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A sign from the Peoples Climate March outside Trump Hotel. (Photo: Oil Change International/Twitter)
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he'll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon's big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he'll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon's big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it's not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization's chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.
Science first. Since the early 1800s we've been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates -- why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required.
"It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq."
And now, in this millennium, we've watched the warning start to play out. We've seen 2014 set a new global temperature record, which was smashed in 2015 and smashed again in 2016. We've watched Arctic sea ice vanish at a record pace and measured the early disintegration of Antarctica's great ice sheets. We've been able to record alarming increases in drought and flood and wildfire, and we've been able to link them directly to the greenhouse gases we've poured into the atmosphere. This is the largest-scale example in the planet's history of the scientific method in operation, the continuing dialectic between hypothesis and skepticism that arrived eventually at a strong consensus about the most critical aspects of our planet's maintenance. Rational people the world around understand. As Bloomberg Businessweek blazoned across its cover the week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into Wall Street, "It's Global Warming, Stupid."
But now President Trump (and 22 Republican senators who wrote a letter asking him to take the step) is betting that all of that is wrong. Mr. Trump famously called global warming a hoax during the campaign, and with this decision he's wagering that he was actually right -- he's calling his own bluff. No line of argument in the physical world supports his claim, and no credible authority backs him, not here and not abroad. It's telling that he simultaneously wants to cut the funding for the satellites and ocean buoys that monitor our degrading climate. Every piece of data they collect makes clear his foolishness. He's simply insisting that physics isn't real.
But it's not just science that he's blowing up. The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world's negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.
The dysfunctional American political process had already warped the process, of course. The reason Paris is a series of voluntary agreements and not a real treaty is because the world had long since understood that no binding document would ever get two-thirds of the vote in our oil-soaked Senate. And that's despite the fact that the agreement asks very little of us: President Barack Obama's mild shift away from coal-fired power and toward higher-mileage cars would have satisfied our obligations.
Those changes, and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world's governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.
And that's precisely the moment President Trump chose to make his move, a bid to undercut our best hope for a workable future in a bizarre attempt to restore the past. A few fossil-fuel barons may be pleased (Vladimir Putin likely among them, since his reign rests on the unobstructed development of Russia's hydrocarbons), but most of the country and the world see this for the disaster it is. Majorities in every single state, red and blue alike, want America to stay in the accord.
And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn't take climate change seriously, but also because he didn't take civilization seriously.
Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, justice, and a free press are escalating — putting everything we stand for at risk. We believe a better world is possible, but we can’t get there without your support. Common Dreams stands apart. We answer only to you — our readers, activists, and changemakers — not to billionaires or corporations. Our independence allows us to cover the vital stories that others won’t, spotlighting movements for peace, equality, and human rights. Right now, our work faces unprecedented challenges. Misinformation is spreading, journalists are under attack, and financial pressures are mounting. As a reader-supported, nonprofit newsroom, your support is crucial to keep this journalism alive. Whatever you can give — $10, $25, or $100 — helps us stay strong and responsive when the world needs us most. Together, we’ll continue to build the independent, courageous journalism our movement relies on. Thank you for being part of this community. |
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he'll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon's big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it's not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization's chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.
Science first. Since the early 1800s we've been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates -- why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required.
"It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq."
And now, in this millennium, we've watched the warning start to play out. We've seen 2014 set a new global temperature record, which was smashed in 2015 and smashed again in 2016. We've watched Arctic sea ice vanish at a record pace and measured the early disintegration of Antarctica's great ice sheets. We've been able to record alarming increases in drought and flood and wildfire, and we've been able to link them directly to the greenhouse gases we've poured into the atmosphere. This is the largest-scale example in the planet's history of the scientific method in operation, the continuing dialectic between hypothesis and skepticism that arrived eventually at a strong consensus about the most critical aspects of our planet's maintenance. Rational people the world around understand. As Bloomberg Businessweek blazoned across its cover the week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into Wall Street, "It's Global Warming, Stupid."
