July 2019 | Rolling Stone | 35
theon and Lockheed Martin.
Three of Trump’s economic
advisers — Moore, then-CNBC
commentator Larry Kudlow
and economist Arthur Laffer
— also joined.
The industry best repre-
sented on the council was en-
ergy — a who’s who of fossil-fu-
el champions, including coal
baron Bob Murray of Murray
Energy, who’s called climate
change a “hoax”; Joe Craft of
Alliance Resources, one of the
U.S.’s biggest coal companies;
and Larry Nichols of Devon
Energy, the $11 billion oil giant
that has long been a fierce op-
ponent of climate regulations.
Leading the energy team was,
of course, Harold Hamm.
“The council mirrors Trump’s
presidency in that even the mainstream pollut-
ers wouldn’t be found on this council,” says Mi-
chael Brune, executive director of the Sierra
Club. “You instead find people who are more
extreme, more radical, more dangerous in their
views — and who have been shaping Trump’s
agenda since before he took office.”
Hamm, who never went to college, started
his own oil company and pioneered the drill-
ing technique known as horizontal fracking.
“Climate change isn’t our biggest problem,” he
said during his prime-time speaking slot at the
2016 Republican Convention. “It’s Islamic ter-
rorism.” A dean at the University of Oklahoma
accused him of pressuring the school to dismiss
scientists studying links between fracking and
earthquakes. (Hamm denied this.) Hamm’s goal
is to make America energy-independent from
the rest of the world. “We can be the Saudi Ara-
bia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century,”
he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. To do
that, the federal government needed to get off
the backs of energy producers like him — mean-DEALMAKER
Trump and
Leadership
Council
member Larry
Kudlow (right)
meet with auto
executives in
May 2018, a
few months
before the
administration
rolled back
Obama-era
fuel-efficiency
standards, one
of a number of
giveaways to
the fossil-fuel
industry.ing less oversight by the EPA and the ability to
drill on federal land controlled by the Depart-
ment of the Interior. Hamm and an industry
front group he co-founded, the Domestic Ener-
gy Producers Alliance, have led the fight to pro-
tect longstanding tax loopholes worth billions
to the oil and gas industry.
After decades of steering clear of politics,
Hamm began giving generously in the late
2000s and served as Mitt Romney’s top ener-
gy adviser in 2012. He gave $1 million to groups
aligned with the Koch brothers. Back in Okla-
homa, he donated the maximum to the 2014 at-
torney-general campaign for Scott Pruitt, who
Trump later tapped to head the EPA. Hamm
had first met the president four years earlier,
when he visited Trump Tower and left with a
collection of Trump ties. He wore one on the
cover of Forbes, which pleased Trump so much
that he sent Hamm a fawning letter (and more
ties). Trump calls Hamm the “king of energy.”
The purpose of the Trump Leadership Coun-
cil was not only to advise Trump but also tostump for his campaign and his policies in TV
appearances, at the upcoming convention and
more. “As you recall, there were few business
leaders willing to go on the record in support
of Trump’s campaign,” says Dan DiMicco, the
former chairman of Nucor Corp., a North Car-
olina-based steel company, and a member of
the council. “We were a group of his support-
ers willing to be out explaining and supporting
his campaign.”
With Hamm seated to Trump’s right and Mc-
Nabb to his left at that first meeting, Trump’s
starting point, several attendees told me, was
simple: What laws do you want to see repealed,
what regulations unwound? This was typical
fare coming from any presidential nominee,
but Trump of course was different. His cam-
paign was in many ways a blank slate. He didn’t
run with a policy agenda in mind and had no
overarching ideological framework. And be-
cause he had such a slim political network to
tap, he was indebted to the people at Trump
Tower that day offering to help. “Trump was
very aware of who put their neck out on the
line for him early,” one attendee told me.
Moore expected Trump to stick around the
meeting for a brief period and then make his
exit. Instead, he stayed the entire time, quiz-
zing representatives from each sector and tak-
ing notes. “In my entire career of doing this —
we do it every four years, every presidential
cycle — I have not given a policy briefing di-
rectly to a candidate like that,” says Jerry How-
ard of the home-builders association. Most-
ly what Trump heard from the attendees was
that Obama had gone crazy with regulation
and was hurting their growth, if not running
them out of business. They backed the idea
of overhauling the tax code, but even more
than that they wanted to see Trump take aim at
Obama’s regulations.
“Whether it’s community banks or the coal
industry or construction, it was pretty univer-
sal that the regulatory structure had become a
deterrent to growth,” Moore says. “That had anDRINKING THE
KOOL-AID
Bush administra-
tion tones down
Hansen’s climate
warnings in a report
to the Senate, tells
Congress there’s
still “significant sci-
entific uncertainty.”
A STEP FORWARD...
Clinton signs Kyoto
Protocol, first global
pact on climate
change. American
Petroleum Institute
sets goal of making
Kyoto supporters
“appear to be out of
touch with reality.”TWO STEPS BACK...
George W. Bush withdraws from the Kyoto
Protocol. “Potus rejected Kyoto in part
based on input from [Global Climate Coali-
tion],” writes a State Dept. official, who also
thanked Exxon for its “active involvement”
in determining climate-change policy.2001SIMPLE MATH
All but eight con-
gressional Republi-
cans (out of 278) are
climate skeptics,
in a year the party
receives $40 million
from the oil and gas
industry, to Demo-
crats’ $6 million.INSIDE MAN
Trump appoints
Exxon CEO Rex
Tillerson as secre-
tary of state. Exxon
donated nearly
$9 million to cli-
mate deniers during
Tillerson’s tenure.REJECTING PARIS
Trump pulls out of
the Paris Agree-
ment, egged on in a
letter from 22 GOP
senators who, com-
bined, received $10
million in donations
from the oil and gas
industry.WHY WORRY?
Carbon dioxide
reaches 415 ppm,
as Exxon predicted
in 1982. Interior
secretary and
former oil lobbyist
David Bernhardt
says, “I haven’t lost
any sleep over it.”1990 1998 2014 2017 2017 MAY 2019TOP:^
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