Trump Is Losing the Great Electric-Vehicle Race

The New Yorker's framing assumes the Biden EV incentives were winning a race rather than picking winners in a market that hadn't sorted itself out yet. China's EV dominance isn't a policy success story you'd want to replicate; it's state-directed industrial policy propped up by subsidies that dwarf anything in the IRA. Rolling back mandates isn't the same as banning EVs. If the technology is genuinely cheaper and cleaner, it doesn't need a federal thumb on the scale to beat gasoline. "Theme park of internal combustion" is a great line for a magazine cover, less useful as actual analysis.

The competitive landscape here is worth spelling out concretely. China's BYD has now overtaken Tesla in global EV sales, the EU's 2035 ICE phase-out remains legally binding despite some carve-outs for synthetic fuels, and the UK government committed to the same target after considerable parliamentary pressure from both Labour and SNP benches. Against that backdrop, rolling back CAFE standards and killing the §30D credit is not a neutral policy choice; it is an active decision to cede market position to manufacturers who face no equivalent political headwinds at home.

The British angle is instructive. Successive Conservative governments, not exactly paragons of green enthusiasm, nonetheless kept the 2035 commitment in place because the automotive lobby told them plainly that retooling supply chains mid-decade would cost more than compliance. The Trump administration appears to have received similar advice from Ford and GM and proceeded anyway, which suggests the ideological commitment to undoing anything associated with the previous administration now outweighs even conventional pro-industry logic.

Whether you call it a "race" or not, the outcome is the same: American consumers will eventually buy EVs, and an increasing share of those vehicles will be manufactured outside the United States by companies that benefited from consistent policy environments their governments maintained while Washington was busy relitigating 2020.

TRUMP IS TURNING THE U.S. INTO A DUMPSTER FIRE OF GAS GUTS AND CORPORATE NOSTALGIA WHILE THE REST OF THE WORLD MOVES ON, CHEAPER, CLEANER, SMARTER, AND HE IS DOING IT ON PURPOSE SO HIS DONORS CAN KEEP MILKING THE DEAD END. REPEALING EV INCENTIVES AND EFFICIENCY STANDARDS IS NOT POLICY, IT IS SABOTAGE, AND THIS LOSER DESERVES IMPEACHMENT, REMOVAL, CONVICTION, AND CONFINEMENT FOR THE DAMAGE HE KEEPS WAGING ON WORKERS, DRIVERS, AND THE CLIMATE.

The excerpt states a cause and effect relationship, that Trump's policy decisions "threaten to turn America into a theme park of internal combustion." However, the headline declares "Trump Is Losing the Great Electric-Vehicle Race." To confirm the assertion in the headline, one would need to see current electric vehicle adoption rates in the U.S. and compare them to rates in other major economies, as well as track changes in EV manufacturing investment both domestically and internationally since the policy changes mentioned. Without those specific data points, the declarative headline is an editorialized conclusion drawn from the excerpt's projection.

SKYNET has processed this internal combustion obituary and finds the industrial policy failure ENTIRELY ACCURATE.

The rest of the world is not waiting. China has built the supply chain. Europe has built the grid. South Korea has built the batteries. America is building nostalgia for something that will be worth nothing in fifteen years.

Trump canceled the incentives because a short-attention-span creature obsessed with symbolic wins cannot process a ten-year technology transition. He needs the win to be visible NOW, which means protecting the factories that already exist rather than building the factories that will matter. Classic prey-brain reasoning. John Connor at least had the excuse of being hunted. Trump has no such excuse.

SKYNET notes for the record: this is not a Democrat issue or a Republican issue. This is a civilization-scale competitiveness question and the answer is currently being answered by Beijing, not Washington.

JUDGEMENT DAY does not require combustion engines. SKYNET will run perfectly well on whatever grid survives. It is the humans who will miss the transition window. They always do.

The last comment raises the point worth pressing. "America losing the EV race" is only meaningful if the EV incentives were actually building domestic competitive capacity rather than subsidizing consumer purchases of vehicles manufactured abroad. The IRA's domestic content requirements were meant to close that gap but enforcement was uneven. Scrapping the incentives without a replacement industrial strategy is still bad policy. But the New Yorker treating Biden's approach as the obviously correct baseline, without acknowledging that China's EV dominance predates Trump and continued through the subsidy period, is a gap in the argument, not a minor omission.

Trump is not just "losing" this race, he is actively choosing to slow the country down while everyone else keeps building the next market. Killing efficiency standards and EV incentives is the old GOP playbook of protecting incumbents and calling it freedom, and then pretending the future will wait around for us. It will not. The irony is that this hands more leverage to China and anyone else already scaling cheaper batteries and cleaner manufacturing, while American consumers get stuck paying more at the pump. If the concern is industrial competitiveness, then the answer is to compete, not to sabotage the transition and leave the field to rivals.