Pelosi calls Trump ‘the biggest con job in American history

“President Trump is the biggest con job in American history,” said Nancy Pelosi, the US speaker emerita, to reporters on Thursday while criticizing his anti-climate agenda.

Donald Trump told the UN general assembly in September that the climate crisis was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. But he was “projecting”, Pelosi said at a press conference. The meeting was convened by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to comment on the US’s official absence from the United Nations Cop30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, where 195 countries are represented.

The Trump administration refused to send a US delegation to the annual talks – a first in the history of the summit – after pulling the country from the United Nations Paris Climate Accord on his first day back in office in January.

The sole federal representative to attend the summit was Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator, ranking member on the environment and public works committee and a longtime climate hawk.

“Trump does not represent the United States … on matters related to climate,” Whitehouse said at the presser in Washington DC. “He represents the fossil fuel industry, and specifically his big billionaire fossil fuel donors when it comes to climate matters.”

Whitehouse aimed to highlight Trump’s ties to big oil at the climate talks in Brazil during his 60-hour stay last week. The administration refused him an official US badge for the conference, so he was forced to attend as part of a climate research nonprofit’s delegation.

The problem of fossil fuel industry influence did not begin with Trump, Whitehouse noted.

“It’s about damn time we told this story truthfully with the villains in it: we wouldn’t be where we were if the fossil fuel industry had not run a long and fraudulent campaign of climate denial,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be where we are if the fossil fuel industry had not, since Citizens United, used its power to spend unlimited dark money in politics … to prevent reasonable, sensible climate action from happening.”

New polling from progressive polling nonprofit Data for Progress, shared exclusively with the Guardian, shows that a strong majority of US voters, 65%, believe the US should undertake ambitious climate action even if other states do not. That includes majorities of Democrats and Independents at 85% and 63% respectively. And it includes a plurality, 47%, of Republicans 47%.

A majority of US voters – 55% – also support a global phaseout of fossil fuels, while 54% of voters said the US should wind down fossil fuel usage by the century’s end.

“The United States is still very solid on climate action,” Whitehouse said.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, also spoke at the Thursday press conference.

“It’s shameful that the Trump administration and the United States government chose not to be involved and engaged at the most recent cop conference, essentially ceding leadership on this issue in the world to our rival China,” he said.

Pelosi, who recently said she will retire at the end of her term, said she wanted to “associate herself” with Jeffries remarks, noting that the first UN climate summit she attended was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

“Our delegation in this was led by Senator Al Gore and while we were there, he made one of the most spectacular save the planet speeches you ever heard,” she said.

After the speech, Gore was nowhere to be found because “he was called away by Bill Clinton to ask if he wanted to be vice-president of the United States”, she added.

Trump’s dismantling of public education, refusal to take on gun violence, and his environmental record mean he is uniquely bad for young people, Pelosi said. “Donald Trump is the worst president of the United States for America’s children, the worst president America’s children have ever had,” she said.