An extraordinary White House meeting
Last year, President Trump gathered with executives from the oil and gas industry at the White House to discuss a range of topics, including drilling and tariffs. Few details emerged from the March 2025 meeting at the time, leaving many to wonder what exactly had transpired. Now, our colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have answers. In the new book “Regime Change,” they provide an account of that meeting that sheds additional light on Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his willingness to exert presidential power. At one point during the meeting, the executives began complaining about the Climate Superfund bills that had recently passed in Vermont and New York. As they spoke, Trump’s policy adviser, Stephen Miller was texting the attorney general Pam Bondi. “I’m on it,” Miller told the group. Less than two months later, the administration sued both states seeking to block enforcement of the laws. In another instance, the ExxonMobil chief executive, Darren Woods, voiced concerns about European Union regulations that required big companies to monitor and reduce the environmental effects of their activities and develop “climate transition plans.” Haberman and Swan report that, upon hearing this, Trump instructed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to impose additional tariffs on the E.U. until they abandoned those regulations. At another point in the meeting, held in the Cabinet Room on March 19, 2025, Miller asked the executives in attendance for a list of 10 projects the White House could help fast-track and requested that they “highlight how much more energy the projects would produce in the United States during the Trump presidency.” And in one of the most fateful exchanges, the Chevron chief executive, Mike Wirth, pushed for an extension of the firm’s license to operate in Venezuela. Less than a year later, the Trump administration had seized the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Shortly after that, Chevron expanded its presence in Venezuela. Yesterday I called Swan to discuss this reporting, and he described to me a room filled with some of the most powerful executives in the world, stunned by what they were witnessing. “They were almost in awe,” Swan told me. “There was no semblance of a policy process, but rather the C.E.O.s were raising their grievances, and Trump was essentially saying, ‘Make it so, it shall be done.’” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the president “frequently listens to the recommendations and concerns of many top stakeholders across various industries.” She added that “President Trump makes all policy decisions based on what is best for the American people — which includes unleashing American energy dominance to lower prices and strengthen our country’s national security.” It’s true that business leaders are always lobbying the government for preferential treatment, regardless of who is in charge. But Swan said that at this meeting, there was an inversion of the usual power dynamic. “The oil executives were not the most aggressive people in the room,” he said. “In terms of unleashing energy production and bulldozing any obstacle in their way, it was actually the Trump people.” This was uncharted waters for the oil and gas executives. “They’re accustomed to lobbying governments to be more permissive,” Swan said. “And now they were faced with a government that was lobbying them to be more aggressive, a government that was essentially saying, ‘ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Chevron, you guys aren’t drilling hard enough. You guys aren’t being aggressive enough. We’re going to open up the floodgates. We’re going to do whatever you want, just so long as you give us extraordinary energy production immediately.’” Trump has long celebrated the oil and gas business, while he has been hostile to renewables like wind and solar. “Trump’s conception of the American economy has always been rooted in the economy of his formative years,” Swan said. “So he’s always romanticized heavy industry.” In the meeting, he was using his newfound authority to reward an industry he admired. “What you see in this scene is the marriage of a long-held and deep affinity with the fossil fuel industry, combined with the president at the absolute apex of using executive power — unchecked, essentially,” Swan said. The oil executives, who are themselves among the most influential business leaders on the planet, came away stunned at how the president wielded his power. “They described Trump as having a better sense of his executive power than anyone that this person’s ever dealt with,” Swan told me. Tellingly, one added: “I would never want a Democrat to have that same sense of executive authority.”
In a single word, Trump ends a wildlife protectionThe Trump administration has moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century. It did so by recasting a single word: harm. For more than 50 years, the federal government has used the same definition of harm under the Endangered Species Act. It includes any significant “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter or breed. That definition has been upheld by the Supreme Court. But on Friday, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced a rule that rescinded this longstanding interpretation. Now destroying the habitat of an endangered species will no longer be illegal. — Catrin Einhorn and Maxine Joselow More news from around the web
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