impact on Trump’s thinking to prioritize dereg-
ulation if he got into office.”
The council’s influence on Trump was im-
mediate. The word “regulation” hadn’t ap-
peared once in his 2015 announcement
speech, but in the summer of 2016, slashing
regulations became one of Trump’s new rally-
ing cries on the campaign trail. He called reg-
ulation “one of the greatest job killers of them
all” and claimed excessive red tape cost the
country $2 trillion a year — a figure produced
by the National Association of Manufacturers.
If elected, he went on to say, he would do away
with 70 percent of all federal regulations. He
was especially critical of the EPA and called for
“complete American energy independence,” a
favorite Hamm talking point.
The council met again at the Cleveland
Browns’ football stadium, during the Repub-
lican Convention in July 2016, and went on
to produce a series of issue-focused white pa-
pers on energy, taxes and banking, according
to Moore. “They were blueprints for a lot of
Trump’s agenda,” Moore says. “Those issues
were highly discussed, and Trump ended up
using a lot of that data for his whole agenda.”
(Moore declined to share the documents.)
If joining the Leadership Council was a
gamble, the executives saw their early bet on
Trump pay off handsomely. (The White House
declined to comment.) DiMicco, the former
steel executive and longtime China critic, was
put in charge of the transition team for the
U.S. Trade Representative and later named to
a trade advisory board by Trump. Rep. Tom
Price (R-Ga.), who at the council’s first meet-
ing had led a discussion about how to replace
Obamacare, was picked to be secretary of the
Department of Health and Human Services
(and was later forced out over a spending scan-
dal). Dr. Mark Esper, a vice president at de-
fense contractor Raytheon, was named sec-
retary of the Army in 2017. “It’s the best time
that we’ve ever seen for the defense indus-
try,” Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy gushed
last year. (At the president’s urging, Congress
increased the military’s already-bloated bud-
get, and Trump has sped up the process for
approving arms deals.) And Trump publicly
weighed nominating Stephen Moore to the
Federal Reserve Board this spring, but the idea
was dropped after even Senate Republicans
scoffed at Moore’s record.
DiMicco saw his pro-tariff position elevat-
ed inside the White House with the appoint-
ment of an ally named Peter Navarro. Navarro
had written books critical of U.S. trade policy
with China and received funding from DiMic-
co’s company, Nucor, for a documentary titled
Death by China. After an internal battle pitting
Navarro, DiMicco and the self-described Amer-
ica Firsters against National Economic Coun-
cil director and former Goldman Sachs banker
Gary Cohn and his allies, the America First-
ers prevailed. In March 2018, Trump official-
ly imposed nearly $3 billion in tariffs on steel
and aluminum imports, and has been escalat-
ing the trade war ever since. As of June, Trump
had approved tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese
exports to the U.S. “It’s unprecedented,” says
David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution. “This is, in modern times, quite
extraordinary. It’s been decades since the U.S.
has done anything like this.”B
UT PROBABLY NO industry got a pres-
ident friendlier to its cause than fos-
sil fuels. Trump’s first EPA director,
Pruitt, was more than willing to do
the industry’s bidding; while Oklahoma AG, he
once copied-and-pasted a document written by
Devon Energy onto his official letterhead and
sent it to the EPA (which he sued more than a
dozen times).
Craft, of Alliance Resources, met with Pruitt
at least seven times during Pruitt’s first 14
months at the EPA, according to official cal-
endars. Pruitt even traveled to Craft’s home-
town of Hazard, Kentucky, to announce his
plan to gut Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which
would phase out the use of coal. Bob Murray
of Murray Energy submitted to the administra-
tion a 16-point “action plan” on company let-
terhead to revive the coal industry; within a
year, Trump officials had moved to implement
more than half of them, including killing the
Clean Power Plan and withdrawing from the
Paris Agreement. EPA head Andrew Wheeler,
Pruitt’s replacement and a former lobbyist for
Murray Energy, has moved forward with weak-
ening methane-emissions protections, mercu-
ry regulations and fuel-efficiency standards
for cars. “They have attacked safeguards an-
chored in science that protect collectively tens
of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of
thousands of asthma attacks,” says Vickie Pat-
ton, general counsel at Environmental DefenseFund, “and they’ve done it at the urging of the
economic interests of the few.”
