On November 14, the US Global Change Research Program released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which found that the United States is already experiencing the severe impacts of climate chaos, driven primarily by continued reliance on fossil fuels. One week later, the Financial Times reported that the Trump campaign is embracing what it calls Project 2025 — a 920-page conservative policy blueprint by the Heritage Foundation that, among other radical goals, urges the elimination of several energy department agencies and would overhaul the whole of the federal government to not only deny climate change but actively promote it.

Yet one would hardly know any of this reading coverage of the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination and betting markets’ most likely pick to be the forty-seventh president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The former president has spent the past month openly courting fossil fuel money and mocking the very idea of climate change, and this objectively delusional and potentially catastrophic posture has barely registered a blip in the American news media’s radar.

A survey of major media outlets from the past month shows that many — such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal — haven’t mentioned Trump’s recent anti-climate demagoguery at all. And the ones that have typically frame it in terms of subjective “vanilla versus chocolate ice cream” partisan preference or a minor “energy policy” news item.