The Denialism Presidency

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 said, before things went slightly off the rails. “As we all know, the natural habitat for the earth is actually water. Ice was probably … I mean, it’s a very long cycle, but ice was an unusual cycle. I mean we are going through cycles, and I believe that it is very difficult to deconstruct the reasons behind why anything changes.” Bessent—a former hedge fund manager who went to Yale—also called climate change a belief of the “elite,” and chalked up concerns about the economic toll of rising temperatures to a single 2024 study that was retracted last year. There is, of course, overwhelming evidence about the mounting costs of climate change. One recent study in the journal Nature, for instance, found that climate change has already cost the U.S. an estimated $16.2 trillion.

It isn’t unusual for members of the Trump administration to deny and downplay climate change. But climate denial—a mainstay of the GOP for most of this century—has also become something of an operating manual for the right as it reacts to other crises it would like to pretend are not happening. Bessent this week likewise dismissed the sprawling economic turmoil caused by the administration’s decision to go to war with Iran, which now involves a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Bessent told the British press that the war was worth a “small bit of economic pain.” He’s “less concerned about short-term forecasts,” he added, such as those projecting—as the IMF did this week—that a further escalation of the war in Iran could trigger a global recession. At another event in Washington, he asserted that price spikes resulting from the war in Iran—which helped inflation rise three times faster in March than in February—were a passing fad, despite the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is not poised to return to business as usual anytime soon. Whenever it reopens, experts warn that the effects of its now more than monthlong closure will be felt for years.

Whether it’s climate change or a looming global recession, the script is the same: downplay, deny, and project confidence. This playbook works for Bessent and other members of the Trump administration because they are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of both rising temperature and economic catastrophe. Bessent can withstand deadly heat waves from the air-conditioned comfort of his country home. With an estimated net worth of $600 million, he can afford to ride out a global economic downturn too, continuing to experience the economy as a series of lines that will probably make him richer. None of his friends’ kids will die in the administration’s pointless, destructive war in the Middle East. Fundamentally, that is, these people do not exist in the same world as the rest of us—which makes it all the more worrying that they have so much control over what happens here.