Trump promised to cut energy costs in half in the first year, but raised them instead

WASHINGTON – When President Donald Trump visits Texas on Friday afternoon to boast about his energy policies, he may want to sidestep the promise candidate Donald Trump made on energy when seeking to return to the White House.

“Energy costs, everything, air conditioning, heating, everything, including gasoline, will drop more than 50% in the first 12 months,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in August 2024.

“Under Trump’s economic plan, we will cut energy prices in half,” he said the following month in North Carolina. “Look at it, you can get really mad at me if we don’t do it.”

Those who downgraded it are probably angry, if not enraged. Trump has completely failed to deliver on what was clearly, even at the time, a wild promise. No energy-related commodities, including those Trump specifically mentioned during the campaign, cost half as much as they did a year ago, according to a News themezone analysis of federal data.

Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant who conducts focus groups on Trump voters, said his failure to reduce energy costs is just one reason many of them have become disenchanted with him.

“It’s food, health care, child care, energy, education, housing, etc. Voters talk about all of them,” he said. “It was the number one problem Trump was hired to solve, and voters not only think he’s failing, they think he’s not prioritizing the problem.”

Electricity costs have risen more than 7% since Trump took office through last month, according to figures compiled by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Heating oil was slightly higher, up half a percentage point, while natural gas was a whopping 87% more expensive year over year.

Overall, the Federal Reserve’s “domestic energy” price index rose 6.6%.

“He lied,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said of Trump. “Besides, this is not something presidents can do. He knows that.”

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Trump’s White House staff did not respond to News themezone’s questions about Trump’s broken promise on energy pricing. Instead, White House spokesman Taylor Rogers falsely claimed that energy costs were falling and attacked the policies of Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.

“Unfortunately, left-wing governors and legislatures in Democratic states are still doubling down on Joe Biden’s failed and costly ‘New Green Scam’ policies, which are inflating energy prices and hurting families. If these elected officials abandon their failed approach and adopt the president’s energy dominance agenda, their constituents would see lower costs too,” he said.

Trump himself, as he does on most issues, simply lies and claims that energy costs have gone down, as he did during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “No one can believe when they see the kind of numbers and especially the energy, when they see the energy come down to numbers like that,” he said, confusingly but disingenuously.

On Friday, Trump will be in the Corpus Christi oil export hub, part of what his advisers have touted as a tour to highlight the president’s supposed focus on affordability. The stop will also come just days before Texas holds its primary election, and much of Trump’s appearance could focus on promoting the Republican candidates he has endorsed.

Trump and his advisers and allies often point to the price of gasoline as evidence of his success, probably because it is the only energy product whose price has fallen during his first year in office and one that most Americans have reason to notice several times a week. According to federal data, gasoline prices have fallen 9.6% in the year since Trump took office, which many analysts attribute to the OPEC cartel increasing its crude oil production last year.

Even there, however, the decline in retail gas prices continued a long-term decline that began under Biden in late summer 2022. Over the past month, gas prices have begun to rise again, as they typically do each year after the winter holidays. The surge in recent weeks has already erased nearly half of the price decline in Trump’s first year.

“This is just a continuation of what was already happening,” said Matt Randolph, a veteran oil industry executive.

Economists also noted that oil is a global product, meaning even a drastic increase in domestic production wouldn’t change the price refiners pay for gasoline that much.

“Energy is traded in global markets. Therefore, reducing the cost of energy means you would have to add enough supply to drive down global prices. The United States is not big enough to do that,” Wolfers said. “But you know what would help? Allowing wind turbines to spin, harvesting solar energy, etc.”

Jason Furman, a leading economist in the Obama White House and now a professor at Harvard University, agreed that Trump’s destruction of wind and solar programs in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has driven up electricity prices. “Their big action was repealing IRA energy credits, which raised costs,” he said.