Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, has been many things. He was the president of his family’s real estate organisation, hosted the reality TV show The Apprentice, launched over 500 ventures under his name, and spent vacations partying on a certain private island.
What Trump is not, notably, is a climate scientist. Fortunately for him, but unfortunately for the American public, this fact has not stopped him from constantly explaining climate situations.
Trump-flavoured Climate Denialism:
When importing Trump’s political messaging into a folder, my Grammarly coloured the page an assortment of red, blue, and yellow. Even the writing detection software knows. Nothing green to see here.
In the autumn of 2012, Trump shocked environmentalists worldwide by claiming that ‘global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.’ Initially, he attacked the very foundation of climate science itself. By 2018, two years after starting his first presidential term, Trump redirected his position on the matter. He stated that ‘something’ was happening to the world, but it [climate change] might eventually ‘change back.’ He argued that humans may not be responsible for climate change. He justified his stance by stating that he did not want to spend ‘trillions and trillions of dollars’ or potentially harm Americans by losing ‘millions and millions of jobs.’ With empirical climate data becoming more mainstream in modern politics, Trump began attacking policies and actions, labelling them as costly and uncertain. In 2025, speaking before the United Nations, Trump moved beyond debating climate change itself. He labeled a new enemy: the ‘green energy scam.’
These statements contradict one another. That is the point.
Despite his climate rhetoric being factually inconsistent, Trump’s messaging is powerful because it is politically adaptable. When one argument becomes hard to defend, the denial of warming surface temperatures, for example, Trump redirects his energy to another. Climate change is not real. Then it might be real, but not caused by humans. Then it might be caused by humans, but its effects are exaggerated. Then the effects might be serious, but the solutions are too expensive. Then the solutions might be affordable, but China is not doing enough. At no point, however, does Trump’s conclusion change: the United States should not be obligated to act on climate.
Dismissing Trump as simply ignorant about climate change, however, is a mistake. He may be wrong about the science, often spectacularly so, but his communication strategy is both effective and intentional. Trump understands something that climate advocates often struggle to accept: political arguments are won by the person who controls what the argument is about.
The polling numbers reflect the impact of his rhetoric: in 2024, a Stanford study found that 96% of Democrats believed ‘Global Warming would be a very serious or somewhat serious problem for the U.S.’, while only 55% of Republicans believed the same.
Climate Denial’s New Costume Change
The traditional climate denier (or self-proclaimed climate realist), historically, had a relatively straightforward job. They appeared on television, made a few jabs at the temperature record, brought up a singular dissenting scientist, and sighed that the evidence remained unsettled. News organisations and journalists, wanting to have balanced arguments, frequently placed climate researchers and contrarians beside one another. This artificially gave denialists credibility, despite mounting evidence that the world was rapidly heating due to anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels.
In turn, the impression of a genuine scientific debate remained long after the core questions had largely been resolved. A tiny minority of dissenting voices received an enormous amount of attention because emotional conflict made for better television than consensus. No one is watching a channel that always says ‘scientists agree yet again’.
But outright denial, over the years, has become harder to maintain. The evidence of climate change is visible, and its consequences are increasingly difficult to treat as a distant theoretical problem. Wildfires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, insurance losses, crop failures, and collapsing infrastructure are undeniable.
Trump couldn’t change the facts, so he changed how the topic was approached.
Modern climate denialism does not always reject climate science. Instead, it attacks the response. It accepts just enough of the problem to appear reasonable before explaining why nothing meaningful should (or can) be done about the situation.
Perhaps warming is happening, but the models are imperfect. Perhaps humans are contributing to climate change, but not enough to justify drastic regulatory change. Perhaps action is needed, but not until renewable energy becomes cheaper (god forbid the fossil fuel companies pull back political donations). Perhaps renewable energy is cheaper, but it remains unreliable and inconsistent. Perhaps it is reliable, but it depends on Chinese manufacturing, and it’s not like we import just anything from China. Perhaps domestic manufacturing could be developed, but government subsidies would distort the free market. ‘Beautiful clean coal’ lives to see another day.
Every answer produces a new objection. Climate policy is required to be immediate, inexpensive, technologically flawless, politically painless, nationally self-contained, and personally convenient. Fossil fuels, meanwhile, are allowed to remain fossil fuels.
This is the central trick of delay discourse: proposed solutions must be perfect to be implemented, while the existing system merely has to exist.
‘Framed’ Once More
Trump’s ‘Chinese hoax’ claim compressed a nuanced story of marginalisation and industrial greed into a familiar one of economic sabotage: America is being cheated by a foreign power. Rather than asking whether greenhouse-gas emissions were warming the atmosphere, the audience was invited to ask whether China was conspiring against American workers.
This is known as ‘framing’. In common language, framing is the art of deciding what a problem means before anyone begins discussing how to solve it.
A house can be framed as a place to live, a financial investment, or a symbol of adulthood. The physical building remains the same, but we are told to notice different parts.
Trump frames climate change through three particularly effective lenses: money, nation, and conflict.
The economic frame presents climate action as a bill sent to ordinary Americans by wealthy environmentalists. Regulations destroy jobs. Renewable-energy subsidies waste taxes. International climate finance gives American money to undeserving countries (who contribute far less). Whether green policies may create jobs, reduce energy costs, or prevent future collapse is pushed to the side. The message is loud and clear: someone is reaching into your pocket.
