The Real Reason Trump Is a Threat to the Economy

WITH HIS BROAD SHOULDERS, thick arms, and even thicker New England accent, ironworker Daniel Langlais is exactly the sort of American who is supposed to love Donald Trump’s policies. But Langlais says he is dumbfounded by some of the president’s recent decisions, especially the one that halted work on an energy project off the coast of Rhode Island.

The project is called Revolution Wind. When it is completed—or, more accurately, if it is completed—it will consist of 65 wind turbines generating enough electricity to power 350,000 homes. The steel towers of the offshore devices are more than 400 feet high; the fiberglass composite blades add nearly that much in length when vertical. Putting those components together requires a lot of skilled labor. And that’s where Langlais comes in.

He leads Ironworkers Local 37, whose members have been among the more than one thousand workers building Revolution Wind, which is now 80 percent complete. But in late August, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order blocking federal money that had been subsidizing the project as part of the clean-energy push President Joe Biden and the Democrats began in 2022.

The Danish company building the wind turbines, Langlais told me, is continuing to pay the U.S. workers, evidently in the hopes that the Trump administration relents soon or that a court orders it to do so. But neither may happen, in which case employment could vanish for both the construction teams as well as everybody who was planning on jobs in operations or maintenance once Revolution Wind comes online.

“This is a really good project for [the Ironworkers], a chance to put hours into their health and welfare funds, their pensions—and just providing for their families,” Langlais told me in a phone interview Friday. “They knew they had sustainable employment for several months, whereas now, each day they don’t know if we’re going to say, ‘Hey, today’s your last day . . . you’ve got to go sign up for unemployment.’”

The Trump administration’s official rationale for suspending construction is that the project requires a new review from federal regulators, to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.” But Trump officials have never specified what those interests are, or why the multiple previous reviews by state and federal authorities were insufficient.

No, the real reason seems to be that Donald Trump simply hates wind power. And it’s not hard to imagine the reasons—even above and beyond his well-known pique about offshore wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf resort.¹ For Trump, opposing wind energy could be another way to stick it to tree-hugging libs or to undo a Democratic legacy item—or to signal his class loyalty. In the MAGA cultural universe, getting power from wind or the sun or any other renewable source is somehow less authentically blue-collar than pulling petroleum out of the ground.

Langlais is proof of how silly these arguments are. He first learned to pour concrete when he was a teenager, he told me, working for his father’s small homebuilding business. He got to know about ironworking through his father-in-law, then spent three years as an apprentice learning the trade’s skills—how to weld and cut, how to read a blueprint, how to take safety precautions. After that, he spent seventeen years in the field.

As for his environmental politics, he’s all in favor of drilling. At the same time, he thinks there should be an “all of the above” approach to energy, because he knows that the United States will keep needing more of it—and that the electricity bills he pays as a Rhode Island resident would go down if Revolution Wind were to come online.

“A country that is dependent on foreign nations to supply their energy needs—to me, that’s a security risk,” Langlais said, recalling the administration’s official rationale. “So if the United States can produce all our own energy needs—whether it be oil, coal, gas, wind, solar—to me that’s a plus for national security. We’re not relying on other nations that could potentially cut us off for our needs.”

But what really seems to irk Langlais is the potential waste resulting from Trump’s decision, and not simply because it’s possible the nearly complete wind turbines will end up just sitting out there off the coast, doing nothing, a slowly rusting monument to what might have been.

The Ironworkers invested approximately a million dollars in training members for wind-turbine production, Langlais told me. On top of that, there was special instruction for offshore projects. Workers had to take courses in water survival, for example, at a cost of $1,000 per member. They did so because wind energy seemed like such a promising and obvious area for growth given the rising global demand for energy, and because wind right now is among the cheapest, quickest ways to add generating capacity.

Stopping the investments in progress means giving up on that work, now and possibly for the foreseeable future, as well as ensuring utility bills stay higher.