Trump Is Kind of Nuclear-Skeptical

Donald Trump is slipping. I don’t mean in the polls (although he’s slipping there, too), but he’s slipping where it really matters: branding.

Dismiss Trump and his gold Stymie Extra Bold font as tacky and tasteless if you want, but you can’t claim that the namesake behind Trump Ice, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, and the Trump footlong hotdog doesn’t know how to make something stick. He arguably won the 2016 Republican primary on the power of branding his opponents as Low Energy, Lyin’, Little, and Crooked — but lately, his heart hasn’t seemed in it. I mean, “Kamabla”? Come on.

Still, sometimes you can see flashes of his former self, such as last night when Trump appeared in a “conversation” with Elon Musk on Twitter, the social media platform now a year into its own rocky rebrand as X. Musk’s justification for the call was to give listeners “a feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation” in a non-adversarial setting (as if Trump doesn’t do friendly media appearances all the time). But the lengthy, wide-ranging interview also offered a decent opportunity to hear Trump speak about policy without the usual teleprompter.

That included some of Trump’s newly Musk-friendly thoughts about climate.In addition to spouting some seriously dubious emissions science — Bill McKibben dubbed their two-hour chat “the Dumbest Climate Conversation of All Time” — Trump and Musk also touched on the problems facing the buildout of nuclear energy.

Here is the relevant part of the conversation (I’ve omitted some of the exchange in brackets, but you can read the whole 61-page transcript here if you like):

Trump: You know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that's very dangerous. [...]

Musk: Yeah, and actually, there’s the bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s also, I think — nuclear electricity generation is underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation. [...]

Trump: Maybe they’ll have to change the name. The name is just, it’s a rough name. There are some areas, like when you see what happened — bad branding, the branding problem. We’ll have to rebrand it. We’ll have to give it a good name. We’ll name it after you or something.

Let’s say right off the bat, they are getting into some real stuff here. Nuclear war is, indeed, “very bad”! To give Trump credit on the branding front, too, “nuclear warming” is a pretty creative way of saying “a mass detonation of atomic bombs that ends all life on Earth.” (And possibly a clever play on nuclear winter.)

Perhaps more importantly, though, nuclear is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. is generally considered crucial to balancing out intermittent renewables as the grid decarbonizes and electricity demand blows up. Talking about nuclear in a serious way will be important — which is tricky if you buy that it has “a rough name.”

Not everybody does, of course. Bloomberg’s Steve Hou disputed Trump’s theory (on Musk’s X, no less), “Nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. It has a NIMBY problem that everyone’s ok with it in theory as long as the nuclear plant’s in someone else’s neighborhood.” Most Americans support nuclear power — more than offshore oil and gas drilling, fracking, or coal mining. It’s the rare issue both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

But that doesn’t mean nuclear doesn’t have a branding problem. Why else would Americans not want a nuclear plant in their backyard if not for anxiety about radiation (or, relatedly, the Soviet unsightliness of cooling towers)? Trump went on in his conversation with Musk to cite the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan and, seemingly, Chernobyl (“in Russia, where they had a problem, where they, you know, a lot of bad things happened”) as the reasons why Americans are, in his opinion, rightfully jittery about nuclear energy.

Musk pushed back on Trump’s examples, asserting that nuclear energy is “not as scary as people think” and that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re, like, full cities again.” Seeing as Musk mostly just let Trump say stuff during their conversation, his moment of objection is telling: Trump’s distrust of nuclear energy suggests possible policy implications that people on the right might not like. (Trump has expressed far more enthusiasm, however, for building up our nuclear arsenal.)

Many in climate communications or the nuclear industry have thought long and hard about how to make nuclear energy more palatable to the public, with strategies ranging from creating imagery invoking the atom (rather than the more obvious and ominous hourglass-shaped cooling tower) to hiring Miss America as an industry advocate. Last fall, John Marshall, the CEO and founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, explained on a podcast that his group had found the term “new nuclear” tests as less intimidating to the public.

So sure, we may need something like a Reddy Kilowatt of nuclear energy to improve messaging. That’s where Trump’s creativity runs out, though. As Heatmap’s own polling suggests, rebranding nuclear power as “Musk power” will probably not help.