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Nothing that any Democrat or enemy of Donald Trump has ever said about his MAGA supporters has ever shown more genuine "contempt" for them than the president himself shows, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, and there is a very important reason why they let him get away with it.

In one of his most recent "Takes" videos shared to YouTube, liberal Times columnist Jamelle Bouie highlighted a "striking" recent remark Trump made during one of his ongoing midterm political rallies. In the exchange, while remarking on the "love" he felt from the gathered crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump claimed, "I could say the stupidest things, and you clap."

Bouie suggested that this comment was directly tied to the same mindset that led Trump to infamously claim during his first presidential campaign that he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose any voters. This sort of thinking, he argued, exposed the deep well of contempt he has for his most devoted followers, showing how little he thinks of their morals and intelligence.

These sorts of comments are also, Bouie added, far worse than anything that Democrats have ever said about Republican and MAGA voters. He singled out three specific examples of remarks from former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden that got them in considerable hot water, despite the fact that the context around the comments made them far more respectful than the things Trump has said about his own backers.

Obama, during his first presidential campaign in 2008, was attacked as "elitist" for claiming that rural voters clung to "guns and religion," despite the fact that he was saying so with sympathy, explaining that they were taking comfort in concrete things as the world changed around them. Clinton, during her 2016 campaign, was attacked for calling Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables," even though, in her full remarks, she made a clear distinction between reasonable Trump supporters and those who backed him out of shared bigotries. Biden, finally, was criticized for supposedly calling Trump supporters "garbage," though he was doing so in reference to backers like comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

"You could play this game all day long," Bouie said. "Nothing Democrats have said about Trump or his supporters really matches what Trump himself has said about them. Why it doesn't register like that is, in part, the double standard that exists: Republicans are effectively allowed to talk trash about large swaths of the public, and Democrats have to defer endlessly out of a sense that they don't really represent 'Real America,' no matter how many real Americans call themselves Democrats."

He added: "And part of this is just the way that the political media does treat Republicans is almost as a force of nature, something that you can't expect to be better. But either way, it's striking. It's striking the level of contempt that Donald Trump has for his voters. It's striking, the level of contempt that Republican politicians show for their voters, where they will tell them all kinds of insane falsehoods and expect them to be lapped up with no obstacle."

Bouie further argued, however, that it "takes two to tango" in this odd dynamic, and suggested that the real reason Republicans are able to get away with treating their supporters poorly is that those supporters are aware of the dynamic, and let it play out that way.

"The fact these voters eat up this contempt, don't seem bothered by it, is instructive as well because it's telling you that they're not really voting for Trump or supporting Trump for respect or for recognition," he concluded. "Because they understand that even if he doesn't respect them, they share hatreds, and those shared hatreds are what absolutely matter the most."

President Donald Trump's latest pro-Russia betrayal has left several Republicans fed up, per a report from The Hill, with lawmakers calling the move "unconscionable" and "beyond irresponsible," and suggesting that one of Trump's late allies would be "appalled" by it.

In his latest move supporting Russia and Vladimir Putin, Trump on Friday signed an executive order that would exempt Russia from sanctions imposed by a recent "legislative package," which were meant to increase the economic pressure on the country and push it to end the war in Ukraine. In response, several Republican lawmakers broke with the president and attacked the decision to let Russia off the hook as baffling and morally indefensible.

“I am hereby waiving the application of such sanctions, restrictions, and duties provided for in the Graham Act,” Trump said in the order. “I have submitted to the Congress a certification that the issuance of such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States.”

The bill, which Trump signed into law last month, was meant to impose tariffs on the top five nations importing energy from Russia, as well as any other nations helping Russia avoid economic sanctions, and passed in the Senate with considerable bipartisan support. The bill was named in honor of Sen. Lindsey Graham shortly after his death, as he had been one of its major backers and announced breakthrough support for it from the White House just before he passed away suddenly in July.

