34 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
NO DENYING IT
Exxon senior
scientist James F.
Black tells company
leaders there’s
scientific consensus
that humans are in-
fluencing the Earth’s
climate by burning
fossil fuels.
KEEP IT SECRET
In documents “not
to be distributed ex-
ternally,” Exxon says
addressing global
warming will require
“major reductions
in fossil fuel” and
warns of “cata-
strophic events.”NO HIGH GROUND
Exxon is certain
enough about
climate change
that it starts
building the decks
of its oil-drilling
platforms higher
in anticipation of
rising sea levels.BAD ATMOSPHERE
Exxon predicts that
by 2020, carbon
dioxide in the atmo-
sphere will reach
400 to 420 parts
per million, higher
than it’s been in
millions of years.TURNING POINT
N ASA’s James Hansen tells Congress that
burning fossil fuels is causing global warm-
ing, prompting George Bush to campaign
on it: “Those who think we are powerless to
do anything about the greenhouse effect
forget about the ‘White House effect.’ ”SOWING DOUBT
One month after
Hansen’s testimo-
ny, Exxon decides
on a strategy to
“emphasize the
uncertainty” in
climate-change
science, according
to internal memos.FOSSIL-FUEL LOBBY
Exxon, Chevron and
others form Global
Climate Coalition
to lobby against
climate action,
distributing a video
claiming more car-
bon dioxide will end
world hunger.I
T COULD HAVE been an episode of The
Apprentice. On a summer day in 2016,
a group of businessmen and women
descended on Trump Tower in Man-
hattan. They exited their black SUVs
and rode the golden elevators to the
26th floor, where they assembled in a board-
room and awaited the presumptive presiden-
tial nominee of the Republican Party.
A year earlier, surely no one in that meet-
ing had the faintest notion that Donald Trump
would make a credible run for president. But
by the spring, he’d dispatched Low-Energy Jeb,
Lyin’ Ted and the rest, and was well on his way
to securing enough delegates to clinch the nom-
ination. The corporate leaders who formed one
of the GOP’s most reliable constituencies faced
a dilemma: Get behind Trump or find yourself
potentially frozen out of the next administra-
tion, in the unlikely event that he won.
Trump took his seat at the head of a long
table and thanked his guests for coming. It was
the inaugural meeting of the Trump Leadership
Council, a kitchen Cabinet and sounding board
featuring representatives from many of Amer-
ica’s biggest industries: energy, finance, trans-
portation, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, de-
fense, construction and health care. The men
and women around him were told the meeting
would be totally confidential. The handful of
Fortune 500 executives in attendance were out-
numbered by leaders of privately held corpora-
tions and little-known companies that, under
more normal circumstances, would never find
themselves in a position to inform the think-
ing of the standard-bearer of a major political
party. They weren’t the country-club, Cham-
ber of Commerce types that had backed Bush
and Rubio and Kasich; they were more on the
fringe, including Obama-bashing coal barons,
China-hating steel producers and modern-day
oil-and-gas wildcatters. Both the largest po-
tato producer and truck-stop operator were
also there. “They weren’t conventional Repub-
licans,” council member and Heritage Founda-
tion economist Stephen Moore tells ROLLING
STONE. “They were more maverick business
leaders.” Moore himself had carved out a posi-
tion as the far right’s go-to economist, and has
stirred up headlines saying things like “I’d get
rid of a lot of these child-labor laws. I want peo-
ple starting to work at 11, 12,” and that women
shouldn’t be involved in sports unless they’re
attractive.
In the three years since that inaugural meet-
ing, the council’s impact has been seen across
the administration. At the urging of coal and
oil industry representatives, Trump’s EPA has
systematically rolled back environmental pro-
tections and frozen new ones, affecting the air
and water of thousands of people. The coun-
cil’s trade hard-liners have advised Trump to
embrace tariffs in the trade war with China —
a move that has put farms out of business and
cost every family in America hundreds of dol-
lars a year, according to one analysis, as a re-
sult of higher-priced goods. The National As-
sociation of Manufacturers, a lobby group for
big business whose leader, Jay Timmons, was
a council member, sent the Trump adminis-
tration a wish list of 132 regulations that NAM
members took issue with. A recent report by
the watchdog group Public Citizen found that
the Trump administration has moved to imple-
ment 64 percent of NAM’s recommendations.
The creation of the Trump Leadership Coun-
cil back in 2016 went almost entirely unno-
ticed at the time. Until now, the members of the
council have not been made public. But ROLL-
ING STONE obtained a complete list of the mem-
bers and interviewed half a dozen people who
attended and organized the council. Togeth-
er, they form a lost chapter in the story of how
Trump’s pro-industry, anti-regulation America
First agenda became a reality.
“With Trump, we’ve had a corporate take-
over of government with no parallel in Ameri-
can history,” says Robert Weissman, president
of Public Citizen. “Your research shows the
seeds were planted early on in the campaign.”T
HE TRUMP LEADERSHIP Council was
the brainchild of Harold Hamm.
Hamm, who runs the Oklahoma City-
based oil and gas company Continen-
tal Resources and is worth an estimated $11 bil-
lion, was one of the few business execs to back
Trump early on. (He did not respond to re-
quests for comment.) Hamm acted as an unof-
ficial adviser to Trump’s campaign, and helped
secure the final delegates needed to lock up
the nomination in the final stretch of the 2016
Republican primary, according to one source
familiar with Hamm’s role. (It was no coinci-
dence, the source said, that Trump announced
he’d crossed the delegate threshold before
speaking at an oil-industry conference in North
Dakota, and that the first person he thanked
was his “very good friend” Harold Hamm.)
The last of 13 children born to Oklahoma share-
croppers, Hamm was truly self-made and had
little in common with Trump, yet the two
men hit it off. Two of Hamm’s associates, Blu
Hulsey and John McNabb, began assembling a
list of corporate chiefs who would help shape
Trump’s policies.
They discovered that much of Corporate
America wasn’t jumping at the opportunity to
associate with a candidate who demonized im-
migrants, mocked his opponents’ appearance
and stoked conspiracy theories about their fam-
ilies. “Some people blanched,” one organizer
recalls. “Some said they’d do it because he was
the nominee.”
By June, they had pulled together a list of 48
people. Despite Trump’s campaign theme of
draining the swamp in Washington, the list was
stocked with industry representatives and reg-
istered lobbyists, including former Minneso-
ta Gov. Tim Pawlenty, then-president and CEO
of the Financial Services Roundtable, the bank-
ing industry’s lobbying group; John Lechleit-
er, then-CEO and chairman of pharmaceutical
giant Eli Lilly; Jerry Howard, CEO of the Nation-
al Association of Home Builders; and lobbyists
for behemoth defense contractors Boeing, Ray-Would
canceling
student
debt and
making
public col-
lege free
be good
for the
country?84%
Ye s16%
NoGo to Rolling
Stone.com
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THE LONG VIEW: CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL
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