This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last Tuesday, as the strongest Atlantic storm in 90 years slammed the western coast of Jamaica with 185-mph winds, Bill Gates was downplaying climate change. In a lengthy blog post published on his personal website, Gates purported to offer some “tough truths about climate” ahead of next week’s UN climate conference. Railing against a “doomsday outlook” stemming from “much of the climate community,” the author of 2021’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster claimed that there’s “too much” emphasis on “near-term emissions goals” as opposed to addressing “poverty and disease.” (The straight line between climate disasters from higher temperatures and the acceleration of both poverty and disease went unnoted.) > The inherent tension Gates posits between “quality of life” and “lowering > emissions” is simply false. While Hurricane Melissa—whose ferocity was supercharged by ocean waters heated by carbon-emissions absorption, as well as increased atmospheric moisture—laid waste to much of Jamaica, Gates followed up with a CNBC interview, excusing Microsoft’s fossil-fueled AI-construction surge and reiterating that global warming “has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.” (He didn’t touch on the many ways artificial intelligence itself has damaged human welfare.) The billionaire does not appear to have publicly addressed the disaster in Jamaica, which extended throughout the Caribbean, with Melissa having killed dozens across Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic. And his overall point, frankly, does not hold up to scrutiny. Gates isn’t alone; climate change has slipped down the world’s priority list in the past few years—and it shows. Governments and corporations are shelving emissions goals, budgets are being redirected from climate initiatives to warfare, the media is pivoting away from climate journalism, and even activists are urging a softer, more “hopeful” tone. It all signals a vibe shift in how we talk about climate change, reframing it from the existential risk it actually poses to a less urgent, peripheral issue—even as the floodwaters reach our front doors. Gates, whose climate nonprofit Breakthrough Energy laid off dozens of staffers earlier this year, is not incorrect to point out that “we’ve made great progress” in fostering climate solutions, and that agriculture and land use should be an especially urgent area of focus. But the person he’s targeting with his post—a government official cutting health and aid funding and redirecting it toward emissions reduction—doesn’t really exist, certainly not at this particular moment. As the US pulls back on all foreign aid and health funds, to devastating and fatal effect across the Eastern Hemisphere, other rich nations are not filling in the gap but instead following suit, cutting back on climate, health, and development. In the climate realm in particular, wealthier countries are trimming not just their budgets (e.g., clean-energy exports, startup financing) but even their assistance with long-term adaptation to a warming Earth—something Gates now prizes above mitigation. This despite the fact that the UN secretary-general warns that it is “inevitable” the world will overshoot the decade-old Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—as an explicit means of preventing worst-case scenarios that will require more money and resources to address. The world order that once notched international climate agreements isn’t just retreating from that fight; it’s pulling back from any globally minded responsibility altogether. The inherent tension Gates posits between “quality of life” and “lowering emissions” is simply false—and it’s a favored talking point of climate denialists. The most odious exemplar of this may be the pro–fossil fuel activist Alex Epstein, whose books (which I’ve reviewed critically) frame the transition from oil and gas to renewables as an “anti-human” endeavor. These days, Epstein is deeply embedded with congressional Republicans, pushing behind the scenes for the debilitating dents in US clean-energy subsidies that have been effected through this year’s budget bills. Setting climate action as antithetical to human flourishing is plainly false; the devastated Caribbean citizens now rebuilding from Hurricane Melissa’s destruction would not be in this predicament had carbon emissions not overheated the ocean and messed with wind cycles. As for finances, the climate is the economy: Skyrocketing insurance and resource costs in the region, along with depleted agricultural yields, are not incidental to climate effects but a direct consequence of their fallout. At our current level of 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, we see the crushing effects everywhere. It will not be any easier for island nations to recover as more extreme weather comes for their homes (and ours), and as nations of means shirk their mandated responsibilities to those spewing far fewer emissions, yet taking the biggest direct impacts. The good news is, there are many folks on the ground working independently to advance climate solutions and their own welfare at the same time. Countries like Pakistan and Rwanda have put cheap solar-panel imports to great use—even to help with growing food. In the Caribbean, some of the hospitals treating the wounded will be powered by solar panels and battery storage, insulating them from the ongoing electricity outages. The US government planes that have been monitoring Melissa’s path are flown by pilots who aren’t being paid to do so, thanks to the government shutdown. These are the types of admirable missions led by people who understand the situation at a far more intimate level than Bill Gates ever will.

It is apparently not enough for America’s anti-tax crusaders that Congress just passed one of the most expensive and regressive tax bills in our history. The Washington Post reports that Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and other conservative groups are now urging the Trump administration to change how investment profits are taxed—unilaterally, if need be—in a way that would overwhelmingly favor the wealthiest Americans. Sound familiar? Namely, they want to index capital gains to inflation. Suppose I bought $100,000 worth of Apple stock on July 10, 2020 and kept it. Today, I could sell that stock for $170,383—a tidy $70,383 profit. That’s a 74 percent overall return and an average annual return of 11.7 percent. Pretty good, right? Not good enough for Norquist et al. These players want to let me adjust the “cost basis”—the price I originally paid for the stock—for inflation. Using this inflation calculator, I could then tell the IRS that my initial $100k investment was in fact a $120,407 investment, and so my profit for tax purposes is only $40,976. This is insane—for several reasons. First, read the room. Congress just passed a megabill whose benefits are deeply skewed in favor of the wealthy. Its tax provisions and spending cuts, taken together, will result in a 4 percent increase in average after-tax income for the richest 1 percent of American households and a nearly 4 percent decrease for the poorest 20 percent, based on the Yale Budget Lab’s analysis. This is very, very unpopular. The bill will at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt—more like $5 trillion if expiring provisions are extended in the coming years. And indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the tab—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits. > “I don’t think reducing [capital gains rates further] will change investor > behavior,” says billionaire Mark Cuban. Norquist told the Washington Post he recently spoke with President Donald Trump and recommended the president implement the change with an executive order. Indexing capital gains to inflation was considered during Trump’s first term, the Post‘s Jeff Stein reports, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin felt Congress should handle it—current secretary Scott Bessent may prove more complaint. “I said something like, ‘Mr. President, after we do the bill, we will need more economic growth,” Norquist told Stein. “The Big Beautiful Bill is very pro-growth, but with this, we can have even more growth.’” In reality, not one of the Republican tax packages enacted since Ronald Reagan became president has lived up to its sponsors’ economic promises. “The economy may well enjoy a sugar-high the next couple of years, as borrowing stimulates near-term consumption,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement after Congress passed the “One Bie Beautiful Bill” on July 3. “But a sugar-high won’t be sustained, it will do real damage, and often what comes next is the crash.” As for the notion of indexing fueling “more growth,” the billionaire investor Mark Cuban told me in an email that he thinks the current tax rates on capital gains are fair, and “I don’t think reducing it will change investor behavior.” Yet the fairness of those rates—and their justification—is the subject of fierce debate. Suppose I’m a wealthy investor and I sell assets I’ve held for at least 12 months—stocks, bonds, real estate, or even, say, a