My biggest fear as Trump takes office: moral apathy

As America faces unprecedented political and environmental challenges, the nation’s moral compass seems to be faltering. Chris Wright explores the implications of this moral decline in the age of Trump

“I am terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country”. This was James Baldwin in 1963. He was trying to answer a question I have been struggling with all week. On the eve of the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, what am I most afraid of?

Back then, it was the year of the infamous civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and Baldwin was describing not only the brutality of the police officers involved, but the everyday dehumanisation that had swept across America. Later that year, John F Kennedy was assassinated. He was only 46 years old at the time, and the youngest president of the United States.

Sixty-two years later, as America swears in its oldest elected president, I’m not sure if fear is the right word.

Yes, I expect Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris Agreement, cut funding for renewable energy, dismantle critical elements of the Inflation Reduction Act and defund federal environmental agencies like the EPA and the weather team at NOAA. If he can deny climate change to the victims of the Los Angeles fires this week, there is likely no floor to his shame.

And if Chris Wright (not me, but the guy running for energy secretary in 2025), who drinks fracking fluid for fun, can pass a Senate confirmation hearing while openly complaining that fossil fuels have “fallen out of fashion and out of favour” with investors, there is likely no unscientific line his cabinet will not cross, no fossil fuel subsidy he won’t offer, and no renewable energy project he won’t try to block. They might even try to stop renewable energy projects already under construction in some states and proactively ban renewables projects in others. I’ll admit, even this surprised me.

But ever since he won the election over two months ago, it’s hard to understand if I’ve truly got over the shock of it all. I mean Trump went against Taylor Swift, Hollywood and Beyonce, and won. Who does that? Twice?

Author James Baldwin spoke of his concern at the ‘moral apathy’ in his country (AFP/Getty)

And perhaps my biggest fear is not just Trump and his billionaire cabinet’s direct attacks on the energy transition, but their combined attacks on the free market, investors, and information, and the bleak and utter silence that’s already starting to ring out in response to his fossil fuel totalitarianism. The utter lack of resistance so far from corporate America, and the proactive self-censorship from so many of these so-called captains of industry.

Mark “masculine” Zuckerberg has not only decided to end fact-checking at Facebook, but also added Trump’s UFC buddy Dana White to his board. This puts the most influential and time-consuming company in the history of the world under the unsupervised guidance of a man whose latest professional venture involves adults slapping each other unconscious.

I can’t think of a clearer symbol of the future of America’s attention than the fact that it may now be guided by the same mind that founded a professional slapping competition.

But we’ve also seen the US finance sector sweat under aggressive legal and political pressure, pushing them to abandon their climate commitments altogether or redirect them under the new “political environment”.

Six of America’s biggest banks have pulled out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, ushering in a similar move from the Banks of Canada and Montreal. They didn’t do this because their bank accounts had suffered as a result of investing in renewables. This week, they all announced stellar 2024 profit margins; Goldman Sachs’ profit margins more than doubled, and Citi group reported nearly $3bn in profits.

They did so after the world’s biggest asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, were all sued by Texas and 10 other Republican-led states for anti-competitive climate investment practices. Effectively, Republican states are trying to make any level of corporate climate activism or public divestment basically illegal.

This led Blackrock to quit the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, an industry coalition backed by 20 years of collaborative engagement. Now the initiative has had to suspend its operations and hide its member list and commitments while it undergoes a global organisational review.

And now that Twitter and Facebook will no longer fact-check, they’re certainly going after the climate fact-shapers. Concentrated pressure is starting to be put on the International Energy Agency by Republican senator John Barasso. The senator, who will probably sit on Trump’s new energy “super-council”, released a report in late December accusing the IEA of “gambling with the world’s energy security”, and directly threatening their funding.

Also in his crosshairs is the NOAA, the primary federal weather and climate science agency. The agency, their research and their 12,000 scientific employees are a key target of Project 2025’s smash and grab.

And I’m not sure what scares me more. Whether it’s the plans to undermine climate investments, expand oil and gas, and lock in renewable energy bans that I know will add millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Or whether it’s the trickle-down impacts of Trump’s reign. The multi-pronged attacks on content, capital and the truth. The cascading effects of self-censorship en masse, the death by a thousand multi-pronged social cuts that may release millions more tonnes of pollution under more subtle, slower-burning fires.

It is then that I fear we will all lose hope. That we will lose ourselves, our sense of resistance, and innovation. That we will succumb to the numbness so easily spreadable when the game’s rigged.

Perhaps my biggest fear right now is that we lose ourselves in that waterboarding sense of loss after loss and never feel able to come up for air. My fear is that we turn off, as the violence unfolds. That as we watch, the moral apathy spreads.

But thinking back to Baldwin’s reflection on what he saw happening in America, there was one other moment in 1963 that gives me hope.

Three months after his interview, a 34-year-old man known as Martin Luther King Jr travelled from Birmingham to Washington DC and shared his dream with the world. He faced Baldwin’s fears, and one year later, the Civil Rights Act was passed. That year, King also became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. One year after that, the right to vote without discrimination was finally enshrined for all Americans.

Trump’s inauguration this year is also, or perhaps more importantly, Martin Luther King Jr Day. An apt reminder that this week “we must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”.