The Trump Revolution—One Year Later

Lindsay: Hi, I’m Lindsay Shingler, the host of Talking Policy. Happy New Year. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. It’s become a tradition at Talking Policy to start the year by gathering the voices of experts, to look back at the year just passed, and ahead to the future year. Last January, I spoke with five experts who reflected on what the election of Donald Trump to a second term might mean for the United States and the world. Now, a year later, I sat down for five more interviews to consider where we are now.

We recorded these interviews over the course of January 6th through the 8th, just days after news broke of the dramatic U.S. military intervention in Venezuela. I sat down with Neil Narang, who is the co-director of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, to ask what the geopolitical ramifications might be.

Neil, welcome back to the podcast. So this dramatic intervention seems to be evidence of the Trump administration’s desire to establish American hegemony in the Western hemisphere—and that was actually spelled out in the U.S. National Security Strategy that was published in December. Going even further, some people are seeing Venezuela, combined with Trump’s rapprochement with Russia and China, as evidence that the administration wants to create a world where great powers led by strongmen dominate in their spheres of influence, so Russia in Europe, China in East Asia, and the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere.

Now, complicating that narrative is the fact that the administration has acted well beyond the Western hemisphere. The raid in Caracas, for example, came barely a week after U.S. strikes in Nigeria, and last summer’s attack on Iran’s underground nuclear sites. Complicating this story even further is the fact that Trump campaigned on a platform of “America First,” and promising to avoid foreign intervention. So what’s going on here? How are we supposed to make sense of how Trump sees the world? Is there a model that we can point to or not?

Neil Narang: Yeah, this is a really good question, and I don’t think any of us know the answer. In my own personal limited experience in the Pentagon, I discovered foreign policy is a very messy, and often incoherent, and parochial, and particularistic process. And it’s not necessarily the case that specific decisions fit neatly within a coherent, grand strategy. I think despite the spin and the branding that’s done ex post, it’s not always the case that all of it coheres. But if you listen to the press conference [with President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio following the strike], I think there were several themes that came out that may imply a broader Trump worldview.

First, it was hard to avoid the core framing around spheres of influence, especially in the Western Hemisphere. President Trump doesn’t just allude to the Monroe Doctrine, he basically says, we’re back to enforcing it. He calls the Western hemisphere our home region, and he’s explicit that under the new national security strategy, American dominance will never be questioned again. That’s a claim that the U.S. has special rights to the Americas and that outside powers like China, Russia, Iran, are not legitimate players in this space.

A second theme that sort of came out for me was around the demonstration of American military capabilities for the purpose of deterrence, and there’s repeated emphasis in the speech, not on multilateral legitimacy or international law, but it’s on capability, speed, precision, the psychological effects, and how decisive the military operation was. The subtext is: the fear of American power should create some order in the world. This is a very different organizing principle than sort of the post-Cold War language of institutions and norms and consent that we’re used to.

A third theme that came out for me was collapsing foreign policy into domestic security, maybe to be consistent with the “America First” logic. Venezuela is not treated as another state with interests that are divergent from the U.S., but in the speech it’s treated as a source of drugs and gangs and disorder inside the United States. And again, even Rubio’s legal framing was that at its core they were pursuing an indicted fugitive, something that the military was just supporting.

Lindsay: Some commentators have noted that Trump seems to be getting kind of increasingly comfortable, and maybe emboldened, with using the incredible firepower that he has at his fingertips.

You’re an expert in nuclear weapons. Are you concerned about the U.S. nuclear arsenal coming into play?

Neil: I’m not substantially more concerned that the current administration is more inclined to use nuclear weapons than previous administrations. That said, I think it’s worth unpacking your question, and why there might be some anxiety around this.

So as many listeners probably know, in the United States, the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons rests with the president and with the president alone. No other official has legal power to approve or veto or block a presidential nuclear launch order. It’s certainly common for presidents to consult advisors before they make a decision like that. They may speak with the White House staff and military commanders, the Secretary of Defense. But, and this is the critical point, there’s no legal requirement that they do so. The system doesn’t have a lot of guardrails between the president and a nuclear launch, and the chain of command that includes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense… none of them, even the vice president, are in the nuclear launch chain of command. Once a president issues a valid and authenticated launch order, the system is designed to execute it.

