The (Dis)United States (Or Do I Mean World?) of President Donald J. Trump

Tom Engelhardt

 July 29, 2026

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Yes, it’s happening and by “it” I distinctly mean climate change. No question about it, this planet is simply getting hotter (and hotter, and hotter yet). Only recently, an international team of scientists reported that greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high globally. And if you happened to be one of the estimated 109 million Americans living in certain parts of the Midwestern, Mid-Atlantic, or Northeastern United States recently, then you undoubtedly experienced your sky turning a grim grey (or weird orange) with smoke from those Canadian wildfires that once weren’t but now are a regular summer experience along, of course, with startling heat.

And you might not even have noticed, for instance, that Europe was blasted by heat early, hard, and in a record-setting fashion this summer with its hottest June in history. (It wasn’t a good time to take the London subway, that’s for sure!). Meanwhile, even before those Canadian fires hit, much of the Midwestern and Eastern United States experienced a record-setting heat wave (with more to come). And oh, yes, then there was that report on Legionnaire’s disease breaking out in my hometown, New York City, possibly also linked in some fashion to climate change.

And yet, explain it as you will, surging climate hell (and it does now seem to be happening ever faster), including a possible “super” El Niño weather cycle in the year to come, seldom proves to be a truly headline-making story for long, not in this country, not in the age of President Donald J. Trump. In fact, he’s distinctly into what’s coming to be known as “climate hushing.” Unfortunately, “hush” isn’t really a word that can be used effectively in any context when it comes to him, since he’s not truly quiet about anything on this planet of ours — or, these days, do I mean his?

Under the circumstances (and, yes, I’m already sweating!), consider it strange that an American president should be so visibly set on doing anything he can to ignore — oh, sorry, that’s certainly understating the situation — I guess I mean, anything he can to actively promote the further overheating of this planet of… well, I might once have said “ours” but not in the age of You Know Exactly Whom.

And hey, let me not simply dump all the bad karma on him, not when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine almost four-and-a-half years ago, launching a war that still shows not the slightest sign of ending and war, of course, turns out to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a genuinely remarkable fashion. Not when Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu can’t stop blasting the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon. Not when the U.S. Air Force almost daily continues to bomb what it considers its enemy in Somalia (something you can only hope to keep track of if you read Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com). Not when Donald Trump (yes, him again!) just can’t stop blasting Iran (and the Iranians continue to respond by blasting their neighbors and U.S. military bases in those countries).

And honestly, that’s just to start down a list — or do I mean to start into deep chaos? — on this distinctly crazed planet of ours. It’s generally growing ever harder to find any version of good news relating to the (yes, again!) distinctly (over)heating world we’re now living in. Under the circumstances, give China some credit. Admittedly, that country still pours more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other place on Earth, but in its imperial rise, it’s also taken something remarkably close to full-scale control over making (and selling globally) just about anything from solar panels to wind-turbine equipment that might effectively produce green energy or capture carbon. In fact, give China’s leadership full credit for realizing that the overheating of this planet could prove to be an imperial money-making proposition of the first order.

And yes, give President Trump credit as well. After all, in the end, he’s certain to lend imperial decline new meaning in a distinctly new age for Planet Earth. Can there be any question, in fact, that he’s intent on putting this country (and this planet, too) on the downhill slope of history, while offering China free rein (or do I mean reign?) to control the green energy market globally into what could be a distant (and, given the way things are going, distinctly devastating) future. Hey, hard as it might be to believe, he’s actually spending our taxpayer dollars to get energy companies to agree to cancel (yes, cancel!) planned offshore wind projects, so as not to offer any aid to what he’s labeled a “green scam.” And you really can’t do China a bigger favor (and the rest of us greater harm) than that, can you?

Setting Fire to Our Future

Of course, all of this would truly be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. After all, to add to the climate mayhem, as the New York Times reported recently, the president appointed “a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change affects the United States.” And why not, given that (as he’s stated more than once) climate change is a first-class “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”? As for predictions about what climate change will do to this planet of ours (no less what it’s already doing), he summed them up this way at the United Nations late last year: “They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

Meanwhile, in the world of Donald Trump, even the Democrats seem to be in a distinctly climate-hushing mood as the November elections approach. You would think that putting the finger on him for potentially setting fire to our future would be a politically effective approach in any election season. No such luck, though, explain it as you will.

In fact, neither many of the Democrats, nor Donald Trump and his — and these days it is distinctly his — party seem ready to face the world that we’re truly in as the November 2026 elections approach. After all, as part of his campaign season, the president has reached not into the future (god forbid!) but into the American past of my childhood years by starting to call liberal Democrats “communists.” Yes, commies! At Independence Day celebrations on July 4th, for instance, he said: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”

In fact, as the Washington Post recently reported, “From January to June, [right-wing influencers and Republicans] used the words ‘communism’ or ‘communist’ in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year — a 43 percent increase.”

In sum, how truly apocalyptic of both him and so many of the rest of us. Or perhaps it’s simply all too human of us not to want to take in the truly bad news on this planet of… well, I was going to say “ours,” but if it ever was, it really isn’t anymore, is it? And you can certainly give Donald Trump and, of course, those who decided to vote for him a second (or do I mean third?) time around significant credit for running this planet into… well, yes, the ground.

I mean, the very fact that Donald Trump was elected to run the increasingly (dis)United States of America (into the ground) a second time should still be a stunning reality on this increasingly strange planet of ours. Once upon a time, you simply couldn’t have made this up, could you (and if you had, who would possibly have believed you)?