stud racehorse—netting my family $1,000,000 in profits. The federal tax on those capital gains ranges from zero for the first $94,000 to 20 percent for the portion that exceeds $583,750. Because my spouse and I have income of more than $250,000, we also have to pay a 3.8 percent “net investment income tax.” This all adds up to an effective tax rate of about 19 percent. But tax rates for wage income are much higher. A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes from primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code. > “This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing.” So how do conservative policy wonks justify the low capital gains rates? A key argument, interestingly, is that inflation eats away at the value of long-term gains. One “solution” would be to index the gains to inflation, notes the libertarian Cato Institute, “but most countries instead roughly compensate” by offering reduced tax rates for investors. And now the anti-taxers want to have it both ways. Investors enjoy other economic advantages, too. Notably, their gains are counted as income only when the assets are sold. In practice, this allows people with a large portfolio of appreciated assets to borrow against their holdings at single-digit interest rates and live off those loans instead of selling assets and paying a double-digit tax. As ProPublica discovered, many of America’s wealthiest families have been doing precisely that. (As a result, from 2014 to 2018, Jeff Bezos paid an effective income tax rate of less than 1 percent.) Or say you have a $100 investment that grows by 10 percent a year during a period of 2 percent annual inflation. The first year’s profit, after inflation, is $8. “But I don’t pay tax on that $8 until I sell, which may be decades later,” says Bob Lord a former tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “I’m basically getting a free ride on the appreciation of that $8 portion of my investment.” Doesn’t that benefit, he asks, more than offset any detriment from inflation? And also, isn’t investing supposed to contain an element of risk management? Isn’t the ability to beat inflation part of what separates a savvy investor from a useless one? Indexing for inflation, combined with favorable tax capital gains rates and an exemption for unrealized gains—doesn’t that basically reduce investing to shooting fish in a barrel? It is worth noting, too, that most Americans work for a paycheck, and the ones who make their living via investing are by and large quite wealthy. More than half of Americans now own some stock, but not much. As of January 2024, per Federal Reserve data, 93 percent of US stock holdings were owned by the most affluent 10 percent of the population, and the richest 1 percent owned more than half of all public equities—not to mention private equities. Indexing gains to inflation “would really codify the notion that income taxes are only for people who work for a living,” says Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock and current chairman of the board of Patriotic Millionaires, a nonprofit that advocates for higher taxes on the rich. If the Trump administration were to attempt the change Norquist recommended—unilaterally or otherwise—its not even clear how it would work. You would presumably need to make changes on both the profit and loss sides of a balance sheet. Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has concluded that indexing is complex and unlikely to generate significant economic impact, and is therefore “more trouble than it’s worth.” “Indexing has been rejected in the past to avoid opening new tax shelters,” says Steven Rosenthal, a Washington tax policy expert and former legislation counsel for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “If investors were permitted to index their assets, but not required to index their liabilities, debt-financed investments would explode. Investors could exclude profits and deduct interest. But indexing both assets and liabilities is a mess, which I, as a congressional staffer, discovered when we tried to draft it.” “This kind of proposal will only widen the economic inequality we’re facing,” adds Patriotic Millionaires’ Pearl. “It’s absurd that all I would need to do is buy property that I can rent out, and make a lot of money, and never have to pay taxes again!”

For kids like me, who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, comics were a big deal. Our media landscape otherwise consisted mainly of books and records, commercial radio, and, in my family’s case, a small black-and-white TV with a coat hanger antenna that got four staticky channels. So we periodically raided our piggy banks and headed to the Stop-N-Go for candy and comics. My favorite was Richie Rich.  Richie was wildly popular, a brave and generous little fellow with unfathomably wealthy parents. He’s 9 or 10 years old in the comics, with a signature outfit consisting of white booties, blue shorts, a black jacket, and a white shirt with a big red bowtie. (He’s a teenager, with outfits less Little Lord Fauntleroy, in the 1980s cartoon series—ditto the 1994 Macaulay Culkin movie.)  Swimming pools filled with cash, monogrammed ships and planes. All part of the Riches’ over-the-top aesthetic.NBCUniversal Had someone compared you to Richie back in the day, you might have thanked them. After all, he used his vast wealth for good. But Richie’s reputation has fallen upon hard times. “We all knew Trump was richie rich scumbag,” one Bluesky user wrote in March. Another posted, in reference to the Virginia governor and Trump sycophant Glenn Youngkin: “‘Richie Rich’ Youngkin (R), thinks poor people should just fucking stay poor.” A third circulated a parody comic book cover, “Richie Reich,” featuring a dour Musk/Richie hybrid doing the Nazi salute. It got more than 1,100 likes. “Richie is so misunderstood,” laments 30-year-old news producer Jonny Harvey, whose late grandfather, Leon, along with brothers Alfred and Robert, churned out hundreds of issues of Richie Rich on their family-friendly Harvey Comics imprint from 1960 through 1982—with an encore from 1986 to 1989, when the company was sold—in addition to titles like Little Audrey and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Richie would not appreciate being associated with Elon Musk.Gretchen Kent “I think people believe he’s this spoiled rich kid,” says Harvey, who is working on a documentary about the late family business. “Because of the blond hair, because he was the son of a multimillionaire, people make that [Trump] comparison. And there couldn’t be anything further from that.” Something clearly has shifted in our culture that we would so defame this icon of upper-crust benevolence. As a journalist who covers inequality and the author of a book, Jackpot, about the American wealth fantasy run amok, I decided it was time to revisit Richie to try to understand how economic changes since his heyday might account for the transformation. As it turns out, there are important lessons here for grownups, even if you’ve never heard of “the poor little rich boy.”  The Richie comics, in retrospect, are wildly incongruous. Richie’s family (much like Trump’s) is comically ostentatious. His mom is a jewel-laden socialite, his dad some sort of industrialist. They have swimming pools filled with cash, piles of gleaming gemstones, safes swollen to bursting, and driveways paved with gold bars—not to mention monogrammed ships and planes and swank mansions. The “help” includes butler Cadbury, robot maid Irona, and Bascomb, a chauffeur who shuttles Richie around in a stretch limo. Their dog, Dollar, has dollar signs for spots. It’s all quite over the top, and that’s part of the appeal. Billionaire and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, raised in a middle-class Pittsburgh family, “loved, loved, loved Richie Rich,” he told me via email. “Watching the cartoon was like driving around wealthy neighborhoods, dreaming of one day being able to afford one of the palatial homes I never thought I would ever even walk inside.”   Yet Richie is no snob. His endless money is leavened by courage, loyalty, and sheer goodness. Despite his vast fortune, he steers clear of the trust-fund kids, opting instead to share his adventures with public school pals. Richie’s besties, Freckles and Pee-Wee Friendly, basically live in a shack. “It was so funny,” says Angelo DeCesare, who wrote and drew Richie for Harvey Comics from 1978 to 1980. “It looked like this beat-up old thing with boards. They really made them poor!” Gloria Glad, Richie’s sweetheart, is the proverbial middle-class girl next door.  “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie..” says former Harvey Comics artist Angelo DeCesare. “Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”NBCUniversal Plots typically involved Richie using his limitless resources to bail out a friend, help solve somebody’s problem, or foil the bad guys forever scheming to steal his family’s wealth. In a paper, York University marketing professor Russell Belk summarized one 1966 story like this: “To keep his girlfriend Gloria’s father from being transferred out of town, Richie Rich buys a hot dog factory for $500,000 and has her father made general manager. The man Richie outbids for the plant is his father, who was buying it as a gift for Richie’s next birthday.”  