What Donald Trump’s view of public lands reveals about his environmental agenda

The most revealing thing Donald Trump has ever said about the natural world came during the first phone call he ever had with Britain’s prime minister.

According to Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, the first thing Trump wanted to discuss wasn’t trade, NATO, or Ukraine. It was obese foxes.

Trump insisted that Britain had too many windmills. The windmills were killing birds. Then he explained what happened next. Foxes, he said, eat the dead birds. With so much easy food, the foxes become fat and lazy to the point that British people no longer recognize them because they’re so enormous.

McSweeney said staff in the room struggled not to laugh, but Starmer, to his credit, managed to keep a straight face.

I start with the fat foxes because the story is perhaps the best snapshot of Trump’s relationship with the natural world in existence. What follows is the full tour.

Sharks & Electric Boats

During a campaign rally in Las Vegas in the summer of 2024, Trump drifted into a story about electric boats and sharks that belongs in a museum of American decline. The pretext was a grievance about electric boats, which he believes are so heavy they sink. From there he offered a riddle he was plainly proud of, one he claimed to have sprung on a boat manufacturer who was reportedly stumped by its brilliance.

If your electric boat is going down, he explained, and the water rises over the big powerful battery, and there’s a shark about ten yards off, do you stay aboard and get electrocuted, or do you leap into the water toward the shark? He reached his verdict decisively. He’d take electrocution every single time, because he is not, under any circumstances known to God or man, getting near the shark.

None of this is real. Electric boats don’t electrocute you when they get wet, the battery lives in a sealed case, the entire scenario exists nowhere but inside his skull, and he was offering it to people in the desert as a reason to vote. But look at what it reveals. Handed the whole ocean, one of the oldest and most staggering living systems on the planet, the only things his mind could produce were a monster that wants to eat him and a machine that wants to shock him.

The sharks aren’t a fluke either. Back in 2011, Stormy Daniels described a hotel room where Trump sat riveted to Shark Week, terrified and unable to look away from a documentary about the worst attacks in history. He told her he would never give a dollar to any charity that helps sharks, and that he hopes all the sharks die.

Two years later somebody tweeted at him asking him to stop serving shark fin soup at his casinos. Trump broadcast the request to millions and replied, “You like sharks? Sorry folks, I’m just not a fan of sharks, and don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone,” then filed the person, in writing, among the losers and haters of the world.

Finning takes the fins off a living animal and drops the rest back in the ocean to sink and suffocate, for a soup that tastes like nothing. He was selling it. A stranger asked him to stop and he made a joke of the asking. Oceanic shark populations have collapsed by roughly seventy percent since 1970, hunted for the soup Trump refused to stop selling.

Save the Whales

Sharks are a scourge and need to be killed and served as soup, but whales are entirely different. The reason is simple: whales can be turned into a weapon against wind turbines. All you have to do is insist windmills are killing whales.

Trump does this regularly, and without proof, in his mind it’s self-evident. He’ll rattle off numbers: so many whales washed ashore this year against so few before, confidently pinning it all on the turbines. Marine biologists will tell you it’s ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and changes in ocean conditions. But those explanations don’t help Trump make the case against wind power.

And the whales are just another act in a decades-long carnival. He’s told crowds over and over that windmills give you cancer. He’s claimed homes built near them become worthless. You’ve already heard about the obese foxes.

Which brings me to where this obsession with windmills all started. In 2012, Trump built a golf resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and then learned an offshore wind farm would be built off the coast from his property. This enraged him because it spoiled his pristine ocean view. Never mind that it powered 80,000 homes. Trump went on to sue over it and eventually lost and the wind farm was built.

Nearly twenty years later, that grievance has followed him into the White House, where his administration is now paying a French company roughly a billion dollars to terminate two offshore wind leases. And last summer, just before his visit to the UK, Trump renewed his attacks on British clean energy: “They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil.”

A Forest is a Hotel Floor

Keen observers of Donald Trump’s comments about forests can pick up on something. He doesn’t seem to understand what a forest is.

When he visited Paradise, California, after the devastating Camp Fire in 2018, his explanation for the disaster wasn’t drought, wind, climate, or decades of fire suppression. It was simple housekeeping.

Trump went on to tell reporters about a recent conversation he’d had with the President of Finland: “They spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem. And when it is, it’s a very small problem. So I know everybody’s looking at that to that end. And it’s going to work out, it’s going to work out well.” The President of Finland was quick to say he had never told Trump any such thing, but the conversation itself isn’t really the point.

