The self-sabotage state of mind
How the GOP has reconciled itself with political incoherence—and how Trump benefits.
I think we all expected the GOP to push an incoherent policy agenda. No surprises there—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, now made law, is indeed incoherent. But I’m reading and rereading its energy provisions1 and I keep finding myself shocked: Who asked for them? Like, who, specifically? I want names and movements, I want a story to tell.
Take the new, sweeping Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) requirements. They’re obviously part of the bipartisan push toward insulating the American energy sector from dependence on Chinese inputs and to force the creation of a China-free supply chain. But, as written, these are going to break our remaining energy tax credits by burdening them with all kinds of red tape and compliance rules. I don’t believe the GOP needed these FEOC requirements to stick it to China or to other target countries. There are all kinds of more performative, less self-sabotaging ways to secure a policy win worth campaigning on than by writing this FEOC rule, which will break much of the American energy sector (and which doesn’t seem to have any substantive budgetary scoring impact2).
The FEOC rules are merely the sharp icing on the self-sabotage cake.3 Readers may already be familiar with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and the countless other actions he’s taken to vacate that phrase of meaning. He’s destroying the offshore wind sector, gutting the Loan Programs Office, canceling critical federal energy programs and and clawing back grants, firing federal staffers en masse, and directing the Treasury and the IRS to crack down on tax credit access for renewable energy project developers. And he talks a big game about reviving the oil and gas industry while imposing tariffs that have spooked the sector. These are among the many actions Trump has taken to undercut the stability of the grid and developers’ prospects for rapid project deployment. In short, he’s being a hypocrite.
To be fair to everyone reading this, we’ve always known this, and it’s unsurprising that the Big Beautiful Bill would also turn out this way. It would certainly be nice, and better for many people, if the GOP weren’t so inconsistent—but I fear Republicans’ hypocrisy is really symptomatic of the personalist government we’re careening into, and emblematic of the nature of Trump-era fascism, too.
I can easily imagine a counterfactual outcome where Trump doesn’t push these destructive changes so much as he pretends he’s achieved his policy outcomes through a much less substantive bill. Trump’s fash vibes, politically incoherent as they are, never needed to deliver a worst-case policy outcome. Take his tariffs: He continues promising the worst but keeps shying away from fully implementing it.4 Rather than use his tariff authority to exact any precise outcome, he seems to be using it for its own sake, because he can. It’s quintessential Trump to place style—the bombast, the bluster, the policy-by-tweet—over any commitment to a specific policy outcome.
In other words, it’s a politics of all form and no content—it’s textbook fascism. The form is always some kind of “reactionary futurism,” how heeding imagined former social mores, as channeled through fascist leaders themselves, will help bring the whole nation into some kind of halcyon future, itself an oxymoron in terms. The content, if there is any, is always “why lose when you can win instead?” You’ve got to look like a winner and, even better, redefine winning in your image. (Actually winning helps but is immaterial.) All of which is to say—again—that there’s nothing inherent in this sketch of fascism that forces a worst-case policy outcome. What I want is a theory of political economy that can satisfactorily explain why we got this outcome anyway. What’s with the self-sabotage?
I’m not convinced that “legislative capture” by Big Fossil, or even by one Alex Epstein, explains all that much about this punitive policy outcome. Sure, the law makes methane-based fuel cells eligible for tax credits5 and provides tax deductions to drillers, but the supply side benefits, even for the oil and gas industry, just don’t seem to match the costs. If Republicans are trying to “bet the house on AI causing 1950's Japan productivity growth out of political expedience,” which is (unfortunately for my sanity) an extremely good heuristic for GOP policy, this reconciliation bill does not support developers’ and grid planners’ ability to build energy to meet data center demand—meaning that even infinitely inelastic energy demand won’t call forth new supply, fossil-fueled or otherwise. What epistemic bubble were GOP legislators in when they wrote this law?
A bad one, surely. Here’s my working theory, at least where the energy-specific portions of the law are concerned. After Trump was inaugurated, he and Elon Musk began taking axes to all levels of the executive branch, using DOGE and the Deferred Resignation Program to compel the exits of thousands of federal employees across the government. And I have heard from a few people that the exits and firings at the Department of Energy over the past half-year have decimated the Department’s capacity to undertake key legislative outreach functions. There may not have been very many DOE presentations to GOP bill-drafters that defended key programs, highlighted staffing needs, or outlined potential policy solutions to political demands—and DOE political staff may not have cared, as well. I heard as well that the Secretary of Energy himself was really the only DOE employee talking to anyone in Congress. This lack of executive branch-engagement helps explain why the Loan Programs Office’s authorities were rewritten so badly, too.
Armed with these bits of evidence and anecdata, I am willing to posit that the mass exodus of career federal staffers across other offices has left GOP legislators and Congressional staffers in the dark about what the baselines for “sensible” and “rational” policy even are. Given how under-resourced Congress already is, the disappearance from staffers’ and legislators’ epistemic communities of the very people who implement the programs they legislate into existence will no doubt leave them more dependent on information and narratives from—to put it mildly—people who don’t implement much of anything: “fossil philosopher” Alex Epstein, the weird Silicon Valley-funded “reindustrialization”-focused think tanks, and the MAGA tacticians who just want to own the libs as hard as they can. The epistemic balance has shifted for the worse.6
The vibes have shifted, too. It’s impossible to ignore that many Republicans quite simply want to do exactly the opposite of whatever they think liberals are doing. Their leaders are balls of pure reactionary spite. The Trump GOP’s shared fetish for reopening coal plants while shuttering solar and wind energy testifies to how they’d willingly smear themselves in coal dust if they could call it “owning the libs.” This is to say nothing of Republican legislators’ and many voters’ very parasocial identification with Trump himself, without whose support their coalition likely collapses. How else do deficit hawks vote for this bill? Why else do people vote for Trump? And now, when Trump says he’s trying to destroy Biden’s “Green New Scam,” as he calls it, Republican legislators use Trump’s words as a mandate to tear up, root and branch, anything associated with Biden at all. It’s as if Trump says “jump” and his party takes license not to ask “how high?” but to jump as high as it can.