The nationalist frame turns international cooperation into national humiliation. Climate agreements are not seen as mutual partnerships to protect the world; they are systems made to restrain the American economy while allowing China and India to overtake ‘us’. Cooperation becomes surrender.
The conflict frame completes the picture. Scientists, journalists, regulators, international organisations, and environmentalists are part of a connected elite. Their motives become the central source of questioning and debate.
Trump used this framing in his famous 2018 interview. He partially accepted that the climate was changing, questioned whether humans were responsible, suggested that the changes might reverse, accused scientists of suspicious political motives, and pivoted to jobs and money. In a few sentences, uncertainty shifted from the existence of climate change to its cause, duration, activists, and economic reality. Nothing was conclusively denied. Everything was made questionable. Simply brilliant.
Such ambiguity also provides Trump an escape route. When challenged on denial, Trump can say he accepts that the climate could be changing. When challenged on policy obstruction, he can say he supports clean air and clean water. When challenged on fossil-fuel expansion, he can discuss jobs, energy security, and national independence.
This rhetorical style thrives in contemporary media. A careful explanation of the difference between weather and climate requires charts, timelines, and attention spans that do not exist in the modern era. A joke about needing global warming in a cold winter requires a quick tweet, is easily consumed, and reaches a huge audience. Confusion is also not necessarily a communications failure. Online, confusion creates arguments and engagement, keeping the original statement visible. By the time experts have explained why a cold day does not disprove a long-term warming trend, the false comparison has already been reposted across television panels, headlines, reaction videos, and family group chats. By then, it is too late.
Language → Policy
On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump ordered another US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (a landmark global treaty on climate change adopted by nearly all nations to limit the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius), just as he did during his first presidential term in 2020. The order framed international climate commitments as unfair burdens that could ‘damage or stifle’ the American economy. He further revoked the US International Climate Finance Plan and instructed officials to prioritise American prosperity, consumer choice, and fiscal restraint in international energy policy.
This is the administrative reality of his rhetoric. Climate cooperation is not rejected because warming has been disproved, but rather because cooperation itself is deemed an economic burden.
The same logic appears in Trump’s attacks on renewable energy. In March 2026, his administration reached a $928 million agreement with TotalEnergies to abandon two planned offshore-wind leases and redirect investment towards oil and gas projects. His administration paid nearly a billion dollars to prevent renewable energy resources. At the same time, he expressed that green energy was too costly.
The contradiction reveals the deeper priority. Opposition to climate policy is not consistently about saving money or protecting a neutral energy market. Government intervention becomes unacceptable when it supports low-carbon infrastructure and acceptable when it blocks it.
Delays in domestic climate progress create a new reality. Renewable projects become financially riskier when governments repeatedly threaten to cancel them. Climate agreements become systematically weaker when major states and funders withdraw. Public agencies become less capable when expertise is removed during restructuring. Policy failure is then offered as proof that climate policy was unrealistic from the beginning. A self-fulfilling prophecy: obstruct the system, then point at the obstruction.
Why Trump’s Rhetoric Is So Successful:
Trump’s rhetoric succeeds because it attaches an abstract crisis to immediate fears.
Climate change is large, technical, and complicated. Causes can be hard to pinpoint, and consequences may be difficult to directly attribute. The benefits of climate mitigation are often invisible because success looks like disasters that do not happen.
The costs of climate policy are easier to display. A factory closes, a household receives an electricity bill, a worker fears industry layoffs. These concerns, often selectively presented and exaggerated, are very real. Trump converts that anxiety into a simple choice: climate action or economic survival.
This simplification avoids a few uncomfortable questions: Who currently profits from fossil-fuel dependence? Who pays when floods destroy homes? Who absorbs higher food prices after droughts? Who can afford private insurance, air-conditioning, relocation, or reconstructed infrastructure? Economic costs do not disappear when governments refuse to act; they are redistributed towards people with the least political power.
Climate rhetoric also becomes entangled with identity. Once accepting climate science is coded as liberal, globalist, elitist, or anti-American, evidence alone won’t change minds. A factual correction can feel like a personal attack. As a result, providing more information is insufficient. Climate denial persists since information is framed through political loyalty, economics, institutional distrust, and personal fears.
Scientists answer the question, ‘Is climate change real?’
Trump answers a different question: ‘Who is using climate change to control you?’
The second question is more politically potent because it provides an enemy.
Trump’s greatest success has been to force climate action to defend itself endlessly. Every proposal must prove that it will cost nothing, threaten nobody, inconvenience nobody, work immediately, preserve every existing job, defeat foreign competition, and solve a global problem without relying on other countries. Until those conditions are met, delay is presented as prudence. This is the brilliance of Trump’s modern climate denialism.
Effective climate communication must therefore do more than repeat scientific consensus. It must challenge the frames through which climate action is interpreted. Climate messaging must explain who pays under the existing system, connect policy to material improvements in everyday life, address fears of job loss, and expose how demands for perfect solutions protect a deeply imperfect status quo.
The central political question is no longer whether Trump believes in climate change. Belief is almost beside the point. What matters is that he has learned to move from denial to doubt, from doubt to cost, from cost to nationalism, and from nationalism to obstruction without ever having to promote a climate policy.
The rhetoric moves. The regulations disappear. The world, day by day, year by year, warms. And we are all the worse for it.
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