And They Call This 'Journalism'

The New York Times is, as Andrew Klavan often jokes, a "former newspaper."

I think he is actually being generous. The Times, as Ashley Rindsberg outlined in his excellent book The Gray Lady Winked, has been manipulating its readers for a century. Still, Klavan's point is that the Times purports to be a "news" organization, but when it comes to stories that are politically charged, it serves more as an advocacy organization that promotes propaganda. 

Breaking News: President Trump threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars, gutting one of the country’s most significant efforts to address climate change. https://t.co/0eVJtCp9WZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 3, 2025

When I saw this story's headline about Trump's reforms of the CAFE standards, I almost guffawed at the idea that the Times was presenting it as "news" rather than a thinly veiled Op/Ed. It presents the Trump administration's reasoning for the reforms as if they were ridiculous, assumes that Biden's claims about the economic viability of electric vehicles were self-evidently true, and ignores the devastation that Biden-era policies have caused to the auto industry. 

Biden infamously promoted his EV push by driving an electric Hummer. This vehicle has been a flop, as almost all electric vehicles have been for American auto manufacturers, save Tesla. Billions of dollars have been thrown into a black hole, and profitability is nothing but a future dream. 

Yet here is how Trump's reforms were framed:

President Trump on Wednesday threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars, gutting one of the country’s most significant efforts to address climate change and thrusting the automobile industry into greater uncertainty.

Flanked by executives from major automakers in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said the Transportation Department would significantly weaken fuel efficiency requirements for tens of millions of new cars and light trucks. The administration claimed the changes would save Americans $109 billion over five years and shave $1,000 off the average cost of a new car.

The Biden administration’s stricter efficiency standards were designed to get more Americans to go electric. But Mr. Trump said they “forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse. This is a green new scam, and people were paying too much for a car that didn’t work as well.”

"Gutting." 

The announcement on Wednesday was the second part of a one-two punch against policies promoting electric cars, a central pillar of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s strategy for fighting climate change.

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and Mr. Biden had adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to reducing these emissions. He offered tax credits to encourage motorists to buy electric cars while requiring that automakers meet stringent fuel efficiency standards to pressure them to sell more nonpolluting models.

Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress got rid of the tax credits earlier this year. They also eliminated fines for automakers who violate the fuel efficiency standards. And now the standards themselves will be watered down.

While auto executives publicly praised the announcement, they have privately fretted that they are being buffeted by conflicting federal policies. During the Biden administration, they invested billions of dollars and reoriented their manufacturing to produce electric vehicles and batteries.

It's all about the carbon, of course. There is essentially no discussion about whether Trump's claims that Americans are paying too much for cars because of EV policies, or whether US automakers' profitability is improved or reduced by either Biden's or Trump's policies. Biden, after all, made claims that EVs would do more than reduce carbon emissions (a claim that ignores full life cycle calculations that may challenge that claim), but also that the shift would help revitalize the auto industry. 

Perhaps examining that claim would add important context to the story. 

The Biden administration rule, finalized in June 2024, assumed that manufacturers would comply by increasing their sales of electric vehicles, which use no gasoline and would help boost the average fuel efficiency across their product lines. Biden administration officials estimated that the rule would lower fuel costs by $23 billion while preventing more than 710 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by 2050, the equivalent of taking 165 million cars off the roads for one year.

Mr. Trump, who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” initially promised to repeal the rules to end what he falsely called an “E.V. mandate.” But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he was motivated to weaken the rules in order to lower the price of new cars. The cost of living has emerged as major concern for voters and a political vulnerability for the president and his party.

“Perhaps grudgingly, the president is increasingly realizing that inflation, affordability, the economy are real concerns across the partisan spectrum,” said Barry Rabe, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.

"Perhaps grudgingly." "Realizing." Notice the assumptions about Trump's indifference up to now about affordability. 

Mr. Trump has aggressively repealed dozens of federal climate protections. The rollback of automobile standards comes as the administration is also lifting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil and gas wells while making it easier for fossil fuel companies to extract and burn more coal, oil and gas, the main drivers of climate change.

Every decision in the world is put into the context of climate change, of course. 

Environmentalists said repealing mileage standards would debilitate efforts in the United States to fight climate change. They also challenged the president's claim that the proposal would lower costs, noting that the efficiency standards have spurred automakers to produce cars that use less gas, saving people money at the pump.

Gutting the program would “make cars burn more gas and American families burn more cash,” Katherine García, the director of the Clean Transportation for All program at the Sierra Club, said in a statement. ... 

Antonio M. Bento, an economics professor at the University of Southern California, said the $109 billion in savings claimed by the Trump administration was smoke and mirrors. “What the administration is doing is not calculating huge benefits that come from fuel economy savings,” Mr. Bento said. The Trump administration also has stopped calculating the damages from global warming that could result from weaker standards.

“If you count only costs, of course you’re going to have this massive number,” Mr. Bento said.

As you can see, the entire story is framed as Trump's very questionable claims vs a series of "experts" who spend their time debunking them. 

Nowhere is there an effort to find anybody outside the Trump administration who supports the move. Even though automakers themselves applauded the move, all those quotes were cast into doubt by anonymous claims that automakers are skeptical. 

If that were true, then these reforms would not change their behavior, of course. They are free to implement the Biden regulations voluntarily, after all. But of course, they will not, because EVs are not profitable for them. In fact, Ford got out of the car business for the most part because they couldn't make a profit on them, which is why they dropped almost everything but SUVs and trucks, which have different CAFE regulations. 

That's why there are no Tauruses and Fusions anymore. They make one car: the Mustang, which is a specialty vehicle. They ceded the market because it was unprofitable under regulatory constraints. 

This story was not intended to inform; it used information as a tool to persuade, and it works on its intended audience, which is why its audience is shrinking, and why liberals and conservatives live in different universes. If you only get a distorted view of reality, people who have a different perspective look deluded or malign. 

That is the point. 

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