Most nuclear strike options are pre-vetted for legality—obviously there are caveats here, legality is not automatic. If a president decided to do an unprovoked large scale attack out of the blue, against China or Russia or something, there would be serious legal questions about that. But there are other scenarios, maybe against targets within North Korea or Iran, where it would be difficult to argue that the president doesn’t have legal authority to do those attacks in national interest.

Empirically, we know that over five years of the Trump presidency, and despite some rhetoric in the first term about fire and fury and nuclear buttons, I don’t think the probability of nuclear use was substantially higher, and there are all sorts of reasons for why this is the case. The U.S., for one, has conventional alternatives that would make nuclear use kind of unnecessary, but there are all sorts of constraints: the nuclear taboo, alliance politics. There’s enormous retaliation risks at play.

So what worries me isn’t that nuclear use is around the corner. It’s more that an interventionist posture increases the number of moments where nuclear states could be frightened or rushed or guessing. So nuclear stability depends on restraint and communication and predictable red lines, exactly the things that erode when force becomes kind of more routine. So the more crises, the more military moves, the more chances for miscalculation, accidents, rapid escalation, especially if adversaries conclude that the U.S. is less predictable. So the risk is latent in misunderstanding and miscalculation that could come from both allies and adversaries.

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Lindsay: As Neil suggested, one of the key areas to watch will be how adversaries and allies of the U.S. respond over the long term, both to the intervention in Venezuela itself and to the new posture of the administration overall. I spoke with UC San Diego professor and co-director of IGCC Tai Ming Cheung to better understand the current state of affairs between the U.S. and one of its most noteworthy adversaries: China.

Tai Ming Cheung: So of course the relationship has gone through major ups and downs in the past year because of the new second Trump administration. A lot of the initiatives of that has come from Washington D.C., while Beijing has sort of played a relatively continuous approach to dealing with the U.S.

So I would say that we can see the evolution of U.S.-China relations in a number of stages. So there’s the first stage, when the Trump administration comes in in late January, and there was hope that there would be a lot of continuity between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, in large part because the Biden administration, especially dealing with China, there was a lot of continuity with the first Trump administration, and in terms of political consensus in Washington, D.C., China was one of the only things that had bipartisan support, which is very, very unusual.

But in that first stage from January until the early summer, it didn’t go by the playbook, in large part because of the broader Trump administration’s external agenda focused primarily on the imposition of tariffs and the America First approach to dealing with foreign policy. The Chinese are very unhappy about this and they impose their sort of responses, especially dealing with technology and critical mineral and rare earth issues. And so by early summer, there’s a sense that U.S.-China relations are going off the rails because both sides are in many ways taking a zero sum approach, and it gets to the point that relations are so bad, that the Trump administration decides we have to find ways to work out these issues.

And so the next stage is sort of the summer to the autumn, when Xi Jinping and Trump meet in Seoul in November, there’s this beginning to cool down. There’s these meetings where primarily on the economic side, they try to work out ways to mitigate this escalating economic war. And it gets to the point where they say, let’s have a truce, let’s go back to where we started in January. The U.S. eases off on the tariffs, China eases off on a lot of these export controls on critical and rare earth issues.

And so at the beginning of 2026, we’re in this space where there was all this turbulence, and now we’re back to where we were at the beginning. And so the key issue now is, there’s a summit meeting planned when Trump will go to China in April, where the U.S. and China can find ways to improve on this sort of truce and find ways to work out their differences. And if that’s the case, then the U.S.-China relationship could actually, especially on the economic side, become much closer than at any time in the last decade or so.

Lindsay: When we spoke last year, you were on the podcast looking ahead on the eve of Trump’s inauguration to predict what might happen in terms of a China policy.

And what you said at the time was that it was too early to tell, of course.

The key appointments had not yet been made, and so there was no real model to speak of, and we would have to wait and see.