But now President Trump (and 22 Republican senators who wrote a letter asking him to take the step) is betting that all of that is wrong. Mr. Trump famously called global warming a hoax during the campaign, and with this decision he's wagering that he was actually right -- he's calling his own bluff. No line of argument in the physical world supports his claim, and no credible authority backs him, not here and not abroad. It's telling that he simultaneously wants to cut the funding for the satellites and ocean buoys that monitor our degrading climate. Every piece of data they collect makes clear his foolishness. He's simply insisting that physics isn't real.
But it's not just science that he's blowing up. The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world's negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.
The dysfunctional American political process had already warped the process, of course. The reason Paris is a series of voluntary agreements and not a real treaty is because the world had long since understood that no binding document would ever get two-thirds of the vote in our oil-soaked Senate. And that's despite the fact that the agreement asks very little of us: President Barack Obama's mild shift away from coal-fired power and toward higher-mileage cars would have satisfied our obligations.
Those changes, and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world's governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.
And that's precisely the moment President Trump chose to make his move, a bid to undercut our best hope for a workable future in a bizarre attempt to restore the past. A few fossil-fuel barons may be pleased (Vladimir Putin likely among them, since his reign rests on the unobstructed development of Russia's hydrocarbons), but most of the country and the world see this for the disaster it is. Majorities in every single state, red and blue alike, want America to stay in the accord.
And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn't take climate change seriously, but also because he didn't take civilization seriously.
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he'll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon's big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it's not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization's chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.
Science first. Since the early 1800s we've been slowly but surely figuring out the mystery of how our climate operates -- why our planet is warmer than it should be, given its distance from the sun. From Fourier to Foote and Tyndall, from Arrhenius to Revelle and Suess and Keeling, researchers have worked out the role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in regulating temperature. By the 1980s, as supercomputers let us model the climate with ever greater power, we came to understand our possible fate. Those big brains, just in time, gave us the warning we required.
"It's a stupid and reckless decision -- our nation's dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq."
And now, in this millennium, we've watched the warning start to play out. We've seen 2014 set a new global temperature record, which was smashed in 2015 and smashed again in 2016. We've watched Arctic sea ice vanish at a record pace and measured the early disintegration of Antarctica's great ice sheets. We've been able to record alarming increases in drought and flood and wildfire, and we've been able to link them directly to the greenhouse gases we've poured into the atmosphere. This is the largest-scale example in the planet's history of the scientific method in operation, the continuing dialectic between hypothesis and skepticism that arrived eventually at a strong consensus about the most critical aspects of our planet's maintenance. Rational people the world around understand. As Bloomberg Businessweek blazoned across its cover the week after Hurricane Sandy smashed into Wall Street, "It's Global Warming, Stupid."
But now President Trump (and 22 Republican senators who wrote a letter asking him to take the step) is betting that all of that is wrong. Mr. Trump famously called global warming a hoax during the campaign, and with this decision he's wagering that he was actually right -- he's calling his own bluff. No line of argument in the physical world supports his claim, and no credible authority backs him, not here and not abroad. It's telling that he simultaneously wants to cut the funding for the satellites and ocean buoys that monitor our degrading climate. Every piece of data they collect makes clear his foolishness. He's simply insisting that physics isn't real.
But it's not just science that he's blowing up. The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world's negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.
The dysfunctional American political process had already warped the process, of course. The reason Paris is a series of voluntary agreements and not a real treaty is because the world had long since understood that no binding document would ever get two-thirds of the vote in our oil-soaked Senate. And that's despite the fact that the agreement asks very little of us: President Barack Obama's mild shift away from coal-fired power and toward higher-mileage cars would have satisfied our obligations.
Those changes, and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world's governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.
And that's precisely the moment President Trump chose to make his move, a bid to undercut our best hope for a workable future in a bizarre attempt to restore the past. A few fossil-fuel barons may be pleased (Vladimir Putin likely among them, since his reign rests on the unobstructed development of Russia's hydrocarbons), but most of the country and the world see this for the disaster it is. Majorities in every single state, red and blue alike, want America to stay in the accord.
And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn't take climate change seriously, but also because he didn't take civilization seriously.
"The inmates are not only running the asylum. They're bringing in more inmates to help," said one observer.
EJ Antoni, President Donald Trump's controversial nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was among the insurrectionist mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, NBC News revealed Wednesday.
