You Got Through Week 1 of Trump. Here’s How Things Start to Turn Around.

Trump’s avalanche of executive orders and expansionist threats, Musk’s Nazi salutes—all of it was meant to leave us scared and demoralized. Take the time you need. But don’t let them shut you down.

Jan 27, 2025

Congratulations on getting through a deeply and deliberately horrifying week: a torrent of malicious and destructive policy announcements from a U.S. president bent on reversing progress on climate and energy solutions, while taking a blowtorch to democracy itself.

We weren’t supposed to be able to catch our breath, any of us. Not after witnessing an avalanche of nearly 100 executive orders last Monday, two deliberately-choreographed Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration, and wave after wave of follow-up news in the days that followed—including expansionist threats aimed at Canada, Greenland, Panama. You would almost say the executive orders amounted to a blitzkrieg, not only against Biden administration climate and energy policies, but against the inclusion, environmental justice, community development, and social cohesion efforts that would help everyone benefit from the shift off carbon.

Except that the language of blitzkrieg is something that Trump enabler-in-chief and apparent co-president Elon Musk would evidently take as a compliment.

But the scarier it gets, the more we see stuff get real, the more important it is to take a deep breath. Think about how we respond. Look around us to find the allies facing down the same crisis. Then figure out together how we get through it healthy and whole.

Have no doubt that Trump’s strategy this past week was deliberate. “‘Flood the zone.’ Repeat.” was the way one of the intrepid journalists who haven’t yet quit or been laid off by the Washington Post headlined the story this week.

On one hand, the best line I’ve seen over the last few days described a U.S. presidential executive order as “just a memo on fancy letterhead”. And indeed, the pushback against Trump’s monstrosities is already well under way. At the same time, it’s all so big and seems so unstoppable that it’s hard not to just look away, harder still to imagine a pathway out of it.

So Job One is: Don’t let them shut you down.

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It’s Meant to Feel This Way

Uncertain as everything feels at the moment, there’s one more thing you can absolutely be sure of: They want you feeling this way. They’re counting it. The first step for a wannabe despot bent on oligarchy or fascism is to see how much ground they can seize without anyone trying to stop them. And nobody will try, at least not at first, if they’re too demoralized, exhausted, or terrified of the next knock on the door.

Or just too fully preoccupied with the need to keep on keeping on, day to day, minute to minute.

Which is your best reason to tune in to the response that is already taking shape—in countries and regions like Canada, Mexico, and the European Union that Trump is targeting, and in U.S. courts, state and city governments, and at the grassroots. Never forget, not for an instant, that every day his agenda can be slowed down brings us closer to 2026 mid-term elections where some of his control over the machinery of U.S. government may well begin to slip. Or the mid-term campaign period beginning in less than a year, when Republicans in vulnerable swing seats will have to be more careful about being associated with Trumpian extremism.

Quietly Paying Attention

Here’s one very limited measure that people are down but not out, quiet for now but still keenly paying attention: Conor Curtis’ brilliant guest post last week, warning that Trump’s “annexation” of Canada has already begun, was by far the most widely-read Weekender we’ve ever published.

And just wait until the reality of Trump’s agenda begins to bite for the people who thought he was in their corner.

• He won’t be bringing down grocery costs, not on Day One of his presidency and not likely ever, nor even making living costs a priority now that he’s in office.

• His unconscionable pardons for the insurrectionists who laid waste to the U.S. Capitol and rampaged against Capitol police on January 6, 2021 will leave everyone in America less safe, making it legal for those Trump-inspired militias to rearm themselves as they vow revenge.

• Needless to say, his immediate order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement (again) will undercut the response to a cascading global crisis, though it’s beyond Trump’s power or anyone else’s to kill off climate action or the energy transition. The most he’ll achieve will be to drive investment to other countries and solidify China’s lead in the global cleantech race, pretty much the opposite of the rabidly protectionist policies he says he’s trying to pursue.

• His performative executive orders, like the one aiming to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, won’t make life better for anyone.

• His high-profile deportations, by contrast, will leave Americans watching neighbours, friends, and loved ones disappear overnight, while driving underground the work force that delivers so much of the invisible, undervalued labour the U.S. counts on. From rebuilding Los Angeles after this month’s devastating wildfires, to staffing the massive Amazon warehouses whose profits gave multi-gajillionaire Jeff Bezos the wherewithal to buy up and essentially destroy the Post before genuflecting to Trump.

• The online mockery has already begun, so far focused on shadow president Musk, his alarming seig heils, and his alt-right interventions in Germany’s national elections coming up next month. “BREAKING: Elon Musk is reportedly furious people keep calling Tesla vehicles ‘swasticars’,” information security and permaculture enthusiast David Penfold wrote on Bluesky. “So don’t do that.”

