Bill Mckibben, Common Dreams

The one thing more inflated than protesters' costumes is Trump's ego. Here's how we pop it

Longtime readers will know that though I generally focus on climate and energy, I also concern myself with organizing: We have to fight for the future we want.

This weekend is one of those occasions: No Kings Day 2, when millions upon millions of Americans will gather to say, in one form or another, we don’t like the turn our country has taken in the last nine months, and we’d like our country to head in a very different direction.

If you don’t know where to go on Saturday, here’s the handy tool to help you find the rally near you. (Many thanks to my colleagues at Third Act who have worked hard to turn folks out; my guess is that older Americans will be overrepresented, as at past such gatherings!)

I’ll be speaking on the Battle Green in Lexington, where in April of 1775 the American battle against kings arguably began. I grew up there, and my summer job was giving tours for the waves of sightseers who would arrive each day — I got to tell, over and over, the stories of the Minutemen who gave up their lives to a mighty military machine on the principle that they were capable of governing themselves. So it will be mostly a solemn talk, I guess — though I will try not to be over-earnest. Because we actually need a fair amount of good humor in these proceedings.

In fact, I think it’s possible that one of the most effective organizers in this entire cursed year is Seth Todd, a local man who appeared at the small protests outside the Portland, Oregon Immigration and Customs Enforcement office a few weeks ago in an inflatable frog costume. He’s been there regularly since — his most viral moment came when ICE officers angry that he was coming to the aid of another protester sprayed mace up his air vent. But he’s been on the news again and again, becoming in the process that most exalted of all humans, a living meme.

Because of the rightly central place that the civil rights movement holds in our history, we tend to think of protest as necessarily somber and dignified.

Those were the moods that that intuitive master strategist Dr. King summoned most effectively. They were designed to appeal to the sentiments of the white Americans he was facing, and to give a socially acceptable form to the deep and righteous anger of Black Americans. King understood that one of his tasks was to persuade the American mainstream that segregation — an accustomed practice — was brutal; quiet dignity against ferocious assault helped make the case, and awed onlookers with the bravery — and hence the humanity — of his followers.

We’re in a different moment now, with different needs. President Donald Trump and MAGA represent an aggressive revanchism built on a series of lies, in this case that the country’s cities are dangerous hellholes protected by dimwitted blue mayors. This is easy to disprove statistically — by many measures Portland is among the safest cities in the country; New York is safer than it’s been in at least a quarter-century; Boston, which Trump was threatening last week to send troops to, is among the least violent cities America’s ever seen.

But statistics have a hard time competing with lurid stories about high-profile murders or (fictitious) out-of-control crime.

“I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” the president said last week. “You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”

As a counter to this, a goofy inflatable frog is pretty powerful; it quickly drives home the message that Portland is more whimsical than dangerous.

If a Black woman in Sunday best presented a messaging problem for Bull Connor in Birmingham, a chubby frog presents a messaging problem for Trump, for different reasons. He hates being laughed at, which is a good indication that he recognizes the power of laughter; this is the classic “emperor has no clothes” moment.

Or, as Seth the frog put it, “I obviously started a movement of people showing up looking ridiculous, which is the exact point. It’s to show how the narrative that is being pushed with how we are violent extremists is completely ridiculous. Nothing about this screams extremist and violent. So it’s just a ridiculous narrative that the Trump administration wants to put out so they can continue their fascist dictatorship.”

Satire like this is not a novel aspect of protest. Americans will remember Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies — running a pig for president, scattering cash on the floor of the stock exchange. In Serbia, the Otpor movement — operating in what was a police state — used humor extensively.

As the website New Tactics in Human Rights explains:

In 2000, before the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, a government initiative to support agriculture involved placing boxes in shops and public places. It asked people to donate one dinar (Serbian currency) for sowing and planting crops. In response, Otpor! arranged its own collection called “Dinar za Smenu” (Dinar for a Change). This initiative was implemented several times and in different places in Serbia. It consisted of a big barrel with a photo of Milosevic. People could donate one dinar, and would then get a stick they could use to hit the barrel. At one point, a sign suggested that if people did not have any money because of Milosevic’s politics, they should hit the barrel twice.
When the police removed the barrel, Otpor! stated in a press release that the police had arrested the barrel. Otpor! claimed that the initiative was a huge success. They had collected enough money for Milosevic’s retirement, and that the police would pass the money on to him.