You just gave us this wonderful portrait of the last year, season by season. On the one hand, as a very much outside observer, there is this kind of bipartisan norm of distrust of China. China as an adversary that we have to beat, especially in the economic space. And then there’s this other component to the administration, which is kind of admiration for strongmen, and it’s a little confusing. There’s some cognitive dissonance here, for the external observer. What would you say is the model?

Tai: So one way that I look at this is there’s the personalistic approach, and [then] there’s the deep institutional, sort of structural approach, in terms of, before Trump comes in, U.S.-China relations was very much this deeply institutionalized approach where, especially on the U.S. side, a lot of the policies or the thinking comes from within the establishment. You have the national security apparatus, you have the economic bureaucracy, and those are issues that tend to be very, very sticky.

And then when Trump comes in, there’s this sense that these institutional fights would continue, but what becomes apparent is that China policy does not take place at these institutions, it takes place in the White House and in particular it comes with the president, and it’s particularly telling when you look at the White House National Security Strategy. It doesn’t talk much about China, but there’s a part of it that says it’s all because of President Trump that we’ve changed the nature of that approach. And so the issue about the personalistic side, then, of the U.S. relationship with China is, how does President Trump see China itself? In terms of whether it’s economics or national security. I think, as he sees in everything else, he looks at issues in terms of U.S. national interest, but from an economic perspective. And that’s what we very much see driving this now.

Lindsay: Well let’s talk about what’s dominating the headlines right now, which is the U.S. seizure of the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife, which happened almost a week ago, and have a lot of people concerned about the potential that this signals an openness to a kind of “might-makes-right” approach to foreign policy, in spheres of influence that are dominated by great powers. Do you think that this move does in fact signal that, and speaking of Asia specifically, does it make it more likely, for example, that Beijing might invade Taiwan, which is something that Xi Jinping has long promised to do, to reunify China and Taiwan. Does the Venezuela situation change the world order?

Tai: I think like any good academic, we say it’s too early to tell. But at least when it comes to the second Trump administration, the Venezuela issue and how they’ve been threatening in terms of Greenland and Cuba and Colombia, et cetera, is very much a return to the 19th century of gunboat diplomacy, of sort of imperialistic interventions, that the country that carries the biggest stick makes the rules.

The issue is, is this going to be permanent, or is this an aberration that will just last for the next period that Trump and his inner circle focuses on this? If it is sort of like this is a major break, that we won’t be able to go back to that rules-based, much more developed sort of global order that we saw before the advent of the Second Trump administration, then I think the concerns that China, Russia, and other countries focusing on spheres of influence, we should be very, very worried about that. But it takes time for countries to move away from how they’ve operated, the norms that have been in place for some time, to this much more jungle-based approach.

Lindsay: A recent commentary in the Financial Times said that “China is marshalling its forces for long-term competition against an America that it believes is divided and in decline.” Do you agree with that?

Tai: I don’t think that Chinese leadership behind the scenes thinks that the U.S. is in decline, not that it makes itself weaker and vulnerable anytime soon. It may be on a long-term decline, or a long-term stagnation. But I think, if you look at a lot of the Chinese analysis, they know that the U.S. is still the biggest power. The economy remains very strong, and the military remains significantly stronger than what China is, even though that gap is beginning to narrow. But the real sort of strength of the U.S. is its alliances and relationships and its preeminent role with other like-minded countries, whether it’s NATO or various sort of treaty alliance relationships with other parts of the world, the U.S. has been dominant.

Now, because of the second Trump administration, especially the way its national security strategy increasingly sort of downplays Europe, and doesn’t really take much of a stance against Russia, China may see diplomatic and strategic and geoeconomic openings to sort of improve its stance, relatively, with these countries, and also especially with the global south. But I don’t think the Chinese really think that they’re seeing the decline of the U.S. as a country.

Lindsay: That’s interesting. So, what will you be watching this year? You mentioned a summit in April. I mean, this is IGCC, where our reason for being is to help reduce the chances of conflict, to help contribute in our small way to making the world more peaceful. With that kind of in mind, what are the things that you’re going to be most attentive to in the next year?

