The Denialism Presidency

Climate denial has become the playbook for how the Trump administration treats everything it wants to pretend isn’t happening.

Last month was the hottest March ever recorded in the United States. This week, the Northeast and Plains states are sweating through record-breaking highs. About a third of the country is experiencing exceptional, severe, or extreme drought. Super Typhoon Sinlaku battered a pair of U.S. islands in the Pacific. This year’s wildfire season is shaping up to be extraordinarily destructive. And people in the U.S are about as worried about climate change as they’ve ever been: 44 percent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll reported a “great deal” of concern about it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Trump loyalist, is not among them.

At a Tuesday event on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Bessent rattled off a hodgepodge of recycled and seemingly half-remembered talking points about how global warming doesn’t exist and/or isn’t a big deal. “The climate does change,” he........

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