Bad for Business
By 
It is at this point banal to note that Mark Burnett making a mass audience believe that Donald Trump was a business genius is a critical factor in explaining his political raise — a nontrivial number of his marginal voters think that he will personally make them rich. But this also plays into a larger narrative that electing Republicans is good for business. But while electing Republicans is certainly good for many individual businesspeople and executives, as Catherine Rampell observes it’s not actually good for the economy as a whole:
IN THE MIDST OF AN ENERGY CRISIS, the Trump administration is paying companies to not build more energy infrastructure.
You read that correctly.
The Trump administration is proudly shelling out almost $2 billion in exchange for agreements from developers to halt wind projects that were already in the works. These projects—wind farms off the coasts of New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and California—would have generated enough electricity to power roughly 3-4 million households once they came online.
What pot of taxpayer money this payoff comes from, and whether the payoffs are even legal, remain open questions. Even lawmakers don’t know the answers. But these companies should probably count themselves lucky. They got paid to shut down, after all.
As an aside, paying people not to build clean energy projects is an excellent illustration of where the Republican Party is in 2026. It’s not even a question of their being a tradeoff between cleaner energy and costs — they’re willing to incur costs to make energy production dirtier because they just hate clean energy on principle.
Dozens of other renewable energy projects around the country have not received the same—forgive me—windfall. Instead, they’ve been canceled, stalled, or quietly snuffed out, with zero compensation. The list includes a gargantuan solar project in Nevada and more than 150 wind developments around the country, which collectively could have powered around 15 million homes.2 As a Heatmap headline declared: “Trump is getting away with murdering an American industry.”
Renewables are hardly Trump’s only victim. Our president is basically an economic serial killer, whacking firms left and right.
In addition to the intentional corporate executions—like the deliberate, gleeful “murders” of these wind projects—there are a great many Trump casualties that look more like manslaughter: companies the president is killing by accident, as with the recently departed Spirit Airlines (R.I.P.). The president simply doesn’t understand how his economic agenda of trade wars and hot wars might accidentally kill off already-weakened individual companies—or, in some cases, entire industries.
Just over a year into his second term, the economic landscape is littered with victims mangled by Trump’s agenda. Corporate bankruptcies last year rose to their highest level in over a decade. So join me, friends, for a stroll through the ‘America First’ Corporate Graveyard.
As she goes on to detail, whether it’s family farmers, manufacturers, of businesses dependent on cheaper fuel or cheaper imported goods and materials — all predominantly Trump constituencies and all getting completely screwed. And I don’t know what do about this any more than I know what to do about people who think that unilateral disarmament will save American democracy rather than crushing it.