Add to that the reality that Trump’s election win was far narrower than he’ll ever let on, and you can see a plausible path—by no means certain, but still plausible—to turning around this terrible moment, sooner and better than we might expect.

Limiting the Carnage

The first step is to limit the damage while community resistance and revulsion to the Trump agenda begin to build. If you look closely and maybe tilt your head 15° for a better view, you’ll see that that’s already beginning to happen.

Yes, the top-line news is that he’s taken a sledgehammer to U.S. climate and energy investments, particularly the wind farms Trump so ridiculously despises, literally defining “energy” to exclude new wind and solar. But the details in those executive orders were a lot more mixed and contradictory than they seemed to be at first glance.

Meanwhile, after a last-minute scramble in the dying weeks of his administration, 84% of the funding under Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act has been “obligated” under contract. And much of the rest has been announced, making it harder for Trump to break the promise in Republican “red states” that are looking forward to the jobs and tax revenue they’ll produce.

In a delicious irony, even Trump’s attack on offshore wind runs the risk of undercutting his administration’s ability to promote offshore oil and gas development, Grist reports.

Of course, the U.S. will still lose four precious years in which it could and should have been ramping up energy solutions and climate resilience, rather than having that action needlessly and senselessly delayed. But this still won’t be the yugely exaggerated, full-scale victory that you can count on Trump to claim.

Warning: Trump-Level Embarrassment Ahead

Trump’s vow to “Drill, Baby, Drill” for more oil and gas may yet turn out to be one of his toughest campaign pledges to deliver on, and hence one of the biggest embarrassments of his second term. In mid-January, The Energy Mix reported at length that oil companies and their investors, facing shaky global markets and a looming drop-off in demand, may be unable or unwilling to keep Trump’s promise for him. We’ve since seen the same story picked up by the Financial Times (UK) and the Globe and Mail.

You can also expect state and local governments to keep up momentum on their climate and energy initiatives. Governors Kathy Hochul of New York and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico are coordinating the bipartisan, state-level response, while state clean electricity standards take centre stage in the push for clean energy investment and emission reductions.

The bigger picture is to dig in for the longer haul, change the way we listen and communicate, and look for new ways to respond that build bridges rather than setting climate hawks apart and marginalizing our message. In his The Crucial Years newsletter, climate author and organizer Bill McKibben cites the winning approach described by Ivan Marcović, one of the leaders of the Serbian resistance movement that eventually overthrew the totalitarian Slobodan Milošević:

When we started, society was largely in a state of despair and apathy. And that is why we decided to use hope as one of our major forms of messaging. People were like, “How can you be hopeful? It looks like things are getting worse by the day.” But we didn’t care how people reacted to the message of hope, or that they reacted with skepticism. What we were focused on was whether people had a need for hope—and they did. They desperately wanted to hope. They were skeptical because they didn’t want to get hurt or disappointed. Cynicism and apathy were at the surface, but below that was actually a common desire to live in a normal country. That’s why one of our slogans was “We want Serbia to be a normal country.” It was silly because just wanting things to be normal was kind of outrageous. But this is why persistence is important.

This Isn’t ‘Hopium’

In some circles of the climate community, it’s fashionable to write off any whiff of optimism as “hopium”. Like the skepticism, cynicism, and apathy that first met the resistance movement in Serbia, it’s easy for anyone working up close on climate change to write off any sense of possibility as naïve at best, dangerously misleading at worst. Particularly with Trump so firmly in control, at least for now.

We can all agree on the need to guard against misguided optimism. But this isn’t that.

The more dire or overwhelming the immediate moment may seem, may actually be, the first step in reversing the damage is envisioning a pathway to getting there. Not a guaranteed win, but a realistic possibility. When giving up is not an option—and it most certainly isn’t today, for climate solutions or for the future of democracy—our first questions have to be the same: What’s next? What do we need? And How can I help?”

And if we’re going to get each other through this, How can I help? Might be the first question we ask, not the last. As Paris-based media artist Franklin Habit writes on Facebook:

Take it from an old campaigner. You are allowed to, indeed you must, find or take or create moments of joy. Laughing, dancing, making pretty things—it's okay. Tuning out for a while to rest your head—it's okay.
Without rest, you can't fight. While some of us rest, the others fight. Then they rest, and we pick up the baton.
Will things be fine? Heh. Of course not. But some things will be fine some of the time, and when those precious things come your way—take them. It helps you keep going, and it's not wrong or selfish.
Please take care of yourself. We need you, we need each other. They want us to be sad, isolated, and hopeless. When we aren't, they lose. For that moment, they lose.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.