"What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?" North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a noted critic of Trump, posted on his official X account. "It’s unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians every single day."

Another Trump nemesis in the Senate, GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn, added in his own social media post Saturday that "Lindsey [Graham] would be appalled."

"The President is prolonging the war, not ending it," Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon posted in response to the executive order news on Friday.

Trump's decision got surprising support, however, from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who has frequently attacked many of the president's other moves and lost his reelection primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger. Massie was notably one of the few Republicans who voted against the bill in the first place

"Glad to see Trump has used the executive authority granted to him by Congress to waive almost all of the provisions of this stupid law that pertain to Russia," Massie wrote in a post to social media.

Massie also notably spoke in support of Trump's recent deal to import diesel fuel from Russia.

Months after President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of convicted GOP lawmaker George Santos, Santos is angling for Trump’s PR position, reports The Hill.

Santos pitched himself on Friday to fill the vacancy abruptly abandoned by White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, despite Santos pleading guilty to two felony counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in 2024.

“Hey I’m not technically open for a job because I have one already…. butttttttt… I’d jump to serve POTUS as press secretary in a heartbeat. Just saying,” the former Republican lawmaker wrote on the social platform X.

His pitch on X drew a myriad of responses. Many critics on X warned Santos that he would probably break Zacharia’s record for shortest Trump administration employment since former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. Others, including many Democratic operatives and liberal allies, beckoned him to officially pursue the plan, and they hoped he got it.

Continuing his pattern of pardoning allies, Trump commuted the prison term of Santos in 2025. At the time he was less than three months into a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. In commuting his sentence, Trump also saved Santos from having to pay $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to victims of his fraud.

Trump’s commutation followed a series of high-profile acts of clemency. Most notorious among these was his blanket pardon of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, for which “the president — himself a 34-count convicted fraudster — was impeached for a historic second time,” wrote Common Dreams author Brett Wilkins.

“… [A]t least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump argued at the time, which prompted critics like Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) to call it “naked corruption.”

“Trump says it plainly: Crimes don’t count if you ‘vote Republican.’ Just like his pardons of those who violently attacked police,” Beyer wrote on social media at the time.

Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and one-time advisor linked to Truth Social, was out after a disastrous, widely mocked first and only press briefing in which she took few questions and struggled with public speaking basics. Falsely claiming to be a lawyer was another point against her.

The Hill reports Santos slammed Fox News host Sean Hannity after the anchor grilled Zacharia about her legal background during a Thursday interview, accusing Hannity of thinking “you are untouchable and like to sit high on your horse and judged people.”

Santos also asked people who watched Hannity’s show to “unfollow” his X account.

With the latest "No Kings" day of nationwide protests against President Donald Trump upon us, a new piece from MS NOW argued that their continued absence from such events is proving that many anti-Trump Republicans are all talk and no action.

In a new piece published Saturday morning, MS NOW senior editor and columnist Anthony L. Fisher argued that while the No Kings movement has provided a meaningful outlet for busy everyday Americans to take part in demonstrations against Trump, he still could not help but feel "underwhelmed" by the continued absence of "a certain subset of Americans" from the events. This cohort of voters, "right-of-center voters that are more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump," seems to exist according to recent polling, but is continually failing to rise to the occasion, as they seem to "lack the courage to stand up and be counted in public."

"A Fox News poll conducted between Oct. 9-12 found that among self-identified MAGA Republicans, Trump’s approval rating is 95 percent — a figure that would make most dictators blush," Fisher explained. "Meanwhile, among Republicans who don’t self-identify with the cult of Trump, the president is underwater: 47 percent approve, while 52 percent disapprove. Among independents, 22 percent approve and 78 percent disapprove."

He added: "Hey, non-MAGA Republicans and independents who live in objective reality, now’s a good time to show your faces in public!"