Hey, and Otpor won — Milosevic was toppled, and many other campaigns have picked up on the strategy around the world. As the Tunisian human rights campaigner Sami Gharbia said, “Making people laugh about dangerous stuff like dictatorship, repression, censorship is a first weapon against those fears … without beating fear you cannot make any change.”

Clearly the frog moment has inspired many here. On Facebook, the Episcopalian church was sharing not just a picture, but an apropos quote from Exodus and the story of Moses against the Pharaoh: “But if you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs … The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your officials.”

Hey, and Moses won too.

Meanwhile, back in Portland, there’s also been a naked bike ride this week to protest ICE. A brass band has been playing outside their headquarters (the clarinetist was arrested while playing the theme from Ghostbusters).

And meanwhile back in DC, the regime is insisting that their opposition is Hamas-loving terrorists. As the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “This crazy No Kings rally this weekend, is gonna be the farthest left, the hardest core, the most unhinged in the Democratic Party, which is a big title.”

We don’t know how Trumpism will fall. We’re in an unprecedented moment in our political history, where the normal checks and balances have failed; it’s unclear if our electoral system will survive intact enough to allow democracy to operate in any way. But for the moment our task is to drive down Trump’s popularity, relentlessly. Their greatest hope is that there will be violence they can exploit; watch out this weekend for agents provocateurs, and pay attention to the people at protests who have been trained in deescalation. But show up — right now that’s our best way to keep building the opposition.

Humor’s far from the only tool. Sometimes the best way to build a movement is to publicize the outrages of the other side: More and more Americans are seeing the images of masked secret police dragging terrified people into unmarked cars and spiriting them away; happily, that’s helping.

Here’s Joe Rogan last week: “When you’re just arresting people in front of their kids, and just, normal, regular people who have been here for 20 years. That everybody who has a heart can’t get along with that. Everybody who has a heart sees that and goes, ‘That can’t be right.’”

And sometimes the best way to do it is to dress up as a frog.

Trump is not just a conman on climate

When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day.

The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction. On the first day of his term, U.S. President Donald Trump set up the con by asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions were dangerous. Yesterday, EPA czar and former failed gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin dutifully made his long-awaited announcement: Nothing to fear from carbon dioxide, methane, and the other warming gases.

Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said when he first announced the idea. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”

Trump didn’t really need to do this in order to stop working on the climate crisis — he’s done that already. The point here is to try and make that decision permanent, so that some future administration can’t work on climate either, without going through the long and bureaucratic process of once again finding that the most dangerous thing on the Earth is in fact dangerous.

The problem with this simple one-two punch from Trump and Zeldin is that someone will challenge it in court as soon as it becomes official. “If EPA finalizes this illegal and cynical approach, we will see them in court,” said Christy Goldufss of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And they’ll have an argument, since — well, floods, fires, smoke, storms. I mean, if carbon dioxide was dangerous in 2009, that’s a hell of a lot more obvious 16 years later.

The Supreme Court upheld the idea that CO2 was dangerous in 2007 — here’s how Justice John Paul Stevens began that opinion:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species — the most important species — of a “greenhouse gas.”

But that was a different, and non-corrupted, Supreme Court. John Roberts wrote the dissent, and he’s doubtless eager to do with climate change what he’s already done with abortion. But that would be easier if they had some “well-respected experts” to say that there’s not any trouble — stage three of this grift.

It’s true that there aren’t any well-respected experts that believe that, but the White House has hired several aged contrarians who have maintained for decades that global warming is not a problem, even as the temperature (and the damage) soared. And yesterday they released a new report that reads more or less like a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In it, they cherry pick data, turn to old and long-debunked studies, and in general set up a group of strawmen so absurd that one almost has to grin in admiration. Actual climate scientists were lining up to say their papers had been misquoted, but all you needed was a modicum of knowledge to see how stupid the whole enterprise was.

Just as an example, our contrarians hit the old talking point that CO2 is plant food — indeed, “below 180 ppm [parts per million], the growth rates of many C3 species are reduced 40-60% relative to 350 ppm (Gerhart and Ward 2010) and growth has stopped altogether under experimental conditions of 60-140 ppm CO2.”