The Trump Leadership Council eventually
went the way of most advisory boards, mem-
bers told me, atrophying and going dormant
as the new administration found its footing,
but not before members and their companies
gave just over $3 million to Trump’s inaugura-
tion. By late 2017, the council was rebranded
the American Leadership Council, with Hamm
as chairman and his oil-and-gas colleague John
McNabb as vice chair, to pressure Congress to
deliver on Trump’s America First agenda.
The council’s influence is felt to this day,
with members serving in the administration —
Larry Kudlow, the CNBC host, replaced Cohn
as Trump’s top economic adviser — or guiding
the president in an unofficial capacity, part of
the crew of “outfluencers” the president fre-
quently calls on for advice. One lobbyist re-
called White House staffers complaining about
Trump calling DiMicco to talk trade. Moore
told me that Hamm, who in 2017 was named
to the board of a dark-money group helping to
re-elect Trump, visits the White House “often.”
Whatever happens in 2020, Trump’s all-out
assault on regulations will long outlive his pres-
idency, whether it’s four or eight years. At a
time when the climate crisis threatens the fu-
ture of humanity, Trump and his corporate
backers have taken the country in the oppo-
site direction. “This administration’s agenda
was set well before Trump was elected,” says
Brune of the Sierra Club. “Just about any safe-
guard to protect the country’s air, water and
climate is up for sale. And if it makes Trump’s
polluter friends happy, that’s what he’s prom-
ised to do and what he’s going to do.”Harold Hamm
CEO, Continental
Resources
The de facto
leader of the Trump
Leadership
Council, Hamm
is an oil-and-gas
billionaire who
wanted the
government to
allow more drilling
on federal land.
Trump obliged,
approving 40
percent more
permits.Dan DiMicco
Ex-CEO,
Nucor Corp.
Trump’s tariff
whisperer, DiMicco
is an ardent critic of
China’s “mercan-
tilist/predatory
trading practices.”
He’s advised Trump
on trade for years.
“Without tariffs the
world would still
gullibly believe
China was serious
about changing its
ways,” he tweeted.Jay Timmons
CEO, Nat. Assoc.
of Manufacturers
Timmons was on the
council, but Trump’s
agenda has caused
headaches: Firms
Timmons represents
through NAM are
getting pounded by
the administration’s
policies. He recently
said the issues of
“trade, tariff, and
immigration” had
created a “Molotov
cocktail of policy.”Bob Murray
CEO, Murray Energy
America’s foremost
coal baron and a
former client of EPA
chief Andrew
Wheeler, Murray
says climate change
is a “hoax.” The
president has raced
to fulfill Murray’s
wish list, which
includes reversing
Obama’s Clean
Power Plan and
slashing staff
numbers at the EPA.Larry Kudlow
Director, National
Economic Council
What could be more
Trump than picking
a guy who played
an economist on TV
to lead the White
House’s economic
policy? Kudlow has
busied himself
defending Trump’s
erratic policies, but
acknowledged
“both sides will pay”
in the trade war
with China.The Agenda-Setters
Five members of the Trump Leadership Council. For most, their early bet on the president has
paid off with industry-friendly deregulation and unprecedented access to the White HouseDAMAGE
DONE
The admin-
istration has
tried to delay
or reverse 84
environmental
regulations
and counting,
affecting
air and water
pollution,
drilling in
national parks,
and bans
on toxic chem-
icals. “Trump
is doing the
bidding of
the biggest
polluters in
the country,”
says one envi-
ronmentalist.FROMLEFT
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OCK36 | Rolling Stone | July 2019