Fisher noted that these everyday citizens do not face the same stakes as elected Republicans who have been too afraid to stand up to Trump publicly, given that they could end up targeted directly by Trump's MAGA wrath and lose their office. While not a commendable reason, it is still a reason, something that anti-Trump everyday Republicans lack. He added that he was "confident" that "few, if any," of these supposed voters would manage to attend this weekend's No Kings events.

"Whether because of apathy or fear of catching cooties from anything associated with Democrats or the left, the result is the same: they’ll be sitting on the sidelines as Trump gobbles up more American yardage for himself," Fisher argued. "It’s possible that the polls predicting a 'blue wave' election are correct. But a midterm 'wipeout' isn’t enough for America to recover. Impeachments, investigations and public shaming ought to be the order of the day if Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress, but even that won’t do. For America to achieve some semblance of a shared national identity, there must be a near-universal call for a return to decency and respect for plurality. But that can only happen when roughly half the country demands the end of an unprecedented American personality cult that they’ve voted for in three consecutive elections."

He added: "I’m glad No Kings is drawing people to the streets and encouraging people to vote. It’s just not nearly enough. Not until the non-left — composed of non-MAGA Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and anti-woke centrists — confronts its own complicity and forges its own No Kings movement."

After getting cornered in public, Alabama’s first Republican lawmaker finally spoke out over a fellow Republican’s indictment for attempted sex trafficking.

It has been roughly two weeks since Alabama State Rep. Brett Easterbrook was arrested in an undercover sting and accused of offering $500 to someone he believed was a minor. But since that time, Alabama political leaders have offered little public reaction, and no prominent Republican has called on him to resign.

Easterbrook, a Fruitdale Republican representing House District 65 since 2018, was caught up in an October operation involving undercover police officers, who nabbed 17 arrests. However, it took a pressure campaign arising from U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures to push the state’s first prominent Republican to make a stand.

Figures accused Republicans of staying quiet because state Rep. Brett Easterbrook is one of their own.

“Unless this guy’s defense is that it literally wasn’t him, he should resign immediately,” Figures wrote in a Friday Facebook post. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying your salary if you’re out here trying to … abuse kids. … This ‘I’ll be quiet when he’s one of us’ attitude is truly pathetic. That’s the exact same reason all the Epstein files still haven’t been released.”

Figures then took a shot at Republican state Rep. Rhett Marques: “What do you think, Rhett Marques? Wanna debate this?”

“You can hear crickets right now on this, my current opponent included,” Figures then added to his challenge.

A short time later, AL.com reported Marques responded to Figures.

“He absolutely should resign, and should have already resigned,” Marques said. “There is no place in the Alabama Legislature for conduct so deplorable, and I have no hesitation saying that about a member of my own party.”

Marques then criticized Democrats about transgender healthcare for minors, and he called Figures “a hypocrite and a liar.” He also tried to spin Figures’ Epstein argument back on him, claiming: “When [Figures] worked for Joe Biden’s DOJ, they didn’t release the Epstein files. They released violent criminals from prison.”

Figures served as deputy chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But Figures was quick on the uptake, accusing Marques of calling for Easterbrook’s resignation only after being publicly challenged and shamed.

“Rhett Marques had no intention of calling on his colleague to resign until he saw that I did it,” Figures said.

Months after Congress passed a law demanding President Donald Trump release the entirety of the Jeffrey Epstein files, public sources are still waiting for pertinent names and details of Epstein's possible accomplices to be revealed. The administration's reticence -- coupled with Trump's open friendship with Epstein for the last few decades -- is driving members of even Trump's dedicated MAGA movement to turn on him.

Regardless, Trump may be facing an Epstein explosion in a few months, particularly before the 2028 presidential election as Democrats with renewed access begin to chip away at hidden nuggets within the files.

Even though former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia failed at reading teleprompters, describing her resume and impressing President Donald Trump for more than five days, she did manage to perform a miracle on Saturday morning. She united a diverse panel of conservatives and liberals on exactly what kind of hire she was.

