latest lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle Planned Parenthood have succinctly identified their point of the attack. “We need to just call it what it is: punishment for Planned Parenthood’s constitutionally protected advocacy for abortion,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said this week in announcing the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by California and 22 other states, along with the District of Columbia. (Planned Parenthood itself is not a plaintiff in this suit.) The complaint, which Bonta said is the 36th he has filed against the administration in Trump 2.0’s first 27 weeks in office, challenges the constitutionality of a provision in the recent budget reconciliation act. That provision denies Medicaid reimbursement for health services rendered by sufficiently large nonprofit clinics that provide abortion services, a description apparently written specifically to proscribe Planned Parenthood. California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks during a press conference in San Francisco in Oct. 2024. That’s a denial of funding for all health services offered by the organization, not abortion. In California, that means the loss of roughly $300 million, money Planned Parenthood uses to help defray the cost of providing health care to about 1 million patients a year. Roughly 80% of those patients rely on Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, for their coverage. “The Trump administration and Congress are actually gutting essential, life-saving care like cancer screenings and STI testing simply because Planned Parenthood has spoken out in support of reproductive rights,” Bonta said. “The hypocrisy is hard to ignore — a party that claims to be defenders of free speech only seems to care about it when it is in alliance with their own agenda.” Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services has made clear the linkage between the draconian funding cuts and Planned Parenthood’s staunch support of abortion rights. “States should not be forced to fund organizations that have chosen political advocacy over patient care,” department spokesman Andrew Nixon said last week. That fairly obvious intent — “I would like to, that’s for sure,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said last December about axing Planned Parenthood – has left the government open to legal challenges like the one brought this week. But there’s another factor to consider, albeit one that Trump and his allies won’t lose sleep over: Their fixation on the abortion issue dramatically misrepresents what the organization really does. *   *   * Planned Parenthood certainly offers abortion services, and — both nationally and in California — makes no apologies for it. “They always underestimate how much people want and will fight for reproductive freedom, especially in California,” said Jodi Hicks, CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates in California, speaking broadly of the Trump administration’s efforts against the clinics. “We are fighting back with every tool that we have.” Nationally, an overwhelming majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But abortions constitute only a small fraction of the services that Planned Parenthood provides across the nation — just 4% overall, according to the organization’s 2022-2023 annual report. The largest broad category of care provided by its clinics is for sexually transmitted infections or diseases, commonly known as STIs and STDs. The next largest parcel of care is for contraceptive services and family planning, and there are also routine checkups, cancer screenings and prescriptions for medication. In other words, Planned Parenthood is health care. And although California remains a staunch supporter of reproductive freedom and the organization offers abortion services statewide, Hicks said that many of the organization’s regular patients visit for basic care. Defunding the organization means less care will be available to patients, pure and simple. Related | Planned Parenthood survives Trump’s latest attack—for now As for abortion, no federal money is or has been involved in that area of health care for a long time. With some narrow exceptions, the Hyde Amendment banned such usage of federal funds nearly 50 years ago. This Congressional budget act is, rather, a straight restriction of funding to Planned Parenthood, using abortion as an inflection point. For California, with its 114 Planned Parenthood locations, that will almost certainly mean less available health care — and there would be a ripple effect to that. “Sadly, we already know where federal defunding of Planned Parenthood will lead,” said U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), whose district sits squarely in Los Angeles County, which has 24 Planned Parenthood centers serving more than 250,000 patients. “Cancers will go undetected, the STI crisis will worsen, wellness exams and preventative care will substantially decline, and it will be harder than ever for people to access birth control.” The denial of funding, added L.A. County public health director Barbara Ferrer, will interrupt “the primacy of the provider-patient relationship for thousands of people across Los Angeles. Sadly, this short-sighted politically motivated move by the federal government will deepen longstanding health inequities and threaten the well-being of so many.” But halting abortion services where they’re still legal will not happen. Planned Parenthood said in a statement that its health centers “will continue to proudly provide the full range of reproductive health care – including abortion — no matter what.” *   *   * This most recent court case argues that the budget measure intentionally singles out Planned Parenthood for punishment in violation of the group’s constitutional right to free speech — in this case, its advocacy of abortion rights. It also argues that while the individual states are tasked with screening Medicaid reimbursement claims, the budget provision “does not provide adequate guidance, definition or notice” to the states on how to do that — or even what the effective dates are to begin enforcement. That lawsuit follows the one filed by Planned Parenthood itself in early July on many of the same grounds. Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in that case, but the injunction allows only a small fraction of Planned Parenthood clinics nationally to continue receiving Medicaid reimbursements for health

