Will Bunch: Trump's $1 billion 'Indecent Proposal' to Big Oil titans is the planet's biggest story

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/trump-oil-industry-climate-change-wildwood-rally-crowd-20240514.html

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Sometimes the movies that stay with you for decades aren’t the good ones, but the ones with an unforgettable ad or an utterly inane premise. That last category includes maybe the worst movie of Robert Redford’s long and distinguished acting career, 1993?s Indecent Proposal, in which a beautiful and desperately cash-strapped young wife (Demi Moore) reluctantly agrees to a one-night affair with Redford’s immoral billionaire for a $1 million payout.

It was a dreadful film, but the sequel is always worse. Last week, immoral billionaire-on-paper Donald Trump made his own indecent proposal to the barons of Big Oil who dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee told the energy moguls that he’s willing to get in bed with them and satisfy their wildest fantasies of crushing regulations, undoing the war on climate change, and cutting their taxes even more.

But inflation has ravaged even the world of political prostitution. Trump’s asking price was a cool $1 billion.

In a week that was dominated by wall-to-wall TV coverage of the 45th president’s felony election-interference-and-hush-money trial in Manhattan, Trump’s pay-for-play pitch to Big Oil was the biggest story on Planet Earth — even if the media didn’t cover it that way. Some who did follow the environmental story focused on the corruption angle, since a presidential candidate’s explicit promise to perform official acts like slashing federal regulations if the executives would fund his campaign sure looked like, well, a bribery solicitation.

That’s not wrong, but this politician who has learned how to talk like a mafia don also probably knows that without a more specific quid pro quo a jury would never convict him, especially in a corrupt America where Justice Clarence Thomas remains a free man. But the real problem, as I see it, isn’t so much the insane $1 billion asking price as what a former and perhaps future U.S. president is willing to sell off: A future in which your grandchildren can still breathe.

*snip*