“For years, MAGA has fought against DEI, arguing that merit should trump everything and that only the most qualified should ultimately get the job. So, it is interesting that the president gave one of the hardest jobs in government to someone whose qualifications are in serious question,” said “Table for Five” host Abby Phillip.

Zacharia — who went down in flames and embarrassment last week after only a handful of days as press secretary — was a cable news pundit. She briefly worked at DHS and advised MAGA media. But she also claimed to be a lawyer, despite never passing a bar exam.

“It's a tough job, which is why you ought to know what you're doing,” said panelist and podcaster Cari Champion. “And you have to be able to put your words together. And you should be able to speak to an audience. And you should be able to have a subject and a predicate with a sentence. You have to be able to talk with a sense of conviction, if not confidence, to make me feel as if I understand you. So, if you ask the question, ‘Is this a DEI hire?’ I would say that is, by definition, someone who got the job, who isn't necessarily worthy of it, nor has the actual qualifications. And based on what they look like, that's why they got the job. That's a DEI hire.”

“That is my take, and that is a very honest take, and I am being kind,” Champion continued. “When I watched this woman get in front of the press corps and talk, I was uncomfortable for her. I literally felt bad for her because I was like, well, what's going on here? And then you have these. … There are all these leaked text messages from the administration saying that they were concerned about whether or not she was the person for the job.”

Even Trump allegedly said Zacharia had no talent, but installed her anyway.

The former secretary was ready with a host of reasons for bombing her inaugural day presentation, but conservative panelist and NewsNation correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera accepted no excuses.

“They should have really grilled her, prepped her,” said conservative commentator Geraldo Rivera. “She's not a lawyer, so someone must have cued up the fact that, ‘hey, you know, you're going to be asked if you're a lawyer. Are you a lawyer?’ [Then] say ‘I'm not a lawyer. I'm a law school graduate.’”

“None of it's an excuse,” said former New York congressman and panelist John Avalon. “Maybe you could argue it's cruel for them to put her in that position, but she's obviously unqualified to do that job. And she took one question about Ukraine that she didn't even have the answer to. … So, this is someone who's not qualified for this position. The problem is that's part of a pattern. Pete Hegseth isn't qualified to be secretary of defense. Kash Patel is not qualified to be FBI director. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not qualified to run HHS. So, this is a pattern. The problem is you can look the job, but on this job, you actually have to know enough to be able to speak off the cuff clearly. And she cannot.”

National Review senior writer and panelist Noah Rothman tried to be slightly more generous to Zacharia, arguing that her being an attorney did not matter so much, since the job “is to give the best narrative on behalf of the administration — not lie, but spin, at times to present the narrative that is factually true, but nevertheless reflects as well as possible on their policies.”

“But you've got to be able to go back and check your facts,” Rothman added, less generously.

- YouTube youtu.be

With her brief White House tenure in the rearview, a psychologist and body language expert explained the one specific moment it became clear that President Donald Trump would fire former press secretary Katie Zacharia.

Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and one-time advisor linked to Truth Social, lasted only five days as the White House Press Secretary before being pushed out of the office by Trump, who had reportedly pushed her for the role in the first place. This came after a disastrous, widely mocked first and only press briefing in which she took few questions and seemed to struggle with the basics of public speaking, as well as a scandal over her falsely claiming she was a lawyer.

Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in reading body language, who also produces numerous videos using his professional expertise to analyse the behaviors of major public figures. In one of his latest videos from Friday, he dug into the situation surrounding Zacharia and pinpointed the "exact moment" he believes that her fate was sealed.

Garrison showed the widely circulated clip of Zacharia, standing behind Trump, being pressed by reporters about which state she passed the bar exam in, to which she claimed that she did so after moving to China. This claim immediately fell apart upon closer scrutiny, as non-citizens are not allowed to take China's certification exam for lawyers, and doing so would still not have made her a lawyer in the U.S.

