WASHINGTON – When President Donald Trump visits Texas Friday afternoon to brag about his energy policies, he may want to elide the promise candidate Donald Trump made about energy as he sought to return to the White House.
“Energy costs, all of it, air conditioning, heating, all of it, including gasoline, will drop by more than 50% within the first 12 months,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania in August 2024.
“Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half,” he said the next month in North Carolina. “Mark it down, you can get very angry at me if we don’t do it.”
Those who did mark it down are likely angry, if not enraged. Trump has completely failed to deliver on what clearly was, even at the time, an outlandish promise. Not a single energy-related commodity, including those Trump specifically mentioned during the campaign, costs half as much as it did a year ago, according to a HuffPost analysis of federal data.
Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant who conducts focus groups about Trump voters, said the failure to reduce energy costs is just one piece of why many of them have become disenchanted with him.
“It’s groceries, healthcare, childcare, energy, education, housing, et cetera. Voters talk about all of them,” she said. “It was the number one issue Trump was hired to fix and voters not only think he is failing, