The environmental legacy of President Trump

ABSTRACT

President Trump had a profound, largely adverse impact on environmental and climate policy, both domestically and internationally. In addition to rolling back environmental regulations and related policies, Trump sought to undermine the institutions and core values undergirding environmental and climate protection. This article analyses Trump’s environmental tenure and legacy, examining key policies and regulations, but also norms, values and discourse. Drawing on insights from new institutionalism, the article explores three different dimensions of Trump’s potential environmental legacy – organisational, policy and ideational. For each it identifies the institutional and discursive factors shaping Trump’s impact, its “stickiness” and durability. It then analyses attempts by the Biden Administration and others to counter, reshape or chip away at that potential legacy. Re-visiting and adapting core institutionalist assumptions, the analysis suggests a decisive factor determining Trump’s legacy is not his own actions and narrative but rather how – and how successfully – other institutional actors support, spread or counter them. The article finds that while Trump’s impact on organisations, regulations and even policies can be diluted (and his legacy diminished), Trump’s attack on the norms and trust underpinning environmental action may be more long lasting.

KEYWORDS:

• Trump
• legacy
• Biden
• environment
• climate
• institutionalism
• regulations
• ideational
• discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A helpful overview is provided by Ansell 2021

2 Budgets for international bodies were also slashed. Trump cancelled funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund which provides financial assistance for developing countries’ efforts to address climate change.

3 Biden’s climate team is heavily populated with Obama former staffers and appointments. Kerry and McCarthy are joined by, inter alia, Brenda Mallory, White House Council on Environmental Quality, David Hayes as special assistant to the president for climate policy, and Ali Zaidi, deputy national climate adviser.

4 In early 2021, the first decision to be signed by the newest Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barret handed down a defeat to the environmental NGO Sierra Club.

5 See www.wearestillin.com. Now that the US has re-joined the Paris agreement, the coalition joined forces with other networks to form ‘America Is All In,’ ‘the most expansive coalition of leaders ever assembled in support of climate action in the United States.’ https://www.americaisallin.com/

6 More specifically the American Recovery Plan includes billions of dollars for public transit agencies and projects; it provides billions to states, cities for improving services such as water systems vulnerable to climate change. By providing billions of dollars for home energy and water improvement programmes targeting low income households, it is particularly designed to ‘address health outcome disparities from pollution and the COVID-19 pandemic’ (White House 2021d),

7 Unless otherwise noted all quoted tweets are taken from Selby 2019; Ott 2017 or Melino 2015.

8 In discourse battles, words matter but so do images. Biden exploited this visual narrative device early on. Within weeks of taking office the Trump-era cover image on the website of the Bureau of Land Management (a photo of massive wall of coal) was replaced with a serene landscape of a winding river.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Bomberg

Professor Elizabeth Bomberg is Personal Chair of Environmental Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Her broad area of expertise is comparative environmental politics, with a particular emphasis on climate policy and activism in the US, UK and EU.