PoliticusUSA is independent news that doesn’t sanewash or bend the knee. Please support us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now For professional wrestling fans, WWE’s SummerSlam is one of the tentpole big four events of the year. For non-wrestling fans, think of SummerSlam like a summer version of WrestleMania. It takes place at a large NFL stadium and is a two-night weekend event. WWE’s corporate owners also own UFC, and all of the brands are full of Trump loyalists. Donald Trump is friends with alleged sex trafficker and former WWE owner Vince McMahon, whose wife, Linda, is the Secretary of Education. Trump has a decades-long relationship with WWF/WWE, so what happened when the current WWE boss Paul Levesque was shown on the screen at the Whire House with Trump as part of the announcement that Trump was bringing the presidential fitness test back was revealing. Video: The crowd booed at the sight of Trump. It was a visceral kind of gut reaction booing. Professional wrestling audiences tend to skew more toward the left, which is interesting given that the people who own the biggest company in the industry are so closely aligned with Trump. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The larger point is that if Trump’s face can get booed at a WWE event, the number of places where he shows his face and won’t get booed appears to be dwindling quickly. Outside of his properties and some deep red areas of the country, it is a safe bet that Trump isn’t welcome. It is a sign of how much this president has failed this quickly that just showing his face elicits boos at an event put on by a company that has the president in their Hall of Fame. WWE fans also booed the late Hulk Hogan out of the building at the WWE’s debut on Netflix in Los Angeles months before his death. Trump’s big accomplishment of second term appears to be making himself and his party despised coast to coast, and if you are looking for a cultural hint of which way the political winds are blowing ahead of the midterm election, the SummerSlam booing suggests rough waters ahead for Trump and his party. What do you think about the SummerSlam crowd booing Trump’s face? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra was one of more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants the Trump administration sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. After his release, he says he wants the world to know what happened to him. By Melissa Sanchez for ProPublica In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter. More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. “Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest. He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him. Related | ‘It was a kidnapping’: Mom shares horror of son’s inhumane deportation That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S. I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records. Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either. Rodríguez lifts his shirt to display some of his tattoos. The Trump administration has relied, in part, on tattoos to brand Venezuelan immigrants as possible members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Experts have told us tattoos are not an indicator of membership in the gang.  I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar. As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador. The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men. Related | Parents of men illegally sent to El Salvador beg you not to look away We spoke to the relatives and

By Renuka Rayasam for KFF Health News Belinda McLoyd has been thinking about peanut butter. McLoyd, 64, receives a small monthly payment through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps. “They don’t give you that much to work with,” she said. To fit her tight budget, she eats ramen noodles — high on sodium and low on nutrition — multiple times a week. If she had more money, said McLoyd, who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and heart problems, she’d buy more grapes, melons, chuck roast, ground turkey, cabbage, and turnip greens. That’s what she did when lawmakers nearly doubled her SNAP benefit during the pandemic. But now that a GOP-led Congress has approved $186 billion in cuts to the food assistance program through 2034, McLoyd, who worked in retail until she retired in 2016, isn’t sure how she will be able to eat any healthy food if her benefits get reduced again. Research shows that programs encouraging SNAP recipients to buy healthy food are more effective than regulating what they can buy. McLoyd said her only hope for healthy eating might be to resort to peanut butter, which she heard “has everything” in it. “I get whatever I can get,” said McLoyd, who uses a walker to get around her senior community in southwestern Georgia. “I try to eat healthy, but some things I can’t, because I don’t have enough money to take care of that.” The second Trump administration has said that healthy eating is a priority. It released a “Make America Healthy Again” report citing poor diet as a cause of childhood illnesses and chronic diseases. And it’s allowing states — including Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah — to limit purchases of unhealthy food with federal SNAP benefits for the first time in the history of the century-old anti-hunger program. President Donald Trump also signed a tax and spending law on July 4 that will shift costs to states and make it harder for people to qualify for SNAP by expanding existing work requirements. The bill cuts about 20% of SNAP’s budget, the deepest cut the program has faced. About 40 million people now receive SNAP payments, but 3 million of them will lose their nutrition assistance completely, and millions more will see their benefits reduced, according to an analysis of an earlier version of the bill by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Researchers say SNAP cuts run counter to efforts to help people prevent chronic illness through healthy food. “People are going to have to rely on cheaper food, which we know is more likely to be processed, less healthy,” said Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “It’s, ‘Oh, we care about health — but for the rich people,’” she said. About 47 million people lived in households with limited or uncertain access to food in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency’s research shows that people living in food-insecure households are more likely to develop hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Related | RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz scold poor parents who can’t afford healthy food The Trump administration counters that the funding cuts would not harm people who receive benefits. “This is total fearmongering,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly in an email. “The bill will ultimately strengthen SNAP for those who need it by implementing cost-sharing measures with states and commonsense work requirements.” McLoyd and other residents in Georgia’s Dougherty County, where Albany is located, already face steep barriers to accessing healthy food, from tight budgets and high rates of poverty to a lack of grocery stores and transportation, said Tiffany Terrell, who founded A Better Way Grocers in 2017 to bring fresh food to people who can’t travel to a grocery store. Tiffany Terrell started A Better Way Grocers in Albany, Georgia, to help residents obtain fresh food.  More than a third of residents receive SNAP benefits in the rural, majority-Black county that W.E.B. Du Bois described as “the heart of the Black Belt” and a place “of curiously mingled hope and pain,” where people struggled to get ahead in a land of former cotton plantations, in his 1903 book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” Tiffany Terrell believes federal cuts to food assistance would devastate the region, setting back efforts to help residents boost their diets with fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious food and curb chronic diseases. Terrell said that a healthier diet could mitigate many of the illnesses she sees in her community. In 2017, she replaced school bus seats with shelves stocked with fruits, vegetables, meats, and eggs and drove her mobile grocery store around to senior communities, public housing developments, and rural areas. Tiffany Terrell said that a healthier diet could mitigate many of the illnesses she sees in her southwestern Georgia community. But cuts to food assistance will devastate the region, setting back efforts to help residents boost their diet with fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious food and tackle chronic disease, she said. Terrell saw how SNAP recipients like McLoyd ate healthier when food assistance rose during the pandemic. They got eggs, instead of ramen noodles, and fresh meat and produce, instead of canned sausages. Starting in 2020, SNAP recipients received extra pandemic assistance, which corresponded to a 9% decrease in people saying there was sometimes or often not enough food to eat, according to the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Once those payments ended in 2023, more families had trouble purchasing enough food, according to a study published in Health Affairs in October. Non-Hispanic Black families, in particular, saw an increase in anxiety, the study found. “We know that even short periods of food insecurity for kids can really significantly harm their long-term health and cognitive development,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst on the food assistance team at the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. Cuts to SNAP “will put a healthy diet even farther out of reach for these families.” In 2017, Terrell

You must watch Buttigieg break down Trump’s massive Epstein problem YouTube Video Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg clearly articulated why he believed the Trump administration’s refusal to release its files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein poses a political risk greater than that of Trump’s Medicaid-slashing “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Scots torment Trump on taxpayer-funded trip to his crappy golf courses YouTube Video Trump took a taxpayer-funded trip to Scotland, where he visited two of his golf properties, seemingly cheated on the links, and the Scots were not pleased, greeting him with protests and efforts to obstruct his media appearances. And when reporters pressed him about his relationship with Epstein, Trump said he never had the “privilege” of visiting the convicted sex offender’s private island, where he allegedly abused underaged girls. YouTube Video Watch Cory Booker’s fiery ‘wake-up call’ for his fellow Democrats YouTube Video Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey called out his fellow Democrats, arguing that advancing a policing bill without proper scrutiny amounted to complicity in Trump’s anti-constitutional agenda. Trump has Epstein files on the brain as presser goes off the rails YouTube Video Trump couldn’t keep Epstein off his mind during a recent press conference, whiffing a softball question and veering into a rant about his own administration’s inability to release its files on Epstein. You’ll never believe why Trump claims ‘Obama owes me big’ YouTube Video Before he jetted off to Scotland for his little golfing trip, Trump was asked whether the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision applies to former President Barack Obama, whom Trump has baselessly accused of treason as the president attempts to distract the public from the ongoing Epstein scandal.  It’s been yet another chaotic week of Republican incompetence, and unfortunately, there are no signs they’ll learn from their mistakes anytime soon. For more video content, please check out Daily Kos on YouTube.