The Harvey neighborhood crew includes a Black kid—quite the rarity in mainstream comics back then, though race is never referenced: Tiny’s distinguishing trait is his diminutive stature. “It was a way of showing that we’re all part of the same neighborhood, that we all have the same aspirations…that we all can have fun together,” Kathy Jackson, a professor of media at Virginia Wesleyan University, told Jonny Harvey in an interview for his film. “Certainly, in the 1960s, in the age of civil rights, that had important ramifications.”  Most of Harvey’s founders, artists, and writers were first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, more than a little familiar with ethnic bigotry. Their mission was to sell comics by creating stories that appealed to kids, encouraged them to read, and imparted good values along the way. Richie would be appalled by the thought that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” as Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in February. He would never, as Musk did on X, brag about a weekend spent “feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Nor would he terrorize federal workers or seek Medicaid reductions to facilitate tax cuts for his family. He wouldn’t slash research funding, either—Richie loves scientists and inventors. He’d be inclined to build them new, cutting-edge labs—and gleaming hospitals for the sick, and cozy abodes for the unhoused. Because Richie Rich is not an asshole.  He is, alas, entirely fictional. “There was no such person like that in the world, who had that kind of money and would use it in the way Richie did,” DeCesare told me. To longtime Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, “Richie was his idealized fantasy of what he really wished the wealthy would be; they would be kind,” says son Seth Jacobson, 67, who remembers hanging out with his late father’s team at their offices in Manhattan’s old Gulf and Western Building. “My dad was a diehard Democrat,” he recalls. “He wanted taxes to be higher for the rich and the upper middle class. He wanted universal health coverage.”  Some Richie characters were more in sync with the Mar-a-Lago crowd, like Reginald Van Dough, Richie’s greedy, scheming cousin, and Mayda Munny, a snooty social climber who is desperate to woo Richie away from Gloria but inevitably fails because Gloria loves Richie despite his money, not because of it. “Those comics were very moral. That’s what I liked about them,” says DeCesare. “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie. Be generous, kind, have empathy for your fellow human beings. Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.” Ideally, children are encouraged to share and tell the truth—and to care about others. As we grow up, some people continue to embrace those values. Others clearly don’t. As for Richie’s parents, the question of what it might take to amass and protect such riches or who may have been exploited in the process is never explored. Did Mr. Rich, like even the “good billionaire” Warren Buffett, have vast holdings in polluting industries or take advantage of obscure (if scandalously legal) tax avoidance strategies? We’ll never know. Richie exists in a realm free of adult politics, unscathed by what one wealthy Silicon Valley denizen described to me as the “blasé weirdness” experienced by the heirs to vast fortunes—think Succession. (“My wife and I are doing our best for that not to happen,” Cuban told me. “I hope my kids are more like Richie.”)  The values Richie embodied, and our notion of noblesse oblige—the duty of society’s richest to behave with honor, generosity, and responsibility toward those with less—have waned in tandem with a staggering rise in wealth inequality. In 1960, if your salary exceeded $60,000, every additional dollar was taxed at a rate ranging from 71 percent to 91 percent. This helped keep our financial differences in check. But the tax cuts signed by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s chopped the top bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent. Two years after he left office, Congress enabled a type of trust—by accident, the lawyer credited with inventing it told me—that America’s dynasties now use routinely to transfer vast fortunes, often billions of dollars, to offspring without paying a dime of inheritance tax.  Since Richie’s heyday, we’ve also witnessed the rise of the zero-sum mindset embodied by Trump and his minions. Namely, the idea that every transaction has a winner and a loser—and you do not want to lose. This ethos is now standard operating procedure for a subset of the superrich, compelling ultrawealthy parents to bribe and cheat their children’s way into elite colleges, as revealed in the 2019 scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. It also helps explain why more than 84 percent of that year’s incoming college freshmen—whose collective top priority in 1969 was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life”—selected as their new No. 1 goal: “being very well off financially.”    A uniting myth of America for scrappers and strivers and immigrants is that of a land of opportunity, despite the bigotry that has pervaded our laws and culture. (Leon Harvey would have excelled in advertising, grandson Jonny told me, “but Jewish sons of Jewish immigrants mostly could not get the advertising jobs.”) The distribution of wealth in Richie’s day was by no means egalitarian, but it was markedly more so than today. The notion of a child of superrich parents attending public schools and mixing with poor and middle-income kids was less laughable in 1965, when the pay ratio of CEOs to typical workers at the nation’s 350 largest companies was 21 to 1. By 2019, the ratio had soared to 320 to 1.  A real child of billionaires today probably wouldn’t be running around with poor kids like Freckles and Pee-Wee.NBCUniversal/Sally Edelstein archive Such vast resource differences contribute to what social scientists call “income segregation,” and I like to call “wealth flight.” “The things that people can afford tend to dictate the spaces that they inhabit,” explains Cornell sociologist Kendra Bischoff, who studies the phenomenon in collaboration with Stanford’s Sean Reardon. Rising inequality increases “the spatial separation of people of different incomes,” she told me. When parents opt into private schools, elite sports leagues, and other exclusive activities for their children, “those are the kinds of structural conditions that lead kids to be a lot less likely to hang out with each other,” and that lack of exposure very plausibly “limits their understanding of the world and decreases empathy for people who are different than them.” There’s that word again—the one that, in the Trumpian mindset, belies weakness. Indeed, there’s good evidence that people of higher socioeconomic status tend to be less empathetic than their lower-status counterparts. “We find that people who are relatively well-off are less likely to orient to others in social environments,” says Paul Piff, a psychologist who studies wealth and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. What’s more, he says, “upper-class individuals show—both explicitly, they talk about it, and physiologically—reduced signs of compassion, less sympathy. They’re less moved by the needs of others.” Who’s to know if hoarding money makes some people callous or whether less-empathetic people are simply more prone to pursuing materialistic aims? Cuban restated a theory I’ve heard numerous times, that great wealth merely amplifies a person’s character: If you’re a Reginald sans dough, you’ll end up a Reginald Van Dough. But “if you were nice and caring” before you hit the jackpot, you’ll remain a good person—and have more resources to do good. “Where I think people deviate from that is during the grind to make money—to get to having more than you ever dreamed of,” Cuban says. “That grind is filled with uncertainty for all those not born wealthy. That’s where you focus on your company, often to the exclusion of others. Families. Relationships.”  The ramifications of America’s wealth divide have grown clearer as the Trump regime lays waste to agencies and programs that the families of Richie’s friends might have relied upon and seeks to privatize federal services and enact more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.01 percent—a group who began this year with an average of $938 million in estimated household assets, and whose share of the nation’s overall wealth has more than quadrupled since 1976, even as the middle class’s share has dwindled.  Richie Rich was a good egg, if a Fabergé one. But today, as America’s wealthiest have fallen in line behind the most egregiously materialistic human being ever to occupy the Oval Office, Richie seems like an anachronism. Remember that Gulf and Western Building where Harvey Comics once had its offices? In the mid-1990s it was acquired by a consortium that included a certain New York City real estate developer. Now it’s the Trump International Hotel and Tower.  The irony, as they say, is rich.

