In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal—it’s murderous.

The deaths are mounting. By one accounting, the disruption of overseas food and drug shipments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including life-saving HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria treatments, has already caused nearly 350,000 deaths (and they continue at an estimated rate of 103 per hour). Here at home, cuts to Medicaid, as contemplated in the absurdly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” would lead to more than 21,600 avoidable deaths annually. And those numbers pale next to the levels of mortality expected to arise from the effects of climate change—a worsening catastrophe that the Trump regime is dead set against doing anything about. Indeed, with an array of policies under the rubric “Drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump and his officials seem intent on worsening matters as quickly as possible.

Worrying about how future generations will cope with a savagely inhospitable climate is for losers.

If the World Economic Forum is to be believed, deaths from flood, famine, disease, and other nonmilitary consequences of a hotter, more violent global climate might reach 580,000 per year, or 14.5 million by 2050. And that may be a lowball estimate, according to the American Security Project. Its models assert that warming-induced fatalities are already running at 400,000 annually and are heading for 700,000.

Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of misery. Given that the Trump regime is opening new areas for drilling; aggressively curtailing funding for climate-related programs; purging mention of climate change from government websites and publications; and disassembling the government’s capacity to track, let alone predict climate-change impacts, it makes sense to wonder WHY?

Trump has indeed claimed that climate change is a hoax. He has also said that solar cells should be installed on car roofs. He says a lot of things. His words may be a guide to his state of mind—or his state of con—but they don’t necessarily reflect his or his coterie’s actual beliefs. On the question of climate change, it’s become increasingly clear that the elite of the far-right tacitly accept the reality of climate change. More and more, outright denial is reserved for ramping up the fervor of the MAGA base, who appear willing to believe that a transvestite in the wrong bathroom is more dangerous than fires, floods, and hurricanes.

Project 2025, the much-discussed (and, by Trump, falsely disavowed) 885-page wish list for his administration, reflects the new Republican tone. That blueprint for reversing progressive policies asserted that “the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Notably, however, the document doesn’t deny the existence of climate change. Indeed, in a relatively sober moment that one might wish Elon Musk and his minions at the Department of Government Efficiency had shared, the authors write, “USAID resources are best deployed to strengthen the resilience of countries that are most vulnerable to climatic shifts.” Other, non-lunatic parts of the Republican Party sail by the same tack: They argue more about the particulars of climate solutions than the reality of the underlying problem. Various outspoken and influential Republicans like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk (all right, in Musk’s case, formerly influential) have taken a similar line.

Let’s get this right: Members of the Republican elite know that there is a problem, but rather than take action to lessen it, they do what they can to make it worse by calling for more oil and gas development, ordering inefficient coal-fired generating stations to stay in operation, and obstructing the growth of renewables. Their excuse for this irrationality, when they even bother to offer one, loosely follows Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s recent testimony before Congress that “the U.S. has ‘plenty of time’ to solve the climate crisis.” How to make sense of this? How do they make sense of this?

The reasons are varied and revealing. First, of course, there’s

• Money: It’s obvious. Contributions from oil and gas political action committees (PACs) to Republicans were more than five times greater than those to Democrats in the last election cycle. And that doesn’t include funds from individual donors connected to the fossil fuel industry or various forms of “educational” soft money, let alone “dark money” channeled through issue-oriented nonprofits that don’t report their sources. There can be no question that total expenditures by fossil fuel interests in the 2024 election far exceeded that sector’s $219 million in traceable investments.

Action to address climate change in a meaningful way would require enforceable restrictions on emissions and/or a heavy carbon tax, both of which are anathema to the right.

• Business Opportunities: One man’s loss is another man’s gain. The thawing of the Arctic and other regions will open new transportation routes and allow access to resources of every kind. Part of the allure of Greenland for Donald Trump, for instance, is the island’s wealth in rare earth metals, which are critical to advanced battery technology and therefore to an array of high-tech and national security applications. If Gaza, demolished and bleeding, can be repurposed as the “Riviera of the Middle East” (to quote President Trump), then imagine what might be done........

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