Donald Trump is a corrupt authoritarian. He’s firing, arresting, and deporting anybody who stands in his way, building a dangerous system of repression to silence his opposition. Meanwhile, his corruption is enriching himself and his allies.
This is a crucial moment. If we don’t stop him in the next few years, there is no road to meaningful climate action, let alone a Green New Deal.
History shows that the first two years of an authoritarian’s tenure are pivotal for determining whether they hold onto power, or if everyday people can end the regime and build a new political and economic system in its place.
This is in our DNA. In 2017, Sunrise Movement formed in response to the first Trump presidency, but also to the three crises his presidency represented:
- An economic crisis. Donald Trump is an avatar for the worst of American greed, somebody who believes that the winners of capitalism deserve their ever increasing wealth, while the rest of us struggle to get by.
- A threatened democracy. He was elected thanks to an undemocratic electoral college, despite losing the popular vote. And his presidency was bought out by the same billionaires and corporations that drove and benefited from the economic crisis.
- The climate crisis. Among those corporations were fossil fuel corporations, who sought to oppose all action that would stop, slow, or even regulate their reckless destruction of our future.
Back then, our goal was simple: win transformative legislation that created millions of jobs doing the honest, hard work necessary to stop the climate crisis by modernizing our energy system away from the fossils of our past and towards clean renewable energy.
We knew that if we trained thousands of young people to start hubs around the country, they could mobilize millions of young people, and create pressure on our politicians to act. It worked.
The pressure pushed the political establishment to treat climate change as a critical issue. In 2022, Congress passed the largest investment in clean energy in our nation’s history, the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested $500 billion in clean energy jobs and programs around the country. Trump cut significant portions of the law this year, but the investment has already been felt. Clean energy was already cheaper and faster growing than fossil fuels, but now it’s leaving them in the dust.
Big Oil read the room, and realized that in a democracy, their toxic business model was going to go the way of… well, fossils.
So they made a simple decision. Abandon democracy: embrace fascism. They bought the Trump presidency, and he’s lined his cabinet with their cronies, like Chris Wright.
America is facing the consequences every day. For months, Trump has been using the National Guard and ICE as his own personal domestic armies to terrorize the communities he has long scapegoated, from Black people to immigrants to students on school campuses. Now, he’s cracking down on media figures and political movements and even whole CITIES.
Throughout history, when authoritarian regimes have looked to consolidate power, it has been movements of workers and young people that have pushed them back and driven them out. Every day, we are building and becoming that movement, because we know that there will be no meaningful climate action if we lose this fight. Join us:
