Poison, Profit, and Propaganda

Trump’s latest policies show exactly what happens when plutocrats, polluters, and warmongers are handed the keys to the state.

Today’s Roundup is Sponsored by Ground News

Good morning! The week begins, as so many now do, with the sensation that America is being governed by a man who looks at a burning planet, a poisoned public, and a destabilized world and thinks: yes, but surely we can make it even worse! Trump has spent the opening stretch of this latest war-soaked phase of his presidency proving that destruction is not merely a byproduct of his politics. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way his administration is treating the environment and public health as disposable obstacles to power, profit, and spectacle.

Making America sooty again seems to be the newest rage coming out of the Trump regime. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility, has now moved to keep two aging coal plants alive past their planned retirement dates, while stripping renewables of priority status just as electricity demand is rising. The official line is reliability, but the real story is uglier: AI load growth, data center demand, Trump-aligned fossil politics, and a federally greased retreat from climate responsibility are shoving the dirtiest backup plan in America back into the spotlight. TVA’s reversal hits especially hard because this was supposed to be the future moving forward, not backward into soot, ash, and respiratory disease. Instead, coal gets a reprieve, nearby communities get more pollution, and the public gets another lecture about “affordability” while being handed the bill.

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Because simple policy vandalism is never enough for this administration, Trump has also been pushing the military deeper into the coal revival, urging the Pentagon to buy coal-fired power as though the U.S. armed forces were not already one of the great carbon-belching institutions on Earth. The image that comes to mind is Pigpen in camouflage, trudging across the globe inside his own private soot cloud, except this Pigpen has aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and a blank check. Trump’s idea of national strength is apparently to take one of the world’s most combustion-addicted machines and feed it even more fossil fuel while calling the result “beautiful clean coal.” There is something almost poetically depraved about using the language of patriotism to market a policy that promises more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and more public-health damage.

Then there is the glyphosate order, which would already be appalling if it merely showed that Trump was once again siding with a giant corporation over the health concerns of millions of people. But this administration can never resist adding a little bonus horror. The same order protecting supplies tied to Bayer’s Roundup operations also protects the only domestic supply chain for white phosphorus, the notorious incendiary chemical used in military munitions. Which is just so perfectly Trumpian it almost writes itself: protect the weedkiller linked to cancer concerns, protect the war chemical that burns through flesh, slap the words “national security” on top, and hope nobody notices that the same government that keeps telling people not to worry about toxins in their food is also quietly shoring up supply chains for Willy Pete. Poison the land, shield the chemical giant, and fold in a side of battlefield fire.

If you wanted one neat little emblem for the whole Trump era, you could hardly do better than that white phosphorus angle. The old Iraq War phrase “shake and bake” still lingers in the background of American memory, a reminder of how easily the language of war turns atrocity into slang. That is the moral terrain this administration inhabits now. Environmental harm, toxic exposure, incendiary weapons, cancer litigation, military readiness, corporate lobbying, all of it crammed into one executive order like a greasy fast-food combo meal of death and deregulation and a side of atherosclerosis.

And all of this environmental and civic degradation is unfolding against the backdrop of a war that is already making the rest of the world more furious with the United States. Part of the reason is moral: Trump sounds abroad exactly the way many of us fear he sounds at home when the flattery falls away as impulsive, grandiose, unmoored. Foreign interviews and coverage have been especially brutal because they are not always softened by the usual American normalization rituals. In one LBC interview, analyst Jasmine Algamal highlighted Trump’s response to a question about a desalination plant in Iran: “They cut babies heads off,” he said. “They chop women in half.” Algamal called it “the most ludicrous” and “sensationalist statement” from a U.S. president trying to justify a war with imagery “that doesn’t even happen.” No, I’m not going to play internet neurologist, however, I will note that Trump’s own words now routinely sound so lurid, impulsive, and unmoored that people keep reaching for medical explanations to make sense of them. That is not a testament to his critics’ imagination, but it is a damning reflection of how alarming his public behavior has become.

There is also the material reason the world is angry: once again, Washington gets to export pain. Financial analysis now makes plain that the U.S. is relatively cushioned from the energy shock set off by Trump’s Iran war compared with Europe and major Asian importers. American consumers still get hit at the pump, and the grocery store but the U.S. is a major energy producer and is better insulated than allies who now face sharper inflation, more volatile energy prices, and harder political tradeoffs because Trump chose to light another geopolitical match. America starts the fire; Europe and Asia get handed a bigger share of the smoke inhalation bill. That is the behavior of an empire too arrogant to notice that the rest of the world is done clapping for the arsonist.

Which brings us to one of the bleakest stories in the whole pile: the emerging evidence that a U.S. Tomahawk likely struck beside an Iranian elementary school in Minab, killing 175 people, most of them children, while Trump tried to wave the blame away. The horror is obvious enough in the deaths themselves. The added obscenity is the denial. If the open-source evidence continues to hold, then Trump did not merely preside over a devastating strike. He responded to evidence of dead children by trying to pin it on the very country he was bombing. Absolute moral rot in real time, and exactly the kind of thing that destroys whatever remains of American credibility abroad faster than any State Department press release can repair.

Finally, because no catastrophe is too large for Trump to view it through the lens of spectacle, the White House is preparing to host a UFC event on the South Lawn called “UFC Freedom Fights 250” on Flag Day, which also happens to be Trump’s 80th birthday. Seriously, we are now turning the White House into a pay-per-view spectacle with Dana White as court impresario, weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, and the South Lawn reimagined as an octagon-adjacent monument to national decline. Naturally, no women’s fights were announced for the main card, because apparently the administration’s preferred version of freedom is a pure testosterone pageant staged on the grounds of the executive mansion. Nothing says “250 years of the Declaration of Independence” quite like branded cage matches in the yard while the republic coughs up coal dust.

This is a grim Monday morning news roundup, but the news is the news when the President of the United States decides to start a war, revive coal, protect toxic chemicals, militarize pollution, and transform the White House into a birthday-themed UFC venue while the planet burns. Trump is not merely failing the environment; he is treating environmental ruin, public-health harm, and industrial regression as proof of seriousness. He is building an America where coal is patriotic, poison is strategic, dead children are somebody else’s fault, and spectacle is governance.

Marz and I are going to go borrow a little ocean breeze now, because at some point you have to step outside the soot cloud and remember what we are actually trying to save. And then it is back to work, back to rallying the troops, back to telling the truth, back to refusing to let a pack of fossil-fueled vandals, war drunks, and cheap authoritarian showmen drag us any further into this fiasco. There is serious business to be done. We have a planet to protect, public health to defend, democratic institutions to salvage, and global relationships to repair after yet another bout of American arrogance and destruction. The plutocrats, oligarchs, and profit-driven arsonists are betting that exhaustion will do their work for them. So get some fresh air, if you can find any, gather yourself, and then let’s get back to the serious business of stopping these people before they burn through everything we have left.