Tai: I guess especially in terms of the U.S.-China relationship, there is this potential opening where the U.S.-China relationship can actually sort of improve, where the two sides sort of work out, yes we have our national security issues, but let’s find a way to contain that and not make that the dominant driver of U.S.-China relations. Because if we see everything from a national security lens, then the distrust, the suspicions will force us to become even more engaged in arms races and engaged in a growing spiral of confrontation.

And if we look at the relationship, as we see with President Trump, from an economic perspective, that potentially provides all sorts of opportunities, of course, as well as challenges. And if that’s the case, I think we can see the potential for improvements in that relationship. And of course, then, if you get the U.S. and China to work together, then the opportunities for the rest of the world is also much, much better.

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Lindsay: For an economic perspective on the second Trump administration, I invited Caroline Freund, dean of the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, back to the podcast to talk about the impacts of the past year, and give us a potential forecast for trade and geoeconomics. I asked her first about what questions the U.S. intervention in Venezuela might raise in terms of the effects on the global economy.

Caroline Freund: Yeah, first I want to say that the most important questions aren’t really about the global economy. They’re about sovereignty and international law. But from an economic perspective, in the short run, the markets have largely shrugged this off. I don’t actually see a big effect. There’s a little bit of volatility in oil markets, but no major effects.

I think the potential longer run impact has to do with the effect on rules and predictability. Investors, markets really want predictability, and this additional geopolitical risk obviously poses a whole number of issues. We could see higher risk premia, we could see delayed big investments. But that will really depend on how it plays out.

Lindsay: You were a guest on Talking Policy one year ago when we were looking ahead at what a second Trump presidency might mean for the global economy. And we know now, one year later, that Trump’s tariff policy dominated the headlines last year.

Tariffs were threatened, then imposed, suspended, reimposed, postponed, and finally enacted in some cases, but not others. To what extent were these policies effective in accomplishing what they were meant to accomplish, and what were they meant to accomplish?

Caroline: Well, I think the administration talked about three goals, primarily: revenue, reducing the trade deficit, and reviving U.S. manufacturing.

And if we look at those three goals, what we see is yes, they got a lot of revenue. I think about $200 billion, way more than in previous years. Trade deficit, most recent month available, September 2025, did see a fall. But if we look at the year to date that’s available, in 2025 the trade deficit still expanded by about 17%. So I think the verdict’s still out on the trade deficit, and the big question is gonna be 2026.

And then the third one, on manufacturing, we’ve seen nothing. So output flat, employment flat. Again, we would probably expect that to take some time as investment could lead to additional manufacturing, though where we have seen investment is much more around AI, which potentially crowded out some of that manufacturing boom. But we haven’t seen that. Now it’s actually less efficient, given current prices, to produce in the U.S. So in a world of global supply chains, these variable tariffs really, really affect the ability to manufacture in the U.S.

Lindsay: When we spoke last year, you were very concerned that the administration would enact self-defeating policies such as curbs to immigration. And what we saw last year was that net immigration fell by 85% from the peak in 2023 in the U.S., and other countries are also cracking down. It’s not just a U.S. phenomenon, but it was particularly dramatic here last year. What will fewer immigrants mean for the U.S. economy? And what will that in turn mean for ordinary Americans?

Caroline: Yeah, so this is actually one of my biggest concerns, and remains so based on what’s happened, probably more than tariffs, despite being a trade economist. This is a country that’s built of immigrants, and being able to source talent from 8 billion people in the world rather than the 350 million Americans, obviously leads to more innovation, better management. You look at the heads of the biggest companies in this country, the CEOs, so many of them are immigrants. So many company founders are immigrants. Part of our ability to remain the most innovative economy in the world, and frankly to beat China in any kind of strategic competition really relies on talent, and that talent needs to be sourced globally.

So I think that’s the first point, is just how much innovation comes from immigrants. I’m worried about it. I’m worried about the H-1B fees. I’m worried about fewer international students in this country who stay and go on to do amazing things. And it’s going to take time, because these people would be here and then over time develop firms and so forth. So we’re not gonna realize how much this hurts us until it’s almost too late to fix it. So this is something that’s gonna be a slow but really costly burn for us.