During the exchange, Trump appeared to do a double-take while staring back at Zacharia while she made her claim about China, and this, Garrison argued, was the moment that her fate was sealed.

"That double take right there was the moment," Garrison said. "President Trump doesn't like surprises, and he doesn't like being embarrassed. And when she just said that, when they asked when she passed the bar, when she said it was when she went to China, that was it."

Garrison also examined Zacharia's behavior during an interview with Sean Hannity that came shortly before her White House departure, claiming that she used a "huge smile" to hide her real feelings.

"It's a very effective tool to hide how you actually feel because doing this and keeping the corners of your mouth up, not that hard to do," Garrison explained. "Now, obviously, there's no wrinkles next to her eyes, which is exactly how you'd see when somebody is actually feeling good or feeling happy. But you can see that her strategy, in order to give a specific impression for impression management, is to just maintain a smile whenever you're uncomfortable."

He later concluded: "The first day for every White House press secretary doesn't have to go incredibly well, but the disaster that we saw with Katie Zachariah made it very clear that this was not going to last long. Once the question started coming up about whether or not she was actually an attorney, because she had apparently used that word through tweets and so on and so forth, it seemed like it was really only a matter of time."

The Washington Post reports nationalist, MAGA-style parties are notching election victories and leading in the polls across Europe, but the “recipe for their success” appears to be steering clear of Trump and his MAGA allies.

“I can’t remember them being mentioned once,” said Leaders of Alternative for Germany politician Leif-Erik Holm, who finished first in a regional election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of his own campaign, which ended two weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote.

The Post reports leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, “scaled back their public interactions with MAGA figures, acknowledged differences of interest with the U.S. and focused their message on domestic issues.” And in France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is polling ahead of next year’s election, has similarly ejected Trump and his buddies from her campaign after calling the Iran war a strategic mistake.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is now set to lead a state government with policies that could have come straight from the MAGA playbook, with the party having campaigned on deporting migrants and cutting funding to museums with “anti-patriotic goals.” Yet the Times reports Trump and the U.S. were “largely absent during the campaign.”

“A lot of people say Trump is arrogant, dangerous, not well-qualified. You see an intensification in his second term of things people didn’t like in the first term,” said Richard Wike, Pew’s director of global attitudes research. “That may create incentives for all sorts of political leaders not to embrace him.”

But backing Europe’s antiestablishment right was an official goal of the Trump administration. The Post reports the State Department even promised grants to organizations promoting what it described as “European sovereignty and other conservative values.”

“Late last year, an updated U.S. national-security strategy said the U.S. supported ‘patriotic European parties’ and would cultivate ‘resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,’” reports the Post.

But this year Trump has put his popularity and the popularity of his nation in a hole, and the Post reports an increasing number of countries view China “more favorably” than the U.S., and Xi Jinping “as a more credible leader in managing world affairs,” according to a Pew Research Center report. Similar surveys reveal many right-wing Europeans share unfavorable views of Trump.

For this, Trump can probably thank his war with Iran, which is continuing to obliterate his national and international standing — and threatens to destabilize the global and US economy with high energy prices.

“It looks like they launched this campaign without much of a concept. It’s a bit of a disaster,” said AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, speaking of Trump’s war on Iran.

Additionally, Trump’s positions on a range of issues, including tariffs, the ownership of Greenland and the war in Ukraine, keep clashing with European interests — even the nationalist ones, reports the Times. Trump’s unbreakable link to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may have helped the leader lose his re-election bid, to Trump’s ire.

Sports broadcaster and President Donald Trump supporter Stephen A. Smith thinks highly of the president and often defends him in interviews, but even Smith’s fond account of a recent dinner with Trump laid out the bubble of ignorance of ignorance surrounding Trump.

Mediaite reports Smith “spilled the tea on his dinner with President Donald Trump,” telling CNN’s Laura Coates about thing he found most shocking about a meal he shared with Trump and entertainers Kid Rock and Bill Maher.

Speaking Friday night on Laura Coates Live, Smith said Trump knows Republicans will likely lose the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms, but he also recounted that Trump was convinced he could reverse the damage by putting his face out on the campaign trail, rallying voters.

“He was saying ‘I’m going to campaign. I’m going to go all over this country and help whoever I have to help and do whatever I have to do because the people love me,’” Smith recounted. “I said ‘sir, the polls show you to be in the 30 percentile in terms of popularity.”

But Trump disavowed the legion of polls saying as much, according to Smith.

“He said ‘did you know that 99 percent of Republicans actually approve of me? So the people out there that are conservatives, that are Republicans, they love me, I love them. They will vote the way that I want them to vote.’ That’s how he feels. That’s the level of confidence that he has,” Smith said.

Trump’s faith is not buttressed by information crawling out of nearly every poll, however, including those on Fox. One particularly hurtful Fox News poll released this week asked registered voters what worries them most heading into the midterms. And the winning topic was not affordability or the economy, but government corruption, with a whopping 88 percent of voters saying they were “extremely or very concerned” about it. It even beat high gas and grocery prices and healthcare.

Worse, that same survey had Trump’s approval sinking to 36 percent, the lowest Fox has ever recorded for him. And in other polls, it’s dipped into the 20s.

In his interview, Smith also appeared astounded that Trump had more than four hours to dedicate to a dinner, considering the heavy load of problems facing the administration and the nation.

“It was shocking. I didn’t I certainly didn’t expect that amount of time. I knew that we were expecting to have dinner. I knew that we were going to have an opportunity to talk. I give him all the credit in the world because he didn’t run from any questions … But he also took us for a tour of the White House, took us to the West Wing, took us to the Rose Garden, took us to the colonnade where you got pictures of every single president, but Joe Biden,” said Smith.

The clean energy industry has learned the hard way that having the law on your side doesn’t always mean you win.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Since taking office for his second term, President Donald Trump has attempted to delay or cancel dozens of wind and solar projects. These projects all underwent extensive reviews to secure federal approval, but the Department of the Interior and other agencies have frozen their permits for vague “national security” reasons, or with no explanation at all. These attacks have all but tanked the offshore wind industry and have led many developers to take payouts from the administration rather than fight for permits.

This attack is one big reason why solar and wind companies have been supportive of efforts in Congress to negotiate a bipartisan “permitting reform” bill. A group of senators reached a compromise earlier this month on a bill they call the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. Lawmakers won’t vote on it until after the midterm elections, but the renewable energy sector has hailed it as a win. The bill would speed up environmental reviews for all kinds of energy projects, from transmission wires to oil pipelines, and it also contains a number of provisions that are designed to deter current and future presidents from blocking clean energy. Trump reportedly told aides just before the compromise became public that he would ease up on wind projects in order to reach a deal.

Cracks are already emerging in the deal. While the renewable energy industry has remained steadfast in its support of the bill, a number of experts and key climate advocates are arguing that the “project certainty” provisions would do little to prevent Trump or another president from blocking solar farms and offshore wind turbines. The Trump administration itself threatened the compromise bill this week when it announced that it would review three permits for wind farms off the Atlantic Coast, including one that is already up and running.

“The administration’s action against [the wind projects] just further demonstrates the lengths they will go to to obstruct clean energy progress, especially offshore wind,” said Elizabeth Klein, who led the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore wind permits, under former president Joe Biden.

The project certainty portion of the Senate bill has two key parts. First, it declares that the federal government “shall not take any new action that would revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter” a project that has already received a permit. This is just a forceful restatement of the status quo, since permits that are issued aren’t supposed to be canceled for no reason. But the bill goes further by offering companies two main remedies if the government does take such prohibited actions.

