The Trump Administration's Disinformation Campaign

Golfers ignoring the climate crisis raging behind them; Photo credit: Kristi McCluer

    What comes to mind when you consider the climate crisis? Climate science? Let’s also consider activism. Advocacy, while we’re at it. Let’s also bear environmental quality in mind. Are you seeing correlation yet? How about a few more topics? Diversity, injustice, pollution? Every single one of these italicized terms (and a great many more) is flagged and suppressed within government sources and documentation under the Trump administration. Every single one.

    The Trump administration was founded on a disinformation campaign, sired from the distortion of words and manipulation that have been deeply embedded within our governance in less than a decade. The omission of the key terms and topics listed above is intentional, malicious, and devastatingly dangerous. And it is only an emblem of the greater denial and manipulation beneath the surface of the governmental websites and public service announcements that bear them. The administration is waging war on the prospect of an educated society, even now, under the guise of protecting us from overwhelming consideration of the climate crisis and being wracked with anxiety resultingly. “Climate communication that downplays the dangers of climate change for fear of inducing despair will, at best, fail to address the political source of young people’s anxiety – and could make young people feel all the more gaslit, as though climate scientists themselves were yet another constituency refusing to take their fears seriously” (Genevieve Guenther, The Language of Climate Politics). Ignorance is no longer bliss – it is a weaponized inundation masterfully orchestrated to control an increasingly incapable and dependent society.

EPA Headquarters in Washington; Photo credit: Francis Chung

    Twenty-three days after the Trump administration took office for the second and (god willing) final time, the Environmental Protection Agency was forced into repealing their public mandates that stipulated greenhouse gas emissions and clean operation standards from American corporations. The climate director of the National Resources Defense Council responded with, “they want to make corporations money, and they don’t care about the impacts on people”. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is deeply-rooted in corporate greed, with both our House and Senate – our representatives, our legal defenders – funded by oil companies in multitudes of millions of dollars. And, of course, helmed by a man whose net worth nearly rivals the entirety of the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (a federal agency that employs fourteen thousand people).

    The damages caused by the Trump administration’s war on public education and environmental protection will long outlive the administration itself and likely condemn us to the third degree of warming that will render our climate crisis self-sustaining. We could not afford to lose half the time and progress that this administration has cost us in our battle against climate change, and it will only exacerbate the difficulty in our fight for generations to come (if we are fortunate enough to have multiple generations left). 

    We are only a year into the second term of this administration and, seemingly, the second coming of the antichrist. We cannot allow the remaining three years to come to pass under them, lest it cost us our grandchildren and a myriad of species whose biodiversity will not be replicated for millennia to come.