Great point except that there is no one calling for, and no way, to get CO2 levels anywhere near that low. I led a large-scale effort to remind people that anything above 350 ppm is too high, and that was so successful that we’re now at 420 ppm and climbing. Too little carbon dioxide is a problem for the planet in the way that too little arrogance is a problem for the president

And yet, when it finally reaches the court, they will doubtless cite this entirely cynical and bad-faith document to buttress the case that the EPA should be allowed to stop paying attention to carbon dioxide. As I said, it’s a pretty easy to follow swindle, but they count on the fact that most people won’t. Butter won’t melt in their mouths — as Energy Secretary (and former fracking executive) Chris Wright said in his foreword to the new report:

I chose the [authors] for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate. I exerted no control over their conclusions. What you’ll read are their words, drawn from the best available data and scientific assessments. I’ve reviewed the report carefully, and I believe it faithfully represents the state of climate science today.

Every word of that is nonsense, but it doesn’t matter — because it’s an official document on the right letterhead it will do the trick. This is precisely what science looks like when it’s perverted away from the search for truth. It’s disgusting.

Still, there’s another grift also under way this week, and this one that may work the other way and do the world some good. The president announced his new trade deal with the European Union, which calls for 15% tariffs — but it’s sweetened by the European promise to buy $750 billion worth of American natural gas in the next three years.

Trump has essentially been using the tariff process as a shakedown, a way to repay his Big Oil cronies for their hundreds of millions in support: it’s pretty much exactly like a mob protection racket, where you buy from the guy you’re told to or you get a rock through the window.

The White House quickly put out a list of thank yous, including one from the American Petroleum Institute: “We welcome POTUS’ announcement of a U.S.-E.U. trade framework that will help solidify America’s role as Europe’s leading source of affordable, reliable and secure energy.”

And yet, as Reuters first noted and then many others also calculated, the numbers are clearly nonsense. First, the E.U. actually doesn’t buy any energy itself, and it can’t tell its member states what to purchase; in fact, even those member states usually rely on private companies to buy stuff. Second, it’s physically impossible to imagine the U.S. selling Europe $250 billion worth of natural gas a year. As Tim McDonnell wrote at Semafor:

Total U.S. energy exports to the world were worth $318 billion last year, of which about $74.4 billion went to the E.U., according to Rystad Energy. So to meet the target, the E.U. would need to more than triple its purchases of U.S. fossil fuels — and the U.S. would need to stop selling them to almost anyone else.

“These numbers make no sense,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher specializing in European gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

The biggest reason it won’t happen, though, is that Europe is quickly switching to renewable energy. As Bill Farren-Price, head of gas research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained to the Financial Times:

“European gas demand is soft, and energy prices are falling. In any case, it is private companies not states that contract for energy imports,” he said. “Like it or not, in Europe the windmills are winning.”

Trump will doubtless coerce some countries into buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the short run, and that will do damage. Global Venture announced Tuesday that they’d found the financing for the massive Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) export terminal, which has been opposed by both climate scientists and environmental justice activists.

As Louisiana’s Roishetta Ozane said Tuesday:

The CP2 LNG facility is an assault on everything I hold dear. It’s a direct threat to the health and safety of my community and an assault on the livelihoods of our fishermen and shrimpers.

I’ve seen my kids struggle with asthma, eczema, headaches, and other illnesses that result from the pollution petrochemical and LNG plants dump into my community. I won’t stop opposing this project in every way I can, because my children — and everyone’s children — deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live in a healthy environment. I refuse to let Venture Global turn my community into a sacrifice zone for the sake of its profits.

But my guess is that such facilities won’t be pumping for as many decades as their investors imagine. Europe pivoted hard to renewables because Russian President Vladimir Putin proved an unstable supplier of natural gas; Trump’s America is hardly more reliable, since the president has made it clear he’ll tear up any agreement on a whim. Any rational nation will be making the obvious calculation: “I may not have gas of my own, but I’ve got wind and sun and they’re cheap. I’d rather rely on the wind than the windbag.”

Trump’s a conman, but he’s also a mark.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."