The revealing part is the picture Trump painted. In his telling, a forest behaves like a building, maybe a hotel if you will. If someone keeps the floors clean, everything works. If they don’t, disaster follows.

Real forests aren’t rooms and hallways to be vacuumed; they’re complex interconnected systems of life. But once a forest is reduced to a simple maintenance problem, it becomes easy to argue that the solution is more roads, more drilling, more logging, and fewer protections. If the landscape is just neglected property, then exploitation begins to look like sound management.

Which brings us to his March 1st executive order last year entitled, “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” that ordered the Forest Service to log more of the national forests and sets an agency-wide target to increase timber volume 25% over four to five years.

His remarks at that event crystalized his understanding of forests. “We’re freeing up our forest. We’re gonna be able to take down trees. Right now, we’re so restricted environmentally, we’re gonna be freeing it up with an emergency order. We have an emergency order, and we’re gonna be freeing up our forests. We have more forests than almost anybody. And great lumber, great trees. We don’t need anybody’s trees. We don’t need trees from Canada or anybody else.”

Speaking of Canada, just last week Trump launched into a social media tirade over Canadian wildfires that had resulted in, as he put it, the United States being “unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” He went on to accuse Canada of “willful negligence,” saying the country had “refused to engage in basic forest management and debris removal.” Then he announced that the cost of the smoke “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

A few days later, after being booed at the World Cup Final where he sat next to Canadian PM Mark Carney, the White House announced Trump had levied new 50% tariffs on Canadian goods.

It’s the raking theory all over again, eight years later, aimed at an entire sovereign country. Canada’s boreal forest covers something on the order of a billion acres. It burns because it’s heating at several times the global rate and the fire season now runs months longer than it used to. But Trump looked at smoke drifting into the U.S. and concluded his neighbor hadn’t tidied up. Nobody swept the floor, the mess came over the fence, and now somebody’s going to pay for it. It’s the logic of a child who’s decided the boy next door is doing it on purpose.

He doesn’t ask why the North is burning, because asking would require being curious about something that isn’t about him. He gets angry that the air smells and he goes looking for who to blame, and the blame lands wherever it lands, and then the punishment is a bill.

Beautiful, Clean Coal

Now don’t close the book on President Trump when it comes to the natural world. There are some parts of nature he truly admires.

Coal is “beautiful.” Oil is “liquid gold.” America’s forests are full of “great lumber.” And mountains are cool things you blast and mine for minerals and marble floors.

This is how he sees the natural world. It’s a vast reservoir for raw materials waiting to be ripped out and used.

His pet name for coal, the filthiest fuel on earth, is “beautiful, clean coal,” and he’s instructed his own staff never to say the word coal without first gluing those two words onto the front of it, which is exactly the logic of a small child who’s decided his least-favorite food will go down easier if everyone at the table agrees to call it dessert.

The reason coal is so amazing is that it’s indestructible. According to Trump, you can blow up a pipeline and you can blow up a windmill, but you can’t blow coal up, not even with bombs. The President of the United States thinks coal is beautiful because it would survive a bomb being dropped on it, the same quality a five-year-old prizes in a favorite action figure.

In Trump’s head, value comes from domination. What can be taken. What can be burned. What can be sold. What can withstand a blast. What can be made to perform loyalty under pressure. Show this man an old-growth forest and he sees lots of lumber waiting to be used. Show him a canyon and he sees whatever’s underneath it. Show him a national monument and he sees a restriction. Show him a wilderness and he sees a locked vault.

The Invented Witnesses

But to really understand him, and to understand how the fat foxes came to exist in the first place, you have to reckon with the one habit that has defined the man his entire life. He cannot make a claim without conjuring a witness to swear it’s true.

Watch him long enough and the tell announces itself. It’s often couched in the word “sir.” Whenever Donald Trump wants you to believe something, a big strong tough guy materializes out of the mist. A man’s man, the sort who’s never cried in his life, not even, in Trump’s favorite embellishment, when he was a baby, and this granite specimen approaches the president with tears pouring down his face, calls him “sir,” and thanks him for personally saving the country.