America is witnessing an unprecedented series of attacks on higher education that commenced well before Donald Trump was re-elected, amid the contentious protests that followed Hamas’ attacks on Israel and Israel’s ruthless (and ongoing) retaliation on Gaza and its inhabitants. But Trump, as president, has taken matters much further. Claiming antisemitism, his administration is revoking student visas and arresting students who have engaged in nonviolent protests or expressed opinions on social media or in innocuous op-eds. The government’s pauses, reviews, and cancellations of grants and contracts at top universities—including new funding freezes totaling $1 billion for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern—are creating havoc. And its attempt to cap federal funding for the indirect costs of medical research, though tied up in court, could prove devastating to research universities, some of which have already fired staff, imposed hiring freezes, and slashed or postponed graduate programs in response. Now Republicans are considering a tenfold tax increase on endowment investment income for certain universities to help pay for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. All told, these actions amount to the most profound crisis US colleges and universities have ever faced, with likely ripple effects on regional economies and employment, public health, and medicine. Indeed, they have thrown the future of America’s leadership in science and innovation into question. Yet, instead of speaking out forcefully and cracking open their endowments to cover any shortfalls, most top schools have hunkered down, and even, in Columbia’s case, cut a deal with the administration. Only a few university presidents, including Princeton’s Chris Eisgruber and Wesleyan’s Michael Roth, have had the courage to stick their necks out. To better understand why, I reached out to Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the “financialization” of higher ed, and who argued, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that elite institutions can absolutely afford to fight—and should. Trying to walk too fine a tightrope between the schools’ needs and the interests of wealthy donors, after all, is a high-risk endeavor. In Eaton’s view, “pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Few college presidents have spoken out publicly about these attacks. It’s baffling to me that our top colleges—and law firms, for that matter—aren’t fighting en masse to protect the interests of their students and faculty. What do you make of the reluctance? By their nature elite universities are conservative—as in cautious—institutions, and I don’t think that equips them well to deal with a full frontal assault like this. Also, elite universities are tied to other elites, especially from the world of finance, who themselves are somewhere between the lines with Trump, and have some sympathy for the Trumpist attacks on diversity and inclusion as university values. So that’s part of what we’ve seen that’s frozen these institutions in their tracks—why they are reacting like deer in the headlights. Right. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers just had an op-ed in the New York Times in which he decries colleges’ emphasis on identity politics as opposed to academic excellence, in hiring and so forth. I think that’s the same Summers op-ed where he says [to Harvard]: Don’t be intimidated, spend the endowment—which is pretty different than what we’ve seen from Columbia and a lot of the other elite schools. Summers has played a different role for a long time than your conventional university president. He was the secretary of the Treasury. He’s highly political and has been engaged in politics, and this is a political struggle. Universities like to pretend to not be political—and there are plenty of ways they shouldn’t be, in order to foster free speech and open debate. But pretending that these attacks aren’t political and not making a political strategy to push back is a fatal error. Wasn’t it this sort of waffling that got them into trouble in the first place amid the Gaza protests? Everybody wanted administrators to issue statements, and they didn’t really know what to do. They’d already spoken up on other things, in support of Ukraine or whatever. And now it looks like they’re stuck back in this mode of indecision. Yeah. You know, the primary job of an elite university president is to raise money from donors, and if you’re spending a lot of your day talking to your wealthiest alumni—who may have donated to Trump or may feel sympathetic with Trump’s critiques of diversity at the university—it’s hard for folks who spend their day in those social circles to imagine pushing back. That gets at my next question. Your research examines the relationships between what you call “financialization” and inequalities in higher education. Can you explain how your work applies to the current situation? Yeah. So, my book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, shows a radical increase in the proportion of elite university board members coming from finance, particularly private equity and hedge funds. If you go back to the ’80s, private equity and hedge funds didn’t really exist. Investment bankers were prominent on university boards but it’s nothing like today. And these are folks who have some official reach in university policy, and who are the primary fund-raisers—a main job of board members is both to donate a lot and to raise money from other donors. We saw the activation of these ties around the Gaza war protests, with a subset of wealthy donors saying they wanted to suspend donations to the university until protests were suppressed. It’s not hard to imagine that board elites from Wall Street who were always uncomfortable with elite universities embracing diversity and inclusion see an opportunity to push back, and Trump has opened the space for it to be okay to oppose this. And of course, their complaints often involved perceived antisemitism at Harvard and so forth, with rich alums like Bill Ackman chiming in. It does seem, in any case, that college presidents are under extraordinary pressure to align themselves with the interests of trustees and top donors. You often don’t quite see how a system works and the preferences of different actors, their roles in the system, until the system is threatened by disruption. I don’t think anybody was terribly attuned to the dispositions of the financiers on university boards 5 or 10 years ago because, outside of a crisis, donors weren’t engaging to pressure the university to be one thing or another. Since the Gaza war and allegations of antisemitism, and now even more so with the Trump attacks, the preferences and dispositions of these donors may become more visible. A lot of them must be aghast to see colleges they care about taking such a hit. Yeah. A proactive, offensive university strategy would be to say no to Trump, to try to weather the storm by tapping the endowment and by turning to alumni of all wealth levels, to say, “Help defend your alma mater. Now is the time that we need you.” You wrote that top colleges can afford a fight. I think we have 16 schools now with endowments over $10 billion, yet many are cutting deals, and in some cases graduate programs. Why would any private foundation, let alone an educational one, hoard money in the face of such a crisis? I have to give Larry Summers credit for saying endowments are not to be admired; they are there to be spent in a crisis. And I acknowledge President Obama for saying the same. But universities have become attached to steadily growing their endowment as a status object. And that course of action is at this moment potentially fatal for the university as we know it. We think of endowments as one giant pot of money, but really they consist of thousands of individual gifts, most earmarked for specific purposes. To an extent. Even the Columbia endowment, which is smaller than Harvard and Princeton and Yale—it’s $15 billion. By my recollection, several billion is entirely unrestricted. The University of California, which has a smaller endowment, especially relative to its size, has billions in unrestricted funds. You know, another implication here is that universities should be seeking to raise more unrestricted endowment funds. But as Summers says, as a former Harvard president: Believe me when I say you can spend the endowment, even restricted funds in it. I don’t quite know how that works. I assumed these are legal contracts. No, it’s true. The law that governs this allows for, in a crisis, you can act in extraordinary ways. Now universities should not undertake this haphazardly. One of the things that endowments are dedicated to is financial aid for low-income students. Most of the very elite colleges have become debt free. So, I’m not saying they should dig into that funding to protect other things. The point is, endowments are huge resources. They have been used to weather past crises, including the 2008 financial crisis and the early months of Covid. And they must be again to defend the university. The University of California, at the beginning of Covid, liquidated $1.8 billion of its Blue and Gold endowment—an additional 8 percent. That’s more than doubling the (normal) expenditure, which is less than Columbia would have to do to weather the $400 million in cuts. There are a lot of different financial mechanics a university can use to tap its endowment. Do you think elite universities, either financially or in terms of hewing to liberal orthodoxies, have gone too far in ways that make them susceptible to these right-wing attacks? The culture side is not