Of course, I suspect that, to some degree, Republicans will suffer from their own hypocrisies as they scramble to solve the problems that their trigger-happiness is creating or exacerbating: blackouts, rising electricity bills, increasing pollution in frontline communities. Their proposed solutions will likely leave them best off while leaving everyone else coughing in the dust; it’ll be “clean air for me, not for thee” in no time. Indeed, it’s a time-honored heuristic that Republicans have always been “just plain evil” and “want what’s worst for everyone,” except themselves. Certainly at the national level, the GOP does not give a damn about the well-being of its voter base.7 I expect Republicans’ policy agenda to trend in this direction whether Trump motivates them or not.
I think there’s a weirder longer-term dynamic going on here, too. Republicans have used their control of the courts over the past decade to gut federal agencies’ capabilities to oversee and regulate the country’s economy—its energy system especially—without greater deference to Congressional intent and statute. Trump and Musk’s forcible mass exodus of agency staff now prevents those agencies from adequately engaging legislators and their staffers on how to clearly define their political intent through better bill drafting. The GOP legislators tasked with translating their understanding of Trump’s core vision into legislative text may no longer have adequate support or a grounded epistemic environment with which to write legislation that federal bureaucrats can implement coherently. Caught in Trump’s vortex, Republicans seem to have deprived themselves of the means by which they can deliver a coherent vision of their party’s stated ends.
American conservatism as practiced by Trump’s coalition is degenerating into nothing more than an ideology of shooting oneself in the foot and taping a “winning!” bandage over the wound, a strategy of bleeding out to own the bloodless libs. And, in the breach, Republicans are letting Trump define the GOP’s ends and letting him control the means by which those ends are realized.
Take the “golden share” over Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel: This “golden share,” which belongs to him, personally, allows him to control U.S. Steel until he’s no longer president. Or take the fact that the IRS now has an incredible level of arbitrary, even retroactive discretion over what energy projects qualify for tax credits. Or that there is no animating logic behind how his administration is applying tariffs on foreign countries beyond enjoying the power to use tariffs in the first place. Republicans in Congress could have prevented Trump from doing any of this at any point in the interest of maintaining control and preserving their power independent of Trump. But they didn’t even censure him! While Republicans deprive themselves of the means to match their ends, Trump is arrogating both. Trump and his cronies now seem to have a free hand to engineer an economy where their favors and their patronage call the cacophonous tunes to which we’ll all somehow have to march.8
We are now watching this personalist political economy bloom in real time. Last weekend’s deadly floods in Texas underscore just how dangerous Trump’s destruction of federal disaster monitoring and response agencies will be for other communities across the country. Even as Trump guts FEMA, he’s still sending disaster aid and federal personnel to Texas (albeit, delayed) while continuing to deny it to California: He’s capitalizing off of disasters that he is responsible for forcing and exacerbating, not just playing the savior in the short-term to shore up political power but gutting the rest of our political and economic institutions in an attempt to ensure that nobody else could possibly play the savior but he. Who bleeds and who gets bandages—well, if he had his way, it would all be up to him.
Trump-era fascism thus remains all form and no content: The form is power, or the appearance of it, for its own sake, and the content, if there is any, is composed of whatever means it takes to achieve Trump’s ends—whether those are owning the libs or playing savior or destroying enemies. And when so many voters are Trump voters rather than GOP voters, there may not be any independent Republican party that can be extracted out of the Trump coalition. Anyone trying to lend any semblance of political coherence to the GOP’s current trajectory misunderstands what the party has become: a vehicle for Trump’s empowerment. Those lucky enough to ride the president’s coat-tails are probably mercenaries who have embraced the total incoherence of this political moment in pursuit of their self-interest. If you once thought that shooting yourself in the foot was always a bad idea—well, President Trump will change that.
Lately I’ve been dreaming about tax credit policy and about drinking geothermal working fluids…
Correct me if I’m wrong.
I had fun calling the FEOC rules an “ugly layered cake” the other day.
Although what he has implemented is pretty worrying.
In the words of a friend, “Everything is backsolved for more fossil demand.”
Is this an epistemic bubble or an echo chamber? C. Thi Nguyen argues that the two are distinct: An epistemic bubble merely has certain voices excluded from a space whereas an echo chamber actively excludes outsider voices to the point where outsider opinions intensify the prevailing belief systems within the echo chamber. Here I could make a case for either one. It’s the Trump administration’s fault that there’s no federal engagement with legislative staffers, suggesting that staffers are definitely in a bubble. But the reactionary, spiteful bent that many Republicans take toward anything smacking of soft or conciliatory Biden-era liberalism—such as a policy that appears more forgiving toward China—suggests that many staffers are in echo chambers. I’ll stick with bubble since it’s more all-encompassing. But we can’t ignore the negative polarization involved. (Thanks to Yusuf Khan for reminding me about Nguyen’s work.)
I would call it bad politics, but they win elections.
I’d love to know if this story holds from perspective of the housing and healthcare sectors—perhaps this doomer judgment about the reconciliation bill applies only to the energy sector, but I doubt it?