One is the reinstatement of the permit — which is somewhat redundant. Judges have already shot down the Trump administration’s past attempts to stop wind projects, but the administration is still seeking to revoke those permits. If the bill passes, all the courts would be able to do is order it in stronger terms to restore them.

The other remedy is a cash payout. The courts would be able to order the government to refund a project developer between 25 and 50 percent of the costs of their project, which for a big offshore wind farm could reach well into the billions. The money would come from the Judgment Fund, a bank account the federal government uses to pay out legal settlements. This fund typically disburses around $2 billion in settlements per year, and successful claims under the permitting bill could lead to a big spike in payouts.

The other key part of project certainty in the bill is an anti-discrimination clause that would ban “disparate treatment” of any particular energy source, whether it’s solar panels or coal plants. If a wind developer found evidence that the government denied them permits as part of an anti-wind pattern, they could present that evidence to a judge. If persuaded, the judge would then order the government to restore the permit and pay the developer the entire construction cost of the wind farm — albeit only if the developer finished building it.

Supporters of the bill argue that the promise of financial relief would help lure investors back to the renewable energy industry, which has been in turmoil under Trump. This is most important for offshore wind. Big companies like Ørsted and Equinor spent billions of dollars to build wind farms in the Atlantic under the Biden administration, but their costs ballooned after the pandemic snarled their supply chains and Trump tried to destroy their existing projects. These companies now view the United States as uninvestable, but Northeastern states still need a lot more offshore wind in order to meet their climate goals.

The cash payout provision is supposed to help make the U.S. seem like a less risky place to invest. The American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing wind and solar developers, said in its analysis of the bill that “greater certainty lowers financing risk before construction and reduces the chance that years of development and investment will be stranded by a later policy reversal.”

While the promise of reimbursement from the federal government would be good news for investors, it’s not clear that it would actually lead to more clean energy getting built. Opponents of the permitting reform bill point out that Trump has already been paying to stop renewable power plants from being built, albeit on a smaller scale. The president has worked out several deals to buy back offshore wind leases from energy developers in exchange for those developers committing to build a fossil fuel project elsewhere. These arrangements are being challenged in court, but in the meantime they function as repayments for leases that Trump intended to block.

The project certainty “provisions are unlikely to deter the Trump Administration from continuing to mess with clean energy permits, since this administration has shown an eagerness to use the public’s money to advance its own policy goals,” said Matthew Littleton, a former attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice who worked on environmental law issues.

Littleton also points out that the anti-discrimination provision may not work as intended. The baseline for calculating “disparate treatment” is the average pace of project approvals over the most recent five years. By the time Trump leaves office, he will have spent four years permitting oil and gas projects while delaying almost all major solar and wind efforts. This baseline would prevent wind developers from making a discrimination claim — while also preventing a future president from walking back support for new oil and gas.

As if to highlight these risks, the White House has said in court filings over the past week that it is seeking to rescind permits for three offshore wind projects on the Atlantic Coast. One of these projects, the 700-megawatt Revolution Wind, is already complete and delivering power to Rhode Island, while the other two are still in the early stages. In each filing, the government has said only that it seeks to “reevaluate … compliance” with federal law.

Over the past year, Democratic negotiators in the Senate have said that this sort of behavior would jeopardize any bipartisan deal. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of the authors of the bill, said in the spring that he would not endorse a compromise bill unless the administration stopped blocking wind farms. This week he appeared to change tack, and described the move against Revolution Wind as another reason to pass the bill. “Frankly, we need to get permitting certainty in law, and this proves it,” he said in a statement.

The bill would in fact offer financial protection to a company like Ørsted, ensuring that a president could not wreck billions of dollars worth of investment with no justification at all. The question is whether it could end the government’s prejudicial assault against offshore wind. The answer could determine how millions of people in the Northeast keep their lights on and heat their homes, and right now, it’s up in the air.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.