my area of expertise. But one thing I can say is that you really can’t divide the financial practices and the exclusiveness of elite universities from their culture. If you go back to the 1970s, Princeton had a pretty big endowment, but it only spent about $10,000 per student from the endowment each year, after adjusting for inflation. Today, Princeton spends $180,000 per student on operations because the endowment has grown so much, and the public is right when they see the Ivy League as more inaccessible than ever. Princeton has only increased its enrollment by a fraction, even as it’s gotten wealthier by more than tenfold. Our problem is that, in the public imagination and political discourse, college is [schools like Princeton and] Harvard, even though in reality, college in the US is— Penn State? Right, or Michigan State—a regional public university or commuter college. Seventy percent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded by public universities, but the persistent exclusiveness of the Ivy League has put a target on the back of all universities, because all universities are imagined to be like them. So [the problem is] actually not too much diversity and inclusiveness; it’s the disingenuousness of discourses of diversity and inclusion at elite schools while they enroll only a tiny fraction of students, overwhelmingly from the very wealthy. If you need a citation, look at the Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Another thing is, universities are mostly thought of as colleges, but they also do research that leads to technological innovation and lifesaving medicines. They run hospitals. But those things are still done in a culture of elite superiority, rather than conceived of as immensely valuable services in the public interest. And related to their failure to expand in the face of rising demand, their wealth has exploded on the public’s dime, given all the tax-free growth of their endowments. Which brings us to the proposed tax increase... One other stat I’ll throw at you is that, up until recent years—and it may still be the case—UC Berkeley, not the most equitable and accessible of public universities, enrolled more low-income Pell Grant recipients than the entire Ivy League combined! That’s because Berkeley grew its enrollment a lot over the last 50 years to make space for more students, including students from lower and middle-class backgrounds. And that doesn’t mean worse students. Just kids who grew up with less. Yeah, the thought experiment of: What if Princeton enrolled twice as many students and only spent $90,000 a year per student from the endowment? I think it would still be an extraordinary university. Okay, so Republicans want to raise the tax on endowment investment income from 1.4 percent to 14 percent or more for colleges with high endowment to student ratios. I’ve been critical of the way private foundations hoard public wealth, and so maybe they should be taxed more. But how do you think such a tax will affect the educational missions of elite institutions? I mean, it’s a sham! These institutions will figure out ways around it no matter what Trump does. I favor taxes on the wealthiest endowments if they fail to use their resources to provide a sufficient public good, either by enrolling more students or by doing other important things in the public interest. But this is about punishing schools for perceived inclusiveness. Democrats and elite universities have left themselves vulnerable to these tax proposals, which will be used opportunistically to fund tax cuts for billionaires. We leave the door open by not developing a progressive policy that incentivizes endowments to be used in the public interest. But that is not what this proposal is—nor what it will ever be. If you really cared about public good, you’d impose the tax on all private foundations, not just elite universities. Yeah. And it’s telling what they actually use the revenue for. The 2017 endowment tax [the current 1.4 percent income tax was imposed by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] was to help offset the Trump tax cut for wealthy people. That is what this will be, but it’s also to punish these institutions. As I think I said in my op-ed, universities are some of the first institutions that autocrats attack, and that’s because they provide space for free debate and free speech that can challenge and criticize the autocrat. So it’s not a coincidence that Trump is going after universities, perhaps more aggressively than any other institution in American society.

As he waited in the shadow of a parking garage in Tempe, Arizona, to hear Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak last Thursday evening, John Ward, a longtime Democrat from the deep-red retirement community of Sun City West, told me he “probably” hadn’t voted for the Vermont senator in the past, but that it felt like Sanders had become a party leader by default.  “I mean, Kamala’s not talking. Barack’s not talking. Biden’s not talking,” he said. “Right now, he’s the only one talking, and he’s the only one making sense.” Ward arrived hours early to catch Sanders at the latest stop on his “Fight Oligarchy Tour,” but already the line snaked around the block to get into the hockey arena on the campus of Arizona State University. The rallies, which Sanders began organizing in February to apply pressure to Republican lawmakers in their home districts, have been growing and growing. According to organizers, nearly 87,000 people attended five events last week—a stunning showing 20 months away from the midterms. Before an event at a high school football stadium in Tucson on Saturday—where people started arriving at 6 a.m. for an 11:30 start—I met a high school student who had persuaded her grandmother to come with her all the way from Redlands, California. It had taken them half a day, stopping every three hours to recharge their car. (No, they clarified; it was not that kind of electric car.)  The Fight Oligarchy Tour is drawing larger crowds than the Sanders’ presidential campaign ever did, but it’s also drawing a different sort of crowd. Although there were still more “Feel the Bern” t-shirts than you can count, at two stops in Arizona last week most of the people I talked to were, like Ward, not longtime supporters. A significant number had not even attended a political event or a protest before. Many of these voters found Sanders’ long-running message of a growing oligarchy newly resonant at a time when the richest man in the world has been given carte blanche to dismantle public institutions. Above all, they showed up because they wanted to hear elected officials express the sort of frustration and rage Democratic voters have been feeling for months. They wanted to be where the fight was. Sanders’ rallies offer both a lifeline and a warning to a party that hasn’t yet found its footing: Start going after Trump—or voters might start going after you, too. Arizonans watch Bernie Sanders deliver remarks from the Catalina High School football bleachers.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones You couldn’t go far at these rallies without running into someone who was dealing firsthand with the fallout from President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s attack on the federal bureaucracy. The very first person I talked to before Thursday’s rally in Tempe told me he was moving back to Puerto Rico after being fired from the IRS. In Tucson on Saturday, I met an educator from a border community whose special-education programming was getting wiped out due to cuts at the Department of Education. Sitting in the top row of bleachers inside the event, a woman from Nogales whose company buys produce from Mexico spent five minutes patiently explaining the process of importing fruit, and how the impending tariffs will force distributors to shut down. For seniors, Social Security was front of mind. When I talked to Lisa Melton outside the arena in Tempe, she said she was now planning on tapping into the program a year early and taking an annual $2,000 hit because she didn’t trust what the Trump administration was going to do it. I don’t know if that’s a sound strategy; I do know that she was terrified. “I tried to sign up for Social Security about a month ago,” said Therese Wagner, a bit further up the line. “I got in and then it got error messages and I thought, Elon Musk is fucking with our Social Security already.” Wagner eventually managed to apply, but rallygoers feared that things were only going to get worse. A retired bus driver named Kevin James volunteered that he’d recently got so upset after trying to talk to a human at the Social Security Administration that he called the White House right after. “I politely said, ‘I would like to express concern and displeasure,’” he said. “Click.” These people are as furious at Republicans right now as you might expect. Musk would probably find a warmer reception on Mars. But what separates the energy of the Sanders-led Fight Oligarchy Tour from the 2017-era Resistance is that a lot of the anger is trained at their own party. Democratic voters’ approval of congressional Democrats has fallen 35 points since last year, according to a recent survey, and rallygoers at the two Arizona stops took aim what they perceived as a toothless approach to the new administration. > “We have to take matters into our own hands, because the people who should be > fighting for us aren’t.” As she waited in the stands in Tucson on Saturday morning, Samantha Schrieber offered a characteristic response when I asked about what Democratic leaders have been doing. “They’ve been doing something? What have they been doing?,” she said. Then she laughed. “They haven’t been doing shit.” Attendees at the Arizona rallies were the focus group of Chuck Schumer’s nightmares. They talked about “backbone” about as often as they talked about “fascism.” The strategy seemed to be to “play dead and just wait for everyone to vote for them,” one young voter complained. The Senate minority leader was “bringing a pillow to a gunfight,” said a cannabis worker. Watching the party fold over the budget was “incapacitating,” said a disabled veteran, who was thinking of running for office now himself. A woman who had just protested outside her Republican congressman’s office told me simply: “We have to take matters into our own hands, because the people who should be fighting for us aren’t.” To a lot of the people I spoke with, too many Democrats were still searching for comity in a political climate that had moved beyond it. “Democrats kind of lean on, like, ‘They’re not all bad, we can all get along’ kind of thing,” said Adonis Gonzalez, who was selling “Deport Elon” and “Smash the Oligarchy” buttons outside the hockey arena. “I feel like right now we don’t necessarily need that message. I think we need a message of, ‘Hey, there are bad people trying to do bad things and we should as good people come together and stop them.’” Sanders was once criticized for saying billionaires shouldn’t exist. But the argument has caught on.