https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1232333303434358785
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1232334012527542272
#
Where’s Trump? He hasn’t tweeted about climate in 350 days
By Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter
President Trump hasn’t used Twitter to malign climate science in almost a year. It’s been 350 days, to be exact.
The radio silence doesn’t mean Trump has stopped talking about it — in fact, his real-life rhetoric on global warming has wildly fluctuated in recent months.
But the absence of climate change from Trump’s favorite medium has caught the attention of activists and political strategists. And they said it could be a sign that Trump — or at least someone in his inner circle — is paying attention to shifting U.S. attitudes toward global warming.
“Everybody sees the same polling, and it shows that more voters are concerned about it,” said Doug Heye, the former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “Young people are not only increasingly concerned about it but it’s one of their very top considerations, and I think that has been more on the Democratic side, but also creeping up for independents and Republicans, too.”
That’s a signal to politicians that climate policy could motivate choices in the voting booth, he said. It’s also a stark contrast from just a few years ago, when Republicans wouldn’t even bother with climate policy because their constituents didn’t care, Heye said.
Now Trump might be hearing a new message from his campaign advisers: Mocking climate science could imperil his reelection.
“I don’t think the language we hear helps Trump win over new voters, but it’s been fairly clear that’s not a strategy of the campaign,” Heye said. “At a certain point, it becomes an existential political challenge for Republicans as younger voters become not so young, which would correspond with them voting more, and that’s something they need to be concerned about.”
Climate change has long been a fascination of the former host of “The Apprentice.”
Over the years, Trump has tweeted at least 150 times about global warming and climate change, calling it a “hoax” and claiming that scientists are lying fame-seekers and that cold weather outside his window means NASA and NOAA are wrong to conclude that humans are warming the Earth at an unprecedented pace.
For comparison, Trump’s tweets about climate change are on pace with his complaints about CNN, which earned 180 mentions since he took office. And they surpass the 117 times he used Twitter to call a political opponent a “dope” or “dopey,” according to the Trump Twitter Archive, founded by Boston-based programmer Brendan Brown.
A common Trump sentiment is that “dollar-sucking wiseguys” changed the name of global warming to climate change to deceive the public.
“The weather has been so cold for so long that the global warming HOAXSTERS were forced to change the name to climate change to keep $ flow!” Trump tweeted in January 2014.
But lately, at least on Twitter, he’s been quiet.
The last time Trump mocked climate science was on March 12, 2019, when he quoted Patrick Moore, who rejected mainstream research while appearing on “Fox and Friends.” “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Moore said, according to the president’s tweet.
A few weeks earlier, Trump used his Twitter account to raise personal objections about climate science. The tweet, on Feb. 10, 2019, marked the last time Trump used Twitter to malign climate change in his own words. He was commenting on Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) entrance into the presidential race. She made the announcement during a snowstorm.
“Well, it happened again. Amy Klobuchar announced that she is running for President, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!” Trump tweeted.
His attacks on science aside, Trump has used Twitter to object to climate-related policies in the past year. He defended his decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, which he said “protects the polluters,” and he retweeted a campaign staffer who said that Democrats’ “plan for climate change is to eliminate more than 1 million jobs.”
The nearly yearlong gap without climate science criticism is notable, considering that Trump has ridiculed and misrepresented climate science since he opened his Twitter account in 2009.
And yet, the silence is not without precedent.
In 2015, Trump abruptly stopped mocking climate science on Twitter after he announced his presidential campaign. The Twitter silence lasted through the election. His criticism started again after he won the presidency, though at a far reduced pace compared with the dozens of times each year that Trump mocked climate science on his Twitter account in the years leading up to his candidacy.