I’m already sweating!

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

New York’s noisy food carts go electric in clean air trial

AFP
July 24, 2026

New York City has around 20,500 licensed food vendors – Copyright AFP ANGELA WEISS

Walk around New York and you’ll likely hear the chugging of petrol generators powering the city’s tens of thousands of food carts. But not William Arevalo’s.

His truck, selling hot dogs, empanadas and fried shrimp, runs on rechargeable batteries as part of a city pilot aimed at cutting harmful noise and air pollution by harnessing electric energy.

“I can’t believe it. Now we don’t have noise and all our equipment is still working,” Arevalo, 59, told AFP from his food cart parked under the shade of trees in a Queens park.

Arevalo is one of 10 street vendors testing whether they can ditch petrol generators to reduce noise, planet-warming emissions and health risks posed by exhaust fumes.

It’s a mammoth task: The vast majority of the city’s 20,500 licensed food carts — selling pretzels, peanuts and ice cream — rely on generators to power stoves, freezers and ventilators.

Shifting all of them to electric power would be the same as taking around 30,000 cars off the road annually, according to the city council, but costs and infrastructure challenges lie ahead.

Arevalo, who is originally from Ecuador and whose family has run the food truck for over 20 years, has noticed several benefits after swapping out his petrol generator.

“All the smoke from the generator used to come inside the truck. It’s really bad for our health. And sometimes when I was with a customer, I couldn’t hear them because of the generator noise,” he said.

“Now it’s 100 percent better,” Arevalo added from inside the cart, where several two-dollar bills are taped to a wall — for good luck, he explained.

And on a hot July day, he said the batteries were far more reliable than fuel generators that can overheat and cut out during summer.



– ‘Surprised’ –



At the back of Arevalo’s cart — decorated all over with colorful menu pictures of chicken wings and coconut juice — is an inverter that holds up to six, foot-long batteries.

He said those provide enough power to keep fries frozen and fans whirring as long as they are switched out every five hours or so.

The six-month pilot started in July and uses the same batteries as many electric bicycles. PopWheels, a New York startup, supplies and charges them at nearby fire-resistant lockers.

Similar trials have been short-lived in the past.

In 2013, New York hooked up some Manhattan street carts to the city’s power grid — it cut emissions and noise but there was no way to scale up.

And a pilot by the Street Vendor Project nonprofit deployed similar batteries to food trucks, but a lack of charging infrastructure proved an issue.

This time will be different, the council hopes, as it envisions a subscription-based model whereby vendors pay a fee to access batteries and charging stations.

“We think it’s going to be cost competitive, either less than what vendors pay right now or about the same as what vendors pay on gas,” said Isabela Brown, senior policy advisor at the mayor’s climate office.

For vendors “the main cost… will be to have an inverter system installed. We’re looking at financial solutions, loans, other things the city can provide,” she added.

Inverter systems can cost thousands of dollars — not dissimilar to petrol generators depending on the size — but proponents say running costs are lower in the long run.

For now, Arevalo is delighted to be flaunting his electric street cart to fellow vendors who rely on petrol generators.

“I show my friends and they’re surprised. Everything is working, it’s really all working,” he smiled.

Illegal Logging Project Halted in Yellowstone Grizzly Habitat

Mike Garrity

 July 29, 2026

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Grizzly bear. Photo: Jean Beaufort. Public Domain.

On Monday, a federal court in Montana issued a preliminary injunction against an illegal logging project in occupied grizzly bear habitat in the Gravelly Mountains of Montana, in the Greater Yellowstone region.  The injunction against the Greenhorn logging project in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest was requested by conservation groups the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish, Gallatin Wildlife Association, and Native Ecosystems Council, which are all groups that work to protect endangered species in the Greater Yellowstone area.

This is a big victory for Yellowstone grizzlies, as well as the other endangered species that call this region home, like lynx and wolverines.  People come here every year to visit because it is a wild landscape that provides some of the best remaining habitat in the country for these endangered wildlife species.  Our goal is to keep it that way.  People don’t come here to experience clearcuts and logging roads full of weeds defacing the landscape.

This illegal logging project was halted because of the seriousness of the government’s legal violation here.  A court can only issue a preliminary injunction if we establish four elements:

(1) a likelihood of success on the merits,
(2) a likelihood of irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,
(3) that the balance of equities tips in the plaintiff’s favor, and
(4) that the injunction is in the public interest.

Although this is no easy task, we established all four elements because the facts here were compelling — we need to protect the grizzly habitat in this area.

The law is clear. The government cannot claim it is protecting grizzly bears by leaving blocks of habitat as small as 10 acres.  No grizzly bear can live in a 10-acre patch of habitat.  It’s just an absurd argument, which is why the government could not point to any scientific support for it.  All available science from the government itself shows that grizzly bears need large areas – at least 1,000 acres if not more — for their secure habitat blocks.

Although our injunction request was successful here, the rule of law, and our endangered wildlife species, are the real winners here.  It’s never easy to go to court, and we are ruthlessly attacked by politicians and special interest groups every time we do.  But grizzly bears cannot represent themselves in court.  So we must stand up for them, and put in the hundreds of hours of hard work it takes to secure injunctions like this one.

We will continue this work and continue to demand that government agencies follow the law.  We will not allow extinction on our watch but we need your help to do it.

Please consider making a donation to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies to help us fight to keep species from going extinct.  Please also donate to Counterpunch so they can continue to spread the news about what our government is doing.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.