Climate scientist Michael Mann called the report “a deeply misleading antiscientific narrative, built on deceptive arguments, misrepresented datasets, and distortion of actual scientific understanding.” By Dennis Pillion for Inside Climate News Several top climate scientists are weighing how to respond to a new climate report issued by the Trump administration that they are calling “deceptive,” “cherry-picked,” and “antiscientific.” The U.S. Department of Energy released a 150-page report Tuesday titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” which argues that human-caused climate change “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and “aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” That flies in the face of most published scientific research on the topic, as gathered in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, the European Climate Risk Assessment, and the U.S. Government’s own Fifth National Climate Assessment, issued last year during the Biden administration. The DOE report states “the growing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere directly influences the earth system by promoting plant growth (global greening), thereby enhancing agricultural yields, and by neutralizing ocean alkalinity,” another way of saying ocean acidification. Datawrapper Content NOAA’s page on ocean acidification states that lowering the pH of seawater makes it more difficult for animals like clams, oysters, corals and plankton to build and maintain their shells. The report then argues that climate model projections are overstating the risks from sea level rise and extreme weather events, and that efforts to decrease greenhouse gas emissions would have little impact. “The risks and benefits of a climate changing under both natural and human influences must be weighed against the costs, efficacy, and collateral impacts of any ‘climate action’, considering the nation’s need for reliable and affordable energy with minimal local pollution,” the report states in its conclusion. Michael Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told Inside Climate News that the Trump administration report was typical of the relatively small number of scientists who deny the seriousness of climate change. ”All they’ve done is recycle shopworn, discredited climate denier arguments,” Mann said in an email. “They constructed a deeply misleading antiscientific narrative, built on deceptive arguments, misrepresented datasets, and distortion of actual scientific understanding. Then they dressed it up with dubious graphics composed of selective, cherry-picked data. “There is nothing scientific about this report whatsoever.” Related | Climate change helped fuel heavy rains that led to devastating Texas flood The report does open a 30-day public comment period, in which the Department of Energy says it is “seeking input from the public, especially from interested individuals and entities, such as industry, academia, research laboratories, government agencies, and other stakeholders.” Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who criticized the report extensively on social media, told Inside Climate News it’s important for mainstream climate scientists to participate even if the Trump administration seems unlikely to listen. “Many people I’ve spoken to recognize the need for a coherent response,” Dessler said in an email. “I think it’s important because this will certainly be litigated, and anything that is put out there could be used in the litigation. “There is no coordinated structure right now [to respond], but I’m hoping one comes together. The stakes on this are very high.” A spokesman for the Department of Energy said the department will “look forward to engaging with substantive comments,” after the comment period ends. “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence—not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous Presidential administrations,” the spokesman said. “Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.” Related | Trump issues executive order targeting ‘unreliable’ clean energy options Ben Sanderson, research director at the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, posted a thread critiquing the report. “Each chapter follows the same pattern,” Sanderson posted on Bluesky. “Establish a contrarian position, cherry pick evidence to support that position, then claim that this position is under-represented in climate literature and the IPCC in particular. Include a bunch of references, most of which don’t support the central argument.” Sanderson highlighted examples, such as the report’s claims of “global greening” and increased crop yields, for which the authors ignored impacts such as heat stress, increased drought, and nutrient limitations, which the IPCC factored in to determine that more atmospheric CO2 would have a negative impact on food security. Sanderson said the researchers had pointed to a flat number of fire ignitions in the