In terms of the ordinary American, as you put it, I would say the biggest immediate effect is in rising prices, especially in sectors that rely on immigrants. So it’s part of the reason we are [seeing] rising food prices, because we rely on immigration for the agricultural sector quite heavily, and for other services like childcare; construction, as well. There’ll be a few people who work in those sectors who will get a positive shock from somewhat higher wages, but for the majority of people, the effect will be felt primarily through prices.

Lindsay: Looking ahead, are you concerned about a bigger change in terms of how other countries view the U.S. and what that might mean for us over the long term? Both in terms of our economic life, but even beyond that in terms of the shared prosperity that we have globally sought to build.

Caroline: Well, maybe I’ll take it from my own expertise around trade, which is I think the U.S. has proven itself to be an unreliable trade partner. So what is the value of an agreement if we can change the rules later, if we can back out later? I think it is really, really problematic when the rest of the world looks at the U.S. that way. I mean, as the saying goes, trust takes a long time to build up, but it can be broken in a flash, and that’s where we are.

So I do worry, I worry about the precedent that this sets for Xi, for Putin, and others. That’s why I say the political implications are much, much bigger than the economic ones. We’ve had this long period after the Second World War of peace and prosperity as tariffs have come down, countries have traded more, and now we seem to be going in reverse.

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Lindsay: Along with China and tariffs, another headline-grabbing issue from 2025 was the impact of the Trump administration on democracy—including elections. To help us unpack what’s happened over the past year, I spoke with UC San Diego political scientist Lauren Prather, who is the new co-director of the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections here at UC San Diego.

Lauren, last year on the podcast we considered what a second Trump term might mean for democracy and human rights, both in the United States and around the world. Let’s focus on the first of those two things. What has it meant for American democracy?

Lauren Prather: So I think when we think of democracy and human rights, they do go hand in hand, and one way I think about democracy in general is about the protection of rights, which includes the right to vote, but also includes a number of other rights, all of which we have seen contested by this administration. So freedom of speech, for example, has been contested very much; freedom of association, the ability to protest without fear of government intervention or retaliation, has also been under attack.

So because my work focuses more on elections, I think about the right to vote, and the constitutional protections around that. One thing that sticks out to me is the unprecedented intervention of the federal government into state elections. This has consisted of an executive order that attempted to change some of the ways in which states make election law, and per the Constitution, states are supposed to be the entity within the United States that governs elections and runs elections and makes election law, consistent with some overarching federal policies. But other than that, states have flexibility to run elections in the way they and their voters think they should be run.

But this year the federal government really did try to intervene to have more control over state elections. One of the key examples of this is the way in which the federal government has attempted to acquire the voter rolls of states, which document all of the registered voters within that state, and most recently has said the federal government will now go through those voter rolls to identify any individuals that should not be allowed to vote in elections, and that state funding from the federal government may depend on whether or not states comply with the federal government’s demand to remove those voters from the voter rolls.

Lindsay: Who would not be allowed to vote? Like, what would the rationale be?

Lauren: It’s unclear at this point. I mean, they haven’t said what their rationale would be. It is related, I think, to some of the agenda around immigration. It’s also possibly a rhetorical or symbolic strategy to undermine confidence in elections by playing into existing fears and existing narratives that people are voting that shouldn’t be voting, which is not something that really happens in the United States, but has nevertheless been a talking point, especially among some people in the administration. So there’s unclear implications because we don’t know who they would identify, but this is an example of something that has not really ever been done before in recent memory and is unconstitutional.

Lindsay: We’re all still grappling with the news about Venezuela. What does the seizing by U.S. forces of the head of state of a sovereign nation, and rendering him and his wife to the U.S. to face criminal charges, without approval from Congress or the UN, signal about the U.S. role in the world as a defender of democracy and human rights?