He has told this story dozens of times. Daniel Dale, a reporter at CNN, has been cataloging the “sir” stories for years, and someone stitched more than two dozen of them into a single montage. The best part is that Trump can’t keep his own stock characters straight. The nine weeping tough guys who were coal miners in Evansville one week turned into steelworkers in Sioux Falls a few days later. And notice who the stock characters are, because it matters. The nameless sobbing heroes of these fables are almost always miners and steelworkers. Men in hard hats. Men who exist, in the story, to bless his war on the natural world.

The invented witnesses aren’t only weeping men, either. They’re experts, authorities summoned out of thin air to vouch for whatever needs vouching. There’s the Finnish president who rakes. There’s the boat manufacturer stumped by the shark riddle. At the Economic Club of Chicago he told a story about a cabinet maker who came to him crying with gratitude over tariffs, and when he reached for the man’s name, the name he produced was Einstein. The cabinet maker was named Einstein.

Last August he informed reporters that Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland who’d spent the previous six months campaigning against him, hugged him at the Army-Navy game and said, “Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime.” Moore’s entire response was “lol.” Then Fox News dug up the footage from their own Trump documentary, and the tape showed Moore shaking his hand, saying welcome back to Maryland, and moving on to talk about a bridge. The next day Trump told the story again, except this time in his telling the cameras had caught Moore saying it. That’s the pattern. Evidence does not correct the story. Evidence is simply eaten by the story.

In one week in the summer of 2017, Trump described two phone calls he’d received. One, he said, was from the head of the Boy Scouts, who called to tell him his jamboree speech was the greatest speech ever made to them. The other, he said, was from the president of Mexico, who called to compliment him on the border.

The Boy Scouts said they were unaware of any such call. Mexico’s foreign ministry said no phone call had taken place. And when it came time to explain, Trump’s press secretary stood at the podium and said it wasn’t a lie, that the conversations took place, they just simply didn’t take place over a phone call.

At the same event where he invented the Moore hug, he also mentioned that “they” call him the president of Europe, and that he considers it an honor. Nobody calls him the president of Europe. There is no they. There never is.

He saves his favorite “they” for climate change. Standing in front of the United Nations last September, Trump called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. He explained that back in the 1920s and 1930s, they said global cooling would kill the world.

They didn’t. Nobody did. There was no paper, no panicked scientific consensus, no great global cooling scare from the 1920s. Just a “they” he needed, so a “they” arrived.

He told the assembled leaders of the earth that the carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions. He didn’t say which people. He went on to say that radicalized environmentalists want to kill all the cows, no more cows, we don’t want cows anymore. Then, because the man can’t help himself, he added that he’s really good at predicting things, that he doesn’t say it in a braggadocious way but it’s true, and that he’s been right about everything.

Just like he predicted prices would come down on day one and he’d stop the war with Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of being sworn in.

And then there’s the Time magazine cover, which settles the question of whether the man is fooled or doing the fooling. For years, Trump has cited an old Time cover warning about global cooling, from the 1920s, he says. The cover is a Photoshop. It’s been drifting around the internet since at least 2013. The real one ran in 2007. It was a penguin, and the headline was “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”

In 2017, an adviser printed out the fake, brought it to him, and told him it was fraudulent. He was informed. He kept using it anyway, right through a rally in Virginia in the summer of 2024, where he told the crowd about a picture of the Earth he saw on Time Magazine, sometime in the 1920s, a global cooling thing.

And if all of this sounds like the behavior of a mind that’s slipping, here’s the detail that should rearrange your whole understanding of it, because it proves this was never about decline at all. It’s the oldest and most consistent thing about him.

For roughly three decades, going back to the 1970s, Donald Trump called reporters while pretending to be other people. Sometimes a man named John Barron, sometimes a man named John Miller. In that borrowed voice he would praise Donald Trump lavishly, in the third person, holding forth on his business triumphs and the women supposedly lining up for him.

This isn’t a rumor. His own former executives confirmed it. A recording of one of the calls survives. When Trump was asked about the name John Barron under oath in a lawsuit, he testified, “I believe on occasion I used that name.” And when the recording surfaced in 2016 he went on the Today show and said it wasn’t him, that it didn’t sound like him, that it was probably one of the many scams out there.

He was shown the fake Time cover and told to his face it was fake, and he used it for eight more years. He was played a tape of his own voice and he said it belonged to somebody else. The man doesn’t stop at conjuring the witness. He’ll defend the conjuring long after everyone in the room can see straight through it.