It’s Not the Climate – ‘Believe Me!’

Trump is more worried about the temperature of public opinion than the temperature of the planet. Climate change denial is a surefire feature of the national populist agenda. In fact, he has already dedicated 115 tweets to the subject, using the way most people take the measure of Trump and his native language. It was not for nothing that a White House political correspondent claimed that Trump’s iPhone only has one app: Twitter. Every time there is unusual weather, Trump takes the opportunity for a sharp retort (“It’s extremely cold in NY & NJ … Where is global warming?” is just one example of his tweets on the subject) discrediting climate change as a canard from the left in need of a reality check. He already garnered applause during the campaign when he announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement to save factories and jobs. Germany has declared the U.S. to be an untrustworthy member on behalf of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, but Trump knows that he is still winning points at home.

It is ironic that the president is calling on “reality” when the scientific consensus is that he is completely disassociated from it. It is not that he is among the 5 percent of convinced skeptics and academics paid by energy companies to circulate “alternative facts;” climate change denial is simply a tempting recourse for national populism. According to the classification set out by Michael Kazin in “The Populist Persuasion,” the natural action for this type of populism is ultimately to invent an exterior enemy. Trump has not held back, claiming that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” In his speech on Thursday, this mantra reappeared, signaling this time not to Paris, but to Ohio and Pennsylvania, states which were, incidentally, key to his victory.

All of this is undoubtedly part of a calculated electoral strategy. During the campaign, Trump was criticized for signing a group letter addressed to former President Barack Obama, published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times in 2009, calling for aggressive governmental action on global warming: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet … an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today.” At that time, Trump was aligning himself with New York liberals. That all changed from 2011 on, once he had the White House in his sights. His convictions, if he has any true convictions, transformed into campaign slogans.

For national populism, climate change is an inconvenient truth because it is a problem that cannot be solved at a national level but requires collective action among nations. That is what the Paris climate agreement was. Only Syria and Nicaragua are not part of the agreement. Yet as strong as the evidence is, right-wing, nationalist populism tends to refute climate change to strengthen its own interests. Trump knows that the mental image of “America First,” “Make America Great Again” and even Trump against the world, benefits him. This is where the ethos takes on its catchphrase: “Believe me.” The utterances of “believe me” in his speeches are often innumerable. They have become the subject of countless memes and meme generators; they have even become a drinking game – every time Trump says, “Believe me,” drink! At the moment, it seems to be working, although Jon Stewart concluded in a conversation with Stephen Colbert that “Trump lies on purpose. You wanna know how I know? Because he constantly says the phrase ‘Believe me.’ Nobody says, ‘believe me’ unless they are lying.”