Lauren: So I think there are potentially two competing narratives in my head about this. I do think the U.S. has been a strong promoter of democracy, and in the first year [of Trump’s second administration], I think one of the things that has undermined potentially the U.S. role in promoting democracy worldwide is the shutdown of USAID and foreign aid in particular that would be in support of opposition or civil society in countries around the world that are trying to advocate for their own democracy. So, to me, USAID was a force of good for promoting democracy around the world, and eliminating those programs is going to negatively affect many groups in countries around the world in terms of their democratic hopes.

Now, the competing narrative in my head is that the U.S. has also not been a force for democracy around the world. And so to go back to your question about Venezuela, I’m not sure that there are a lot of countries around the world that have been subject to the United States interventions in myriad ways that would be that surprised about what happened. And so in that way, while some domestic audiences in the United States I think found it very shocking, I think there are also audiences around the world that would say this is consistent with how the U.S. has carried out its foreign policy in lots of places, that viewed, for example, the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as illegitimate.

So in that way, I think the impact of this Venezuela intervention might not be as dramatic as we might think for the prospects of democracy, because again, I think it’s consistent with how some people view U.S. foreign policy.

Lindsay: Okay, back to the U.S. A report published last year by the Brennan Center for Justice argues that there is a concerted effort underway to undermine U.S. elections. Do you agree with that, and what do voters need to know about what’s going on?

Lauren: So my expectations, although I’m not a mystic and can’t see the future about the 2026 midterms, is that most likely there are going to be continued attempts to undermine the fairness of elections, and what I mean by that is to work within the laws or change the laws such that people’s choice is limited, or even people’s ability to vote is limited.

I do think once we reach a certain point this year where elected officials are legally obliged to stop changing the laws, the administration of the election consistent with the laws that are on the books is going to be run professionally and competently by those officials that have been elected to carry out those elections consistent with the laws that are on the table.

But I do think what’s happening right now is the administration is trying to change those laws, or the political parties in power are trying to manipulate those laws so that they can secure majorities and secure power and ultimately take choices away from voters. It’s very unlikely and historically has been very rare to have election fraud on election day, where you see, like, stuffing of ballot boxes, or changing of votes. And so that kind of administrative attack I don’t necessarily anticipate, but I think we are seeing an attempt to manipulate laws to secure power by the president’s party.

Lindsay: I want to go back to something that you said at the beginning of our conversation, which is that there are a broader set of values that are inherent in democracy and human rights that are being contested. What is at stake both for Americans and for the world?

Lauren: When I look back at the past year, and when I think about going forward, one of the key things that’s at stake both in the United States and around the world is accountability of elites and the powerful in countries to the citizens and the less powerful. One of the key mechanisms for that is elections, and democracy in general, and so attempts to undermine the free and fairness of elections, attempts to undermine democracy as a whole, or confidence in elections, ultimately breaks the accountability of elites and those in power to the citizens that put them there. We see that in the United States, and we’re seeing that around the world, and when this happens, we see those leaders able to act without constraint, and ultimately the citizens and the less powerful are the ones that suffer.

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Lindsay: Finally, I welcomed Matto Mildenberger, an expert in environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, for a conversation about climate change. 2025 saw major rollbacks of climate policies in the U.S., even as concerns about the effects of climate change have continued to mount. I asked Matto for his take on what 2025 means for climate action and a green energy transition in the United States.

Matto Mildenberger: We live in a really challenging time to analyze when it comes to progress on climate change. The Trump administration has taken a wide series of actions over the last year trying to rollback and slow down the energy transition here in the United States. This involved really substantial rollback of parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was obviously the signature climate bill passed during the Biden administration. It’s also involved an enormous amount of executive branch attacks on clean energy, whether that’s trying to freeze in-progress offshore wind developments in various parts of the East Coast; trying to facilitate fossil fuel use, keep coal plants online in an emergency basis while trying to slow trickle permitting of new solar and other clean energy resources. And of course, as you mentioned, taking really detrimental action to try and undermine and break apart global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

And so there’s no way that you can look at the last year and see it as good news for the climate. On the other hand, it’s also worth remembering that even as the Trump administration is winning some of the battles here, the momentum of the clean energy transition is really still picking up, even in the United States, which is still seeing pretty substantial clean energy deployment in 2025, and particularly globally, where the economics of clean energy have been utterly transformed over the last five years.