Video footage archived from the right-wing social media site Parler and posted online by a Republican-led congressional subcommittee shows Antoni among the crowd about half an hour before the MAGA mob began breaching barricades, attacking police, and swarming the Capitol. He is also seen walking away from the crowd.
The White House attempted to downplay the news, with spokesperson Taylor Rogers saying that "these pictures show E.J. Antoni, a bystander to the events of January 6th, observing and then leaving the Capitol area."
"E.J. was in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest E.J. engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal," Rogers added.
See the man circled here? That's E.J. Antoni, Trump's Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee, walking through a crowd of Capitol rioters.#ICYMI, we've got an archive of 500+ Parler videos taken during Jan. 6. You can spot Antoni starting at around 1:41 here: projects.propublica.org/parler-capit...
[image or embed]
— ProPublica (@propublica.org) August 14, 2025 at 9:06 AM
Other MAGA figures also defended Antoni. Felonious fraudster Steve Bannon, who pleaded guilty in a border wall fundraising fraud case this year, said Thursday on his War Room podcast: "They came up with a photo of E.J. Antoni in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, and NBC went absolutely nuts over it. I think it makes E.J. even more based. I didn't know that about E.J.—makes us want him even more."
Critics, however, expressed alarm, given the important post to which Antoni was nominated.
"We just discovered a Trump [Department of Justice] official was at January 6, telling other traitors to 'kill' police," journalist and attorney Adam Cohen wrote on the social media site Bluesky, referring to Jared Wise, who was pardoned by Trump.
"Now we learn Trump's BLS nominee, E.J. Antoni—apart from being totally unqualified—was ALSO part of the insurrection," Cohen added. "The inmates are not only running the asylum. They're bringing in MORE inmates to help."
The West Virginia Federation of Democratic Women noted on the social media site X that "Trump fired the vetted woman who reported honest stats on job losses. His new guy was in the mob on January 6 and wrote Project 2025."
Journalist Ahmed Baba wrote on X: "So, E.J. Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a contributor to Project 2025, and was literally outside the Capitol on January 6. This is who Trump wants to be in charge of the BLS data that shapes global decisions and moves markets—an extremist sycophant."
Trump nominated Antoni after firing former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom the president accused without evidence of manipulating employment statistics to discredit him and other Republicans.
"These reductions may cause some providers to stop accepting Medicaid patients," said a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
The cuts to Medicaid contained in the recently passed Republican budget law are already having a damaging impact in multiple states, as both local hospitals and state governments struggle financially to make up funding gaps.
As NC Newsline reported on Wednesday, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) has announced plans to cut Medicaid spending by $319 million starting on October 1, which the publication said "means the state will reduce rates by 3% to all medical providers, as well as cuts of 8-10% for inpatient and residential services and 10% for behavioral therapy and analysis for patients with autism."
NCDHHS spokesperson Summer Tonizzo did not sugarcoat the impact that the cuts would have on services for Medicaid patients in her state. She said that services including hospice care, behavioral health long-term care, and nursing home services could see reimbursement cuts significantly steeper than 3%.
"These reductions may cause some providers to stop accepting Medicaid patients, as the lowered rates could make it financially unsustainable to continue offering care," she said.
The Tar Heel State isn't the only one reeling from Medicaid cuts, as Colorado Public Radio reported that the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which manages the state's Medicaid program, held a webinar this week in which it outlined plans to, in the words of department director Kim Bimestefer, "mitigate the loss of coverage and its catastrophic consequences to Coloradans, providers, and the economy."
This will be easier said than done, however, as Colorado Public Radio noted that numbers reviewed by the department estimate that "hundreds of thousands" of residents in the state could lose healthcare access thanks to cuts from the GOP budget package.
In addition to people who will lose coverage thanks to the work requirements passed in the legislation, an estimated 112,000 people who buy health insurance policies from state exchanges could lose it after the expected expiration of enhanced tax credits passed by Democrats during former President Joe Biden's term.
Taking a look at the broader nationwide picture, Stateline reported that even some Republicans attending the National Conference of State Legislatures summit in Boston this week expressed anxiety about the impact the cuts will have on the people whom they represent.
