He repeated it over and over again during his campaign and right up until his inauguration speech. “Drill, baby, drill!” », exclaimed Donald Trump once again on Monday. A slogan taken and taken up by the 47th President of the United States and his supporters.
More than a simple love of oil, a symbol of American expansion and success for over a century, Donald Trump repeats this slogan (which can be translated as “Fore, darling, drill”) as a leitmotif and a summary of his strategy: his “America Great Again” will involve black gold, and more generally fossil fuels.
“Oil exploration everywhere, even in protected areas”
“It is an expression which, in a few words, illustrates that the president will do oil exploration everywhere, even in protected zones, to achieve the energy independence that he advocates,” explained Valérie Beaudoin, researcher associated with the United States Observatory of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair to our Canadian colleagues from The Press this Monday.
A strategy which must not be limited to American territory, as evidenced by its threats on Greenland or its exhortation, made on January 3 on its Truth Social network to the United Kingdom, to resume oil exploration off its coast .
This position is in opposition to his predecessor Joe Biden, who on January 6 banned all new offshore hydrocarbon drilling over more than 2.5 million square kilometers, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific via the Gulf. of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska.
A Republican slogan from 2008
Promising to reverse this decision, the new president once again repeated his slogan, which has become a Trumpist reference to the point of being parodied or becoming the title of a song. In 2013, the phrase even became the title of a Polish documentary on shale gas extraction.
However, if the expression has entered everyday American language, it is not thanks to Donald Trump, who was not even at its origin. Indeed, this phrase was cited for the first time by Republican Michael Steele who made it his slogan during a party convention in 2008.
From “Drill, baby, drill” to “Spill, baby, spill”
Already at the time, “Drill, baby, drill” made noise and was widely commented on. In October of the same year, Rob Perks, campaign director of the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), an American environmental foundation, criticized the slogan and already found an alternative.
-“I doubt that most of those chanting ‘drill, baby, drill’ have thought about the potential consequences for their local coastline that could turn into ‘spill, baby, spill,’” explained then this expert on the foundation’s website.
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Citing Hurricane Ike which destroyed 52 oil platforms in the east of the country, he recalled that nearly 2 million liters of crude oil had spilled onto the American coasts, into the Gulf of Mexico, and into the bays of Louisiana and Texas.
Since then, with each oil disaster, opponents of “all oil” have repeated this new slogan to show the disastrous effects of oil spills and opposition to new energies, supposedly cleaner. A new slogan which created another, more evocative “Kill, baby, kill”.