So the world that the Trump administration is trying to blow up climate policy in, during this period of time, is actually quite different than the world that existed during the first Trump administration. And so for all of the real efforts that the administration has made, and the real harm they’ve done in blocking and slowing down and throwing obstacles in the way of decarbonization here in the United States, I’m not sure that their efforts are having the type of global, systemic impact that they might have had in a different era.

Lindsay: You mentioned that the economics of clean energy have really transformed over the last five years. Can you say more about how?

Matto: Yeah. I mean, one is just the scale of deployment. Over half of the solar energy that’s ever been deployed has been deployed since 2020-2021. The price per kilowatt of new solar, the economics of battery storage, which is really critical because linking batteries with solar together actually allows for renewable energy to take on, and the economics of gas and other fossil fuel baseload forms of electricity generation. And so what it means is that, right now, the cheapest new unit of energy that possibly can be built, even here in the United States, is solar plus storage, is clean energy. And there’s an enormous, growing need for more energy resources fueled by the data center construction boom fueled by AI needs. But we’re in a world of vastly expanding energy needs at a moment in which the cheapest and easiest and quickest and most sensible way to meet those needs is with renewable energy.

Lindsay: I want to ask you about public opinion. The last three years have been the hottest on record, and so all of us are increasingly aware, and confronting in our actual lives, the ferociousness of climate change, and wildfires and extreme heat and floods. Has that created a stronger push from citizens for climate action? What is public opinion on climate change policies, green energy transition, and to what extent does the public opinion and pressure interact with what we’re seeing the Trump administration doing and not doing?

Matto: Yeah, it’s a really good question, and I think this has been the focus of a lot of public debate right now. It’s also a topic that is the main focus of my research group here. I think there’s two things that we need to remember when we think about the role of the public and the public’s opinion in structuring U.S. climate policy, but also thinking a little bit more broadly about backlash.

The first is that the experiences that people have with climate change, and also with climate policies, rarely convert or change people’s minds when it comes to climate change. I’ve done a lot of work looking at, for instance, voting patterns in California and do people vote differently on climate-related ballot initiatives when they have experienced a wildfire near their home. And, you know, what we find is that wildfires or other forms of exposure to climate change are not persuading people who are otherwise skeptical that climate change is a serious concern and making them sort of climate advocates.

What it does do, though, is it increases the salience and importance of some of these issues amongst the coalitions already engaged. So if we look at the lead up to the Biden presidency, we think about the 2020 election campaign and the Democratic primary that led there. One of the things that happened was a lot of these growing extreme weather events increased the importance of climate change for political elites, for primary voters, and made climate change a really central issue within the Democratic Party coalition, and climate policy in many ways became one of the signature commitments and priorities of the Biden administration.

Now there’s a lot of conversation now about backlash. Was that strategic focus on climate change a mistake? How did that intersect with the public’s legitimate concerns about inflation, affordability, economic needs? And I think the data shows that climate change has not been a salient issue for the American public in the last several years. Things that are related to climate change, like security of your home, exposure to storms, affordability of electricity can be higher priorities, but climate change in and of itself is not sort of being prioritized. But that doesn’t mean that the public doesn’t care about it. If you ask people whether they’re worried about climate change, whether they want the government to take action, large majorities across the country, including in red states, including in red congressional districts here in California, hold those pro-action positions.

The way that I think we ought to think about this is that there’s probably not, at this moment in time, enormous political gains to sort of center climate change in your political platform. You’re not going to grow your coalition enormously. Most voters are going to make their voting decisions and political decisions on other dimensions. But the critical thing is that there’s not really a penalty, either. There’s really no anti-climate constituency of the sort that should make politicians fearful of centering this issue.

Lindsay: I am pretty much obliged to ask you about the capture of Venezuelan president Maduro on January 3rd, which is dominating the headlines here in the U.S. and globally.