The publication quoted Oklahoma state Sen. John Haste, who said during the summit that he was particularly concerned about the impact the cuts would have on rural communities. Among other things, he pointed to a provision in the law that will deliver a $209 million cut in Medicaid funds to Oklahoma, as well as the fact that complying with work requirement verifications will cost an estimated $30 million.
"All of those things added together come up to a really big number," said Haste. "We don't know exactly what that is."
Hawaii Democratic state Sen. Ronald Kouchi said during the summit that the impact of the Medicaid cuts would be absolutely brutal, but added that the only thing Democrats can do for now is make sure their voters know whom to blame for what's happening.
"Who's going to be blamed when people are left out, when people are hungry and they lose out on educational opportunities?" he asked during a panel discussion. "If we as state legislators do not convey that it is a result of the decisionmakers in Washington, D.C., they will be at our doorstep as the place of last resort."
"Emergency powers are the lifeblood of authoritarians," said a former Republican congressman.
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday he may declare a national emergency to circumvent Congress and continue his military occupation of Washington, D.C. indefinitely.
Under the Home Rule Act, the president is allowed to unilaterally take control of law enforcement in the nation's capital for 30 days. After that, Congress must extend its authorization through a joint resolution.
The authorization would need 60 votes to break the Senate filibuster, meaning some Democrats would need to sign on. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said there's "no fucking way" they would, adding that some Republicans would likely vote against it as well.
During a speech at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Trump said that if Congress won't approve his indefinite deployment of the National Guard, he'll just invoke emergency powers.
"If it's a national emergency, we can do it without Congress, but we expect to be before Congress very quickly," Trump said.
"I don't want to call a national emergency," Trump said, before adding, "If I have to, I will."
Announcing his federal takeover of the D.C. police, Trump said he would authorize the cops to "do whatever the hell they want" when patrolling the city.
On Wednesday, a day after troops deployed to D.C., federal agents set up a security checkpoint on the busy 14th Street Northwest Corridor, where Newsweek reports that they have been conducting random stops, which have previously been ruled unconstitutional.
One eyewitness described seeing agents "in unmarked cars without badges pulling people out of their cars and taking them away."
Other similar scenes of what appear to be random and arbitrary stops and arrests have been documented around the city.
"President Trump fabricated the 'emergency' that's required to exist for a president to federalize D.C. Police," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's nonvoting congressional delegate on X. "He admitted to reporters today that he's willing to fabricate a national emergency in order to try to extend his power."
It would not be the first time Trump called a national emergency in an attempt to suspend the usual checks on his power.
In 2019—despite border crossings being at historic lows—he declared a national emergency to reroute billions of dollars to construct his border wall after Congress refused to approve it. He has also declared a national emergency at the U.S. border.
He has used national emergency declarations even more liberally in his second term, including to send U.S. troops to the Southern border, to expedite oil drilling projects, and to enact extreme tariffs without congressional approval.
According to Joseph Nunn, a legal scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump is already abusing the language of the Home Rule Act, which only allows D.C. law enforcement to be federalized in "special conditions of an emergency nature."
Though the law does not explicitly define what constitutes a "national emergency," Nunn says, "the word 'emergency' has meaning. An emergency is a sudden crisis, an unexpected change in circumstances." That would be at odds with the facts on the ground in D.C., where crime has fallen dramatically over the past year.
After Trump floated using a national emergency to extend his occupation of D.C., Justin Amash—a former Republican congressman who was ousted in 2021 after breaking with Trump—wrote on X that "emergency powers are the lifeblood of authoritarians."
"Once established in law, they're nearly impossible to revoke because a president can veto any bill curtailing the power," Amash said. "We always live under dozens of active 'national emergencies,' almost none of which are true emergencies."
Trump also said he was working with congressional Republicans on a "crime bill" that will "pertain initially to D.C." but will be expanded to apply to other blue cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Despite Trump's portrayal of these cities as crime-ridden hellscapes, crime is falling in every single one of them.
"What Donald Trump is doing is, in some ways, a dress rehearsal for going after others around the country. And I think we need to stop this—certainly by the end of the 30 days," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "This should never have started, so I definitely want to make sure it doesn't continue."