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones At Sanders’ rallies, Musk was as big of a villain as President Donald Trump.Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones The speakers on stage during the tour sought to channel this frustration into immediate action and longer-term transformation. Sanders, who has said he went on tour only after seeing the tepid response to Trump from the Democratic Party, chose his rally locations strategically. They are all either in competitive but Republican-held House districts, or close to them. In Michigan earlier this month, he targeted second-term Rep. John James. In Colorado on Friday, it was first-term Rep. Gabe Evans. In Arizona, Ocasio-Cortez promised that Democrats would unseat veteran Republican David Schweikert, who held onto his suburban Phoenix seat in November in one of the country’s closest races. The hope is that with sustained public pressure on vulnerable Republicans, Democrats can convince enough of them to block Trump’s objectives in a narrowly divided chamber. > “Trump helped me immensely in educating the American people to what oligarchy > is,” Sanders said. Sanders is, in large part, still giving the speech about oligarchy he’s been giving for the last decade. But the 83-year-old was a bit more soulful, as he spoke with urgency about threats that are now not just theoretical but existential. There were nods to both the nation’s founders, and its second founding at the end of the Civil War—at various stops on the tour, he and the crowd have recited a portion of the Gettysburg Address together. It’s like a tea party rally for people who believe the 14th Amendment is real. “From the bottom of my heart I am still convinced that they can be defeated,” he said on stage in Tempe. Part of the reason for that optimism was the presence of a handful of considerably younger allies joining him on tour, including Texas Rep. Greg Casar and Ocasio-Cortez, who told the crowd in Tempe, “We’re gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve” before she even introduced herself. And “these bums” might not all be Republicans. The Bronx Democrat, who as Sanders noted won her seat after primarying a member of the Democratic leadership, drew huge applause when she told the crowd, “you all have shown that if a US Senator isn’t fighting hard enough for you, you’re not afraid to replace her with one who will”—a reference to both Republican Martha McSally and the Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who declined to run for re-election in the face of plummeting Democratic support.  Musk and Trump—Vice President J.D. Vance was never mentioned—were trying “steal our healthcare, social security, and veterans benefits in order to pay for their tax cuts,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Pugilism was the name of the game. “We’re gonna fight, fight, fight,” she said. Attendees deserved people “with the courage to brawl for the working class.” In Tempe, she used the word “fight” 13 times. “My queen!” someone at Arizona State shouted. Ocasio-Cortez laughed. “Your representative,” she said. Technically, the congresswoman from the Bronx isn’t that, either. (In fact, she was full of praise for the four Democrats currently representing Arizona in Washington.) But on stage, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies were holding themselves up as, in effect, the true opposition—an alternative power center that will stand up for working people when the people who promised to do so fade away.     “We’re gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve.”   Sam Van Pykeren/Mother Jones After their speeches in Tucson had wrapped up on Saturday, and the announced crowd of 20,000 had begun to trickle out, Bernie and Casar chatted with reporters for a few minutes in the high school gym where the rally was originally slated to be held—before the surge in interest pushed it outdoors. It had been a hectic three-state tour, and Sanders had spoken for half an hour under a scorching high-desert sun. As he dropped into a folding chair, the senator looked spent. But he let out a loud laugh when I asked if it felt like people were more attuned to his message about “oligarchy” now, in Trump’s second term. “Trump helped me immensely in educating the American people to what oligarchy is,” he said. The inauguration crystallized things, he said. The three richest men in the world, sitting alongside the richest cabinet in history, made for a powerful symbol. “It doesn’t take Bernie Sanders to point out that you now have a government of the billionaires by the billionaires and for the billionaires—I think that’s clear and apparent to everyone.” Now that people have come around to Sanders’ diagnosis of the problem, he hopes they will accept that the prescriptions he and his allies are offering. Anyone who has been listening to him for a while will recognize the applause lines—free health care, free college, new organizing protections for unions. He’s recently started using Musk’s obsession with artificial intelligence and automation at DOGE to argue in his speeches that what’s happening to federal workers now will come for your industry too—if it hasn’t already. But a major part of his pitch is the need to overhaul the Democratic party. I asked Sanders what he thought about the rumblings about a liberal tea party. While he commended the party’s accomplishments on social issues and civil rights, he reiterated a point he’s made in the past. “I think very few people who understand politics can deny that by and large, for the last 30, 40 years, the Democratic Party has turned its back on the working class of this country, and that is the working class out there,” Sanders said, referring to the crowd outside. “They want leadership like Greg and Alexandria to stand up, and they want more people. They’re tired of Democratic hacks. They’re tired of Republicans.” “I mean, we are taking on everybody,” he continued. “Taking on the oligarchy, taking on the Republican Party, taking on the Democratic leadership, taking on the corporate media, taking on Wall Street. It ain’t easy and this change is not gonna happen overnight.” Casar, the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, put the point a bit more sharply, when I asked why it seemed like his colleagues had been caught flat footed. “The biggest divide right now within the Democratic party [is] between fighters and folders, it’s not just between the sort of the typical left–right constellation that you usually talk about in political media.” Democrats who rolled over in this moment were “playing some sort of political game,” he said, but “most people don’t think of their lives as a political game. They think of their lives as their only life on earth, and they want somebody to say, ‘we’re going to do everything we can to protect our democracy and keep your life from getting worse.’”  “We either have to listen to our voters, channel that energy and turn this into an organizing moment,” he said, “or, you know, face the consequences from our voters.” Sanders and his younger colleagues are hoping to channel this dissatisfaction into a movement that can remake the Democratic Party and wrest power back from the billionaire class. But a public uprising powered, to such a large extent, by the anger and anxieties of mainstream Democrats could still end up in a much different direction.  By the time we wrapped up in the gym in Tucson, the crowd had emptied out, and only a few stragglers remained. Lois Bursuk, a school psychologist, and Linda Laraia, a retired VA nurse, were cooling off under a tree by the main entrance. They were fed up with what they were seeing in Washington, and had each taken their own steps to resist Trump. Bursuk had recently joined hundreds of protestors outside the nearby office of Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani. “They just inspire me to keep going, because they’ve been on this platform now for a decade, and I’m grateful that they’re there,” she said of Sanders and his colleagues. But Laraia, when asked, offered a far different choice for a Democratic champion going forward. “Okay, I’m gonna put in a plug for somebody I want to run for President,” she said.  “Mark Cuban.”  Additional reporting by Nadia Hamdan and Sam Van Pykeren.

