Trump’s Weird “Nuclear” Moment With Elon Musk Gives Kamala an Opening

Kamala Harris has adopted a future-versus-past frame against Donald Trump, presiding over enthusiastic rally chants of “We’re not going back.” Is there a way to make efforts to combat climate change part of this pitch—not in a pointy-headed kind of way but by arguing that building cool electric cars will create the blue-collar jobs of the future?

A strange moment from Donald Trump’s much-discussed interview with Elon Musk this week, combined with a striking new report from the group Climate Power arguing that a green energy jobs “boom” is underway, together hint at what this might look like. Harris has an opening to argue that Trump, who wants to repeal the Biden-Harris climate agenda, would throw our green energy transition into sharp reverse, putting all those jobs at risk—and to insist in response that, No, we’re not going back.

In their widely panned interview, Musk tried to persuade Trump—who derides climate change and policies incentivizing use of electric vehicles as scams—that we can move toward a more sustainable future by expanding our use of solar power and electric cars. Musk is very pro-Trump and a red-pilled right-winger on other topics, but his position as co-founder of Tesla puts him at odds with Trump on this one big issue.

“We don’t believe that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer,” Musk told Trump. “So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy, they’re cool.” As if talking to a child, Musk added that they can run on solar power stored in batteries “because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night.”

In this, Musk tried to appeal to Trump’s crassly materialistic, hedonistic side and his entrepreneurial instincts—with some slick inventiveness, we can drive really cool cars and snag all the power we need from that big energy ball in the sky, dude. But to no avail. Trump seemed unimpressed, then segued into a strange rambling monologue about nuclear weapons.

Watch the whole thing, courtesy of Aaron Rupar:

Note that Trump has nothing to say in response to Musk’s suggestion, which, while oversimplified for Trump’s consumption, does offer a seductive future vision that’s far better than the horrors awaiting us if we fail to curb average global temperatures in time.

Which brings us to Climate Power’s new report released on Wednesday. It finds that approximately 335,000 new clean energy–related jobs are on track to be created by over 600 manufacturing projects already launched or announced since August 2022. That’s when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars to incentivize the manufacture and purchase of green energy technologies.

Notably, the report finds that many of these jobs—mostly manufacturing in wind, solar, batteries, E.V.s, and energy storage—are concentrated in Trump-friendly areas. More than 100 such projects are located in rural communities, potentially totaling over 50,000 jobs. Most projects are in GOP-controlled House districts, totaling nearly 200,000 jobs.

There are complexities in measuring all this—the report includes jobs in construction related to the projects, not just green energy manufacturing. But Jack Conness, whose Energy Innovation Policy and Technology think tank tracks manufacturing investments  by Biden’s policies, says the report broadly dovetails with his own findings.

And while it’s hard to say if there’s a direct link between Biden-Harris policies and every one of these projects, Conness said the policies are the primary cause of the broader green energy boom. “These laws are setting up U.S. businesses to compete in a twenty-first-century global clean energy economy,” Conness noted.

All this undermines Trump and running mate J.D. Vance’s favorite narratives. They keep repeating that the IRA is shipping manufacturing jobs to China, to scare Rust Belt autoworkers and their dependents. Because electric vehicles involve a supply chain with parts like batteries and critical minerals, they say, moving toward E.V.s sends jobs to China.

But as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler demonstrates, the IRA contains many provisions ensuring that more E.V. parts are manufactured in the United States. That’s meant to help the U.S. catch up with China in such manufacturing. Kessler shows that the IRA is creating large numbers of these jobs in the U.S. The new Climate Power report underscores that.

Trump and Vance are telling a bigger story here too. It’s that globalization has prompted a full-blown calamity in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands, a rolling crisis that’s economic, social, even spiritual. Vance often suggests that manufacturing work was the foundation of a virtuous working-class life in the Rust Belt. Elites sold all that out by allowing China into the world trading system and via other free trade deals, and only Trump and Vance will restore it.

Yet Trump and Vance have nothing serious to say in the face of an actual effort to restore U.S. manufacturing work by cutting into China’s dominance in green energy—one that is bearing fruit. They just robotically repeat that all this is again a sellout to China.

Neatly capturing the absurdities here, even the steel mill in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio—the wellspring of his Rust Belt bona fides—is seeing an upgrade, thanks to Biden-Harris subsidies. What’s more, as the Climate Power report details, clean energy projects are set to create thousands of jobs in Vance’s beloved Rust Belt states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—including in rural and Republican areas.

It would be folly to claim this transition will entirely solve the region’s problems. Some projects are being delayed, which is fairly common to such initiatives but is creating an odd political situation: Harris must campaign on the promise of what’s to come. And as Bloomberg reports, many local Rust Belt economies are recovering slowly from the Trump-era pandemic disaster, making it harder to sell that promise.

But nonetheless, Trump would repeal Biden’s whole climate agenda, which would hurt progress in the very places Trump and Vance rhapsodize about. While it’s unclear exactly how many projects and jobs that would cancel, it would likely roll back many of them.

“Repeal would be absolutely destructive, at a time when China is ramping up its own production of clean technologies,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Despite what Trump and Vance are saying, these investments are boosting America’s position in the world. Reversing those policies would be a tremendous benefit to China.”

At bottom, the real obstacle to seeing value in green energy jobs lies deep in the Trump-Vance “American carnage” worldview. It does not allow at all for the mere possibility that something good economically might be happening in these places that’s linked to the aspirations of liberal or Democratic elites in any way. What’s happening to those places can only be understood as a full-blown, elite-inflicted, rolling catastrophe. Progress related to the green transition cannot possibly form part of the answer. Only restoring manufacturing work of a bygone age will do.

All this gives Harris an opening. As Substacker Noah Smith argues, the green transition is something we should all get more excited about. Meanwhile, Harris and running mate Tim Walz are campaigning on an optimistic vision of the future. Smith notes the contrast between this and Trump-MAGA rage, shitposting, and deranged conspiracy theories about the direction of the country—case in point, the ugly MAGA conspiracy-mongering about the U.S. Olympics team—when people just want to feel good about things again.

Can’t Harris put all these pieces together? Without getting entangled in cultural cross-signaling around fossil fuels, she can argue that the very last thing we should do is reverse the clean energy boom. It’s creating lots of jobs building cool, innovative stuff right in the American heartland. They’re good jobs, to boot: Many are advanced manufacturing jobs well suited for people without college degrees. They are the jobs of the future, and Trump would wipe them all out because he hates wind turbines and has offered to do so in a corrupt bargain with his plutocrat donors. All that fits neatly with the campaign’s core message: We’re not going back.

Musk didn’t quite say all this. But oddly enough, this supreme Trump booster provided the beginnings of a template for Harris to do just that.