Let me pull on my pessimist’s hat and advance the most scary hypothesis I can imagine that explains the current situation.
Please note that the following scenario assumes that what we are witnessing is deliberate and planned and that the people in Trump’s inner circle actually have a coherent objective they are working towards. (I desperately hope that I’m wrong on all counts.)
Here’s the thing: we are looking at an administration that is very clearly being operated on behalf of carbon extraction industries…
…Note that climate change denialism is a flag of convenience for the folks at the top. It’s a loyalty oath and a touchstone: they don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s very convenient to fervently preach it in public if you want to continue to turn a profit.
If you believe in anthropogenic climate change but dare not admit it, you cannot be seen to do anything obvious to remediate it. But there is one remediation tactic you can deploy deniably: genocide…
…I am going to posit that a foreign policy set by white supremacists in support of a carbon extraction regime is going to cleave to certain pseudo-scientific ideas, notably Social Darwinism (which isn’t Darwinian, isn’t social, and is fundamentally flawed as bad science) and Malthusianism (which has been used in the past as an excuse for tactics ranging from the innocuous–improving access to family planning and birth control–to the monstrous–conquest and genocide…
…So here’s what I expect to see if the alt-right get their way globally:
The obvious stuff (the agenda dictated by the fourteen signs of fascism) is a distraction The real plan, in the short term, is to maximize the liquidation of capital investments in the carbon bubble on behalf of the principal shareholders Once the carbon bubble has deflated, the angry and impoverished citizens of the first world will be pointed at a convenient scapegoat--foreigners overseas A clampdown/shutdown on most international travel will ensue (hint: there's a reason Bannon et al hate the EU, and it's not economic: it's all to do with the bit about freedom of movement) Tighter controls on "immigration", enforced out of sight by killer drones, will replace relatively permeable frontiers with exclusion zones enforced by bullets and bombs Climate-change induced famine will replicate the intent of Hitler's "hunger plan", without the need for hands-on involvement by Western soldiers who might be traumatized by the requirement to shoot the surviving "living skeletons" A systematic genocide of the Middle East and the Islamic world (hint: that's where the eliminationist rhetoric of the islamphobes leads if you follow it to its logical conclusion) will reduce Earth's human population by up to 30%: other culls elsewhere will be enforced by containment of would-be migrants and the primary tool of murder will be famine and lethal heat waves. This will be presented to the citizens of the west as a "solution" to anthropogenic climate change for which they should be grateful, and framed as defending us from hordes of dark-skinned alien terrorists and asylum seekers who want to come to our lands and out-breed us and convert us to their weird and scary way of life and enslave our women (and you know the rest of this dismal litany of racism already, so I'll stop here).
Yes, out there as a worst case scenario, but even going partway there is horrific…