The budget resolution released Wednesday by the House Republican caucus contains no concrete details, but it codifies a GOP strategy that should surprise absolutely no one. In parallel with the mayhem playing out in the Executive Branch, the House lawmakers aim to gut agencies Donald Trump disfavors, boost spending for those that align with his agenda, renew and extend the 2017 tax cuts that enriched America’s most affluent—his latest proposals all told, by one estimate, would raise taxes on all but the top 5 percent. They also pay lip service to the deficit even as their proposals will increase it significantly, perhaps as a way to build political consensus for cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Specifically, the new resolution directs each House committee to submit recommendations, by March 25, to either cut or increase federal spending under its jurisdiction. The figures below cover the 10-year period from 2025 to 2034. Cuts (“not less than…”) Agriculture: $230 billion Education and Workforce: $330 billion Energy and Commerce: $880 billion Financial Services: $1 billion Natural Resources: $1 billion Transportation and Infrastructure: $10 billion Total cuts: $1.45 trillion Increases (“not more than…”) Armed Services: $100 billion Homeland Security: $90 billion Judiciary: $110 billion Oversight and Government Reform: $50 billion And the doozy: Ways and Means, the committee responsible for tax policy, “shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $4,500,000,000,000.” That’s an invitation for a net $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. Total increases: $4.85 trillion If the total cuts from the group above don’t reach $2 trillion, the document states, the difference will come out of Ways and Means’ $4.5 trillion allowance. That would leave us with $3 trillion in deficit spending. But at least the rich will get their tax breaks, right? In the past, House Republicans have talked a good game on balanced budgets. This would be anything but. Tellingly, their resolution makes a show of lamenting the growing federal debt, which “poses a significant risk to the country’s long-term fiscal sustainability, with implications for future generations.” The document points to the mandatory spending that accounts for more than 70 percent of the budget, noting that it has increased by 59 percent since 2019. And yes, the growing debt is a problem, especially when interest rates are higher, which makes servicing payments expensive, but there are ways to narrow the deficit that the Republicans, along with Elon Musk and his DOGE bros, have largely ignored. Indeed, the gripes about mandatory federal spending, especially in this context, sound like a pre-justification for cutting from the three biggest areas of mandatory spending: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Republicans have already targeted Medicaid, the national health insurance program for the poor, by proposing work requirements—which evidence shows are little more than a cruel tactic to purge people from the rolls. Going after Social Security and Medicare would be messing with America’s seniors, who are relatively wealthy and politically engaged, driving up their health care costs. Historically, the latter two have been political third rails, “but with this group, I kind of never know anymore,” says a Democratic aide who works with the House Ways and Means Commitee. “They’re already talking about doing things on Social Security and Medicare in a way that I never would have thought they would be talking about, but it’s definitely in the ether.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter—Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis. Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers.” The president, who previously suggested supporters of EVs “rot in hell” before somewhat tempering his rhetoric, has already ditched an aspirational goal for half of all car sales to be electric by the end of the decade, halted some funding for EV chargers, and began reversing vehicle pollution standards that prod auto companies to shift away from gasoline models. A key tax credit for Americans buying an EV, worth up to $7,500, is also a major target for elimination, although to overturn this Trump will require Republicans in Congress. Should he succeed, though, the impact would be significant, with a recent study finding that electric car sales could fall by 27 percent without the incentive. > “It just shows he’s an opportunist, really.” “Turning off the credits would affect a meaningful share of the EV market,” said Joseph Shapiro, a University of California, Berkeley, economist and co-author of the study, who added that while a growing number of people would still go electric, the total number of cars sold would shrink by more than 300,000 a year than if the incentives stayed in place. “You could say that it would be a speed bump in the road but if the US goes all electric in 2090 rather than 2050, say, that matters a lot for the planet,” he said. “A lot of carbon would be emitted in that time.” Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically backed by Musk, despite the world’s richest person heading Tesla, the market-leading EV company that also relies upon some parts made in China that may be targeted by tariffs imposed by Trump. Musk has said, though, that removal of EV subsidies will hurt rivals such as Ford and General Motors more than Tesla. “Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies, in July. “It will only help Tesla.” There is some logic to this, Shapiro said. Tesla is comfortably the largest EV brand in the US, accounting for nearly half of all sales, and makes more profit per car than its rivals, meaning the removal of incentives would be disproportionately felt by other manufacturers. “If the tax credit is removed Tesla could survive and have less competition, they have more headroom to withstand a decrease in the market size,” Shapiro said. Stock in Tesla surged following Trump’s election win. However, Tesla will still be affected. Weakening federal pollution rules, for example, could see a reduction in the amount of carbon credits Tesla sells to other car companies—amounting to $2.7 billion just last year—to offset their emissions and avoid fines. Tesla’s sales dipped slightly for the first time in 2024, amid concern among some of its traditionally liberal customer base about Musk’s rightward political turn. “Tesla isn’t immune to sales being impacted, they have some brand loyalty although we don’t know what the impact Elon Musk has had on polarizing consumers yet, that’s still a bit of an unknown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, which estimates EVs will have a 10 percent share of US car sales this year, up from 8 percent in 2024. Regardless, Musk’s focus has now seemingly shifted away from EVs to other areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and his SpaceX venture, Valdez Streaty said. He has also embraced rightwing fixations shared by Trump. In a speech after the president was inaugurated, Musk made no mention of cars but said that the “future of civilization is assured” with “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff.” He added: “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars,” in reference to the “department of government efficiency” he heads in an effort to curb spending. “Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? Bam. Bam. Yeah. How inspiring would that be?” Concern over the climate crisis is seemingly no longer one of Musk’s priorities, despite previously saying he is “super pro-climate” and in 2016 calling for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.” > “This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary > accomplishments…But it also has a dark side.” When Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk said he was quitting a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.” But Musk has had little to say after Trump, who memorably called climate change “a giant hoax,” once again pulled the US from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.” Critics say it is unlikely Musk will reflect the growing alarm voiced by scientists, and the American public, over the impacts of dangerous global heating within the Trump administration. “It just shows he’s an opportunist, really,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. “He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.” Those who know Musk say that he soured on Democrats in part after not being invited to a major summit on electric cars held by the White House in 2021, after Joe Biden became president. “That was an unforced error by Biden,” said Robert Zubrin, a leading advocate for human exploration of Mars who said he helped introduce Musk to the idea of Martian expansion. “And in the past two years, Elon Musk has redefined himself from the white knight of environmentalists to a Bond villain.” Zubrin said that Musk’s “central motivation is the desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds. He wants to save civilization because he wants to be famous for saving civilization. “This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments, Tesla and SpaceX,” he added. “But it also has a dark side to it, and this has been exploited.” Tesla was contacted about its stance towards the EV tax credits but did not respond.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When the White House took down a critical environmental justice tool just three days into President Trump’s administration, a team of data scientists and academics sprang into action.  They had prepared for this exact moment, having created a list of 250 online resources widely expected to be taken down during Trump’s second term. The Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, a platform created to help federal agencies, states, and community organizations identify neighborhoods heavily burdened by pollution, topped the list. The team worked quickly to re-create the tool using previously archived data and host it on a new website. Two days later, the webpage was up and running. In the two weeks since Trump’s inauguration, his administration moved swiftly to scrub government websites of information it objects to. Federal agencies have taken down critical environmental and public health datasets. The US Global Change Research Program ended the National Nature Assessment, a sweeping review of the nation’s flora and fauna and its benefits to humanity. Departments throughout the executive branch have altered websites to eliminate any reference to the inequities women, people of color, and other marginalized communities face.  > “Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the > best policy decision, whatever that is.” Researchers and advocates whose work revolves around addressing these inequities and mitigating the impacts of climate change told Grist they find these changes troubling.  “One of the things that’s worrisome is when you start to take down resources like this, you start to construct a knowledge sphere that doesn’t acknowledge that environmental or climate injustices exist,” said Eric Nost, a geographer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph. Nost, who studies the role of data technology in environmental policymaking, is part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, one of several organizations tracking the Trump administration’s changes to federal websites and resources. Many of these changes are a direct response to executive orders the president issued within hours of taking office to end “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and defend “Women From Gender Ideology Extremism.” Many of them dovetail with his rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their policies on areas with high poverty rates and large minority populations. Trump also revoked Justice40, President Biden’s policy of ensuring so-called “disadvantaged” communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of climate and energy spending. Some of the resources dismantled in the past two weeks, including the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, were created to help achieve these goals. The Environmental Protection Agency deleted pages showcasing the work of African American employees. It also removed an equity action plan, the “Diversity and Inclusion” section on its careers page, and scrubbed “Environmental Justice” and “Climate Change” from its homepage menu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and resources related to trans people, HIV, and environmental justice. The Department of Energy eliminated online resources for anyone struggling with energy bills. The webpage previously listed government assistance programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay for electricity. The agency also killed its own version of the environmental justice screening tool. Beyond making it harder for taxpayers to access information that could reduce their bills and navigate some of the effects of climate change, these steps make it harder to govern effectively. “Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University. “To the extent that any administration is not using data or not giving access to data, that will always be of concern to us.” The law program has been tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental rules and environmental justice policies since his first term. A handful of other groups consisting of academics, archivists, students, and environmental organizations are pursuing similar efforts and have launched an initiative called the Public Environmental Data Project. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is part of the effort, as is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has since 1996 been archiving webpages, and End of Term, a group that has since 2008 archived federal websites at the end of each presidential administration.  > “I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it > done.” Other environmental groups are archiving taxpayer-funded datasets at a smaller scale. For instance, the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that helps coastal communities design climate and ocean policy, began collating research and data on climate change in a dedicated section of its website last summer. The group started a “Resource Hub” to help cities easily identify the best available climate science. When Trump won the election in November, it realized that dozens of datasets and research hosted on government websites could disappear and began archiving additional policy papers and data. Those resources were especially relevant because the lab found many cities use outdated information to make planning decisions.  “We remember what had happened during the last Trump administration, where a huge amount of relevant environmental information was taken down or altered, and we wanted to make sure that the resources that we had posted to our own website would continue to live on,” said Alex Miller, an analyst there.  What’s happening now is in many ways a repetition of the efforts the Trump administration made during his first term, when as much as 20 percent of the EPA’s website became inaccessible to the public. The use of the term “climate change” decreased by more than a third. The first Trump administration also tried to derail work on the National Climate Assessment, an important synthesis of the state of climate science that shapes federal policy.  This time around, Trump officials are attempting to more tightly control how the assessment is compiled and want to lower the scientific standards it employs, according to reporting by E&E News. While the document is likely to be published in some form within two years, the administration did axe another environmental review.  Last year, the Biden administration announced the National Nature Assessment, a comprehensive literature review of the state of nature in the United States. It was modeled after the climate assessment and enlisted dozens of researchers to calculate all the ways nature is valuable. Last week, the administration told researchers who had spent nearly a year working on the report that it was shutting down the effort. Alessandro Rigolon, an architect and planner who teaches at the University of Utah and studies the benefits of green spaces, was working with other researchers to outline the effects of nature on physical and mental well-being. Rigolon said he was informed about the administration’s decision just a few days after a meeting in Vermont with those colleagues.  Because those working on the report were volunteers, Rigolon said they trying to find a way to continue their work.  “We are committed to writing this one way or another,” said Rigolon. “I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done after the work was terminated without explanation.” 

On a call with investors earlier this week, Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp—fresh off a week of stock surges—was euphoric. “We’re doin’ it!” he yelled, arms spread wide. “And I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am!”  The “it” in question? It seemed to be a reference to enabling President Donald Trump’s administration to carry out mass deportation and police surveillance domestically, while aiding the “West” globally—actions that, “on occasion,” Karp said on the call, may involve the need to “kill.” “I’m very happy to have you along for the journey,” the CEO said. “We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”  “Palantir is here to disrupt,” he continued. “And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” (Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.) Google Finance This type of rhetoric isn’t new for Karp. In 2020, he made headlines doing the same thing: announcing that Palantir was used “on occasion to kill people.” Founded in 2003 by Karp and Trump donor Peter Thiel, Palantir supplies data analysis software—called “spy tech” by its critics—to governments and companies. That software has reportedly been used to help generate “kill lists” for the Israeli Defense Forces, target immigrant families for deportation from the United States, and enable rogue employees to spy on co-workers. Karp made Palantir’s relationship to violence more forcefully evident in his latest letter to shareholders, released Monday. In the document, he quotes political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who famously wrote that Hispanics cannot assimilate into American society. “The rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion,’” Karp says in the letter, “‘but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’” Karp is not the only one cashing in on Trump’s plans for territorial expansion and mass deportation. Stocks for the GEO Group and CoreCivic, two of the nation’s biggest private prison firms, jumped after Trump was elected and again after he was sworn in. While the Federal Bureau of Prisons has lessened its reliance on private prison companies in recent years, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recently extended contracts with both companies. A GEO Group spokesperson said in an email that the company is investing $70 million to increase “housing, transportation, and monitoring capabilities” in anticipation of the new administration’s “immigration law enforcement priorities.” “This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government and the incoming Trump administration towards achieving a much more aggressive immigration policy,” GEO Group founder George Zoley said on a November earnings call. CoreCivic told Mother Jones that the company “does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws, or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.” Since initial bumps in stock prices, as Axios reported, there has been some fluctuation—in part because Trump has talked up outsourcing incarceration. The president has discussed plans to use Guantanamo Bay and jails in El Salvador to house deportees, including American citizens. Google Finance Google Finance Elon Musk’s DOGE also may be creating enrichment opportunities for those who make money from helping the US deport immigrants. Karp said Musk’s slash-and-burn effort to reshape the federal government would be “very good” for his company, which generates about two-thirds of its US revenue from government contracts, according to the Financial Times. “I think DOGE is going to bring meritocracy and transparency to government, and that’s exactly what our commercial business is,” said Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar.  “There’s a revolution. Some people get their heads cut off,” Karp said. “We’re expecting to see really unexpected things, and to win.”