And I know we’re here to talk about climate and energy, but I do want to ask the extent to which you think that this event has any kind of importance in terms of the global green transition, given that shortly after the capture, Trump announced that he would take over Venezuela’s oil, and oil appears to have played an important role in creating an impetus for this strike.

And I’m curious whether you think that this does send some kind of a signal about the relative importance of fossil fuels with this administration. And does it kind of throw a wrench, symbolically, into that global momentum that you talked about in terms of the renewable energy and green transition?

Matto: I think there are two things to say. One is that, you know, Venezuela has enormous oil reserves. It’s a very carbon intensive oil that is fairly cheap to extract if it could be extracted and brought to market. So the worst case scenario would be to bring an enormous amount of incredibly cheap, climate unfriendly oil into the global market.

On the contrary, I actually think that there could be some effects to accelerate or deepen clean energy transition in parts of the world. One of the most important trends that we’ve seen in the last year or two has been a number of emerging economies and developing economies across the world who have seen that importing fossil fuels is actually a source of serious economic instability for their country, and have viewed clean energy transition and electrification as a way of decoupling themselves from the volatility of global oil markets, and from the volatility of the type of geopolitics that the capture of the Venezuelan president signals.

I’m thinking here, for instance, of the ways in which countries like Nepal and Ethiopia are actually among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of electrification of vehicles. So for all of these countries in the global south that have fossil fuel dependent economies, but don’t themselves have fossil fuel reserves, the intersection of that insecurity plus the cheapness of these technologies, particularly as subsidized by sort of overcapacity in China, we’re just seeing a radically transformed set of incentives and geopolitics of energy.

Lindsay: Hearing you talk, it just seems so striking how out of step the U.S. is with the rest of the world, particularly in the last year, in the overwhelming efforts that you described to really damage progress in climate policy and clean energy transition. Why is the Trump administration moving in that direction?

Matto: I think that it is very hard to glean the motive of the Trump administration. By all accounts, the particular intense attacks on offshore wind may be somewhat personalistic, and go back to Trump having been upset at one point in time about offshore wind that was being built in Scotland, visible from his golf property there, that he opposed deeply.

It is certainly the case that, in a moment in which the long-term future of fossil fuels is beginning to become murkier, there’s going to be a strong desire amongst incumbent fossil fuel companies to capture as many profits, and sort of extend their life as long as possible. And so we can kind of read the Trump administration’s efforts as one of extending the life of the fossil industry, even if just by a couple years.

Personally, I think one of the biggest consequences is actually going to be an undermining of U.S. economic competitive advantage and competitiveness in the medium term. I think the U.S. is ceding, essentially, the energy markets of the future to other parts of the world and to China.

And so, you know, one of the things that was encouraging about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden administration’s investment in clean energy was that it looked like it was leading to an enormous explosion in manufacturing and electrification and clean energy technology investments here in the United States in a way that was transitioning the U.S. economy towards these technologies of the future.

Some of those transitions persist. The Big Beautiful Bill did not repeal as much of the Inflation Reduction Act as it might have. Certain technologies like battery and storage and utility scale clean energy still have a lot of support that is sort of baked in over the next three to five years. But the reality is that by 2035, we’re going to be in a world where the U.S. is going to be an island unto itself, stuck with outdated, less efficient, dirtier, less compelling, and more expensive technologies, and it’s a really puzzling decision to make at a moment in which energy needs are going up. The stated priorities of the Trump administration to, you know, invest in AI, and data centers, are in direct conflict with their energy policies. So it’s not coherent, and the likely outcome is that it’s just going to penalize Americans by increasing the cost of electricity and energy needlessly.

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Lindsay: Although scholars like the five I spoke with here often look for signs of continuity through the years and decades, it’s clear from these conversations that significant change is afoot, with implications for ordinary Americans and for the world. What is less clear is how long-lasting these changes will be. Our experts at IGCC and across the University of California will be watching and sharing their views with you over the course of the year—with a mission, always, to safeguard democracy, human rights, and global prosperity.

Thanks for being with us on Talking Policy, and have a good week.