U.S., “omitting that burned area, severity and persistence have all exceeded records.” “This is not a systematic or complete assessment of the report,” Sanderson posted. “But even a brief read is enough to understand what it’s doing—it’s selectively isolating particular studies and data to support the narrative that climate is less severe than assessed, whilst ignoring a much wider body of literature.” A “Red Team” Assembles The report relied on the Department of Energy’s new Climate Working Group consisting of five of the most prominent climate contrarians: John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer. “The authors of this report are widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus,” Dessler posted on social media. “If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. “The only way to get this report was to pick these authors,” Dessler said. A spokesperson for the Department of Energy said in an email that the department “intentionally selected individuals with expertise in climate and atmospheric science, economics, physical science, and academic research.” “The five experts represent diverse viewpoints and political backgrounds and are all well-respected and highly credentialed individuals,” the spokesperson said. Datawrapper Content Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil company executive, said in the report’s forward that he had not chosen the members because they would agree with him. “I didn’t select

A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump: Actually, the Epstein scandal is great for me

President Donald Trump is obsessed with getting a Nobel Peace Prize. President Barack Obama won one—so why can’t he? His desperation is so transparent that foreign leaders are now using it as a tool of manipulation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on July 7 that he would nominate him. A group of African leaders followed. So did Pakistan—just one day before condemning Trump for bombing Iran. Now Cambodia’s joined in on the butt-kissing. President Barack Obama is applauded by Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10, 2009.  Officially, the prize goes to the person who, in the words of its namesake Alfred Nobel, “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Imagine Trump, of all people, being the recipient of that. Of course, a nomination means almost nothing. According to Snopes, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are eligible to nominate anyone—including national legislators, university professors, and more. Back in 2020, a far-right Norwegian lawmaker nominated Trump, long before self-serving world leaders figured out how to game the system to flatter him. But Trump doesn’t care about the difference between a nomination and actually winning the esteemed prize. In 2020, he treated being nominated as a monumental achievement. Again, from Snopes: At a rally in Minden, Nevada, on Sept. 12, Trump called the nominations “a big thing,” saying that on Sept. 11 he had been “nominated a second time for another Nobel prize,” a confusing formulation of words that muddled the fact that he was only nominated for one award, albeit by two different individuals. He touted the nomination again at a rally in Las Vegas on the following day, telling the crowd, “They nominated your president, twice last week, on two different subjects, for a Nobel prize.”  Sean Hannity, Fox News host and one of the president’s most prominent supporters, tweeted that in the space of “only one week,” Trump had been “nominated for not one, but two Nobel Peace Prizes,” the same oddly inaccurate phrasing used by the president himself. Between Sept. 10 and Sept. 14, Trump and his campaign ran a combined total of 48 Facebook and Instagram ads touting the nominations as part of his reelection pitch to voters. Half of those ads contained a graphic with an unfortunate spelling error that read “President Trump was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.” So far this year, the Nobel committee has received 338 nominations for the 2025 prize. The deadline was Jan. 31. Don’t be surprised when Trump starts whining that he didn’t win, despite taking office again a mere 11 days before the deadline. And expect a repeat performance next year, too, when he is actually rejected. But how could Trump even be in the conversation? Related |In his mind, Trump is already a dictator He bombed Iran. He encouraged ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He’s currently threatening nuclear war against Russia. He sanctioned International Criminal Court judges. He trashed the United Nations. He gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which will cause millions of avoidable deaths, according to a study by The Lancet. And somehow this is a man promoting “fraternity between nations”? Trump wants the world to see him as a peacemaker. But he’s never created peace—only chaos. And no amount of flattery from influence-seeking foreign leaders will change that.