Trump's $1 Billion Ask From Fossil Fuel Execs Epitomizes the Corruption of Political Bribery

Without American environmental leadership, the rest of the world will suffer the consequences of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth.

Photo by Rob on Unsplash

As if we needed another reason to despise money in politics (and not to vote republican), Donald Trump has handed us the quintessential example of corporate political bribery.

Last month, at an event at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago home, the twice-impeached adjudicated sexual assaulter out on bail currently facing criminal charges for election finance fraud promised oil industry executives that, if re-elected, he would destroy the fossil fuel regulations making President Biden the most environmentally progressive president in history. 

But he’s not going to do it on principle. It’s going to cost them.

The price they have to pay? 

$1 billion.

That’s right. The former host of Celebrity Apprentice said that for a bargain-basement billion dollars he will help fossil fuel companies pollute again, thereby accelerating an already dire prediction from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists foreboding an at least 2.5 C (4.5 F) rise in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels this century.

Corporate polluters are wasting no time. According to Politico, fossil fuel oligarchs are at this moment “drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases”.

As the piece explains:

Six energy industry lawyers and lobbyists interviewed by POLITICO described the effort to craft executive orders and other policy paperwork that they see as more effective than anything a second Trump administration could devise on its own. Those include a quick reversal of Biden’s pause on new natural gas export permits and preparations for wider and cheaper access to federal lands and waters for drilling.

Stephen Brown, former oil refining industry lobbyist, and director of energy consulting firm RBJ Strategies, said:

You’ll see a lot of Biden regulations that have come out in the past six months checked one way or another. It’s going to be like shooting fish in the barrel — there’s just so much to go after.

The fossil fuel lobby out to bribe a once and aspiring future president into rolling back planet- and humanity-saving environmental laws and regulations? What a shock!

None of it is, of course. What else would we expect from the only political party in the world that denies the existence of climate change and its titular leader bereft of core beliefs, scruples, or morality?

Yes, Trump is a vacuous grifter who announced back in 2016, “I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that. I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right?”.

Yes, the republican party is and has always been on the take from the fossil fuel lobby. 

But the fact that any politician, Trump or anyone else, can be persuaded to dance to lobbyists’ tune at all lays squarely at the feet of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS).

On January 21, 2010, the nation’s highest court handed down its ruling on the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) decision equating political spending with free speech covered under the Constitution‘s first amendment.

Under this ruling, the federal government is prohibited from interfering with corporations, nonprofit organizations, and unions from spending unlimited sums to support or oppose individual political candidates.

As long as they are not presenting funds to campaigns directly, corporations are free to dump as much as they want into political advertising and “super PACs” (political action committees) not required to disclose their donors’ identities.

It’s what former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee–now Utah Senator–Mitt Romney referred to in 2011 when he proclaimed “Corporations are people!” i.e., “corporate personhood”.

This scourge is one of the primary reasons more progressive candidates do not get elected despite their being more popular to a majority of voters.

Citizens United was not the first high court’s sop to corporations, however.

That distinction lies with the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that political campaign spending limits are unconstitutional.

In 2014, the McCutcheon v. FEC case further solidified Citizens United by determining unconstitutional any limits on individual contributions to federal candidate committees and national parties over a two-year period.

Thanks to these decisions, a republican candidate with a right-wing billionaire like the Koch brothers or the Mercers in his or her pocket can render voters virtually superfluous.

A recent example of this is Heritage Action for America, the advocacy arm of powerful conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which spent spent $5.1 million in 2021 on lobbying efforts intended to suppress voting in key battle ground states.

It’s what’s opened the door to the morbidly rich corporate CEOs’ “playbook” to wrest control away from We the People delineated in the “1,091-page manifesto of conservative governance,” “Project 2025”. 

Trump must be repudiated in November, yes. But so must the republican party.

We must also continue pushing our lawmakers--republican and Democratic — to support legislation to weaken the SCOTUS’ ruling, like the “Democracy For All Amendment” Reps. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Dean Phillips, (Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Gerry Connolly (Va.), and Jim McGovern (Mass.) have introduced that would affirm congressional and state lawmakers’ constitutional authority to place restrictions on amounts of money donors can spend to influence elections. It would codify language declaring money does not equal free speech and corporations do not have the same rights as individuals.

With a democratic president — particularly one willing to or at least threaten to expand the size of the nation’s high court — we also have the possibility of appointing enough SCOTUS justices willing to overturn its 2010 ruling.

It isn’t hyperbole to state the fate and future of the planet depends on it, because without American environmental leadership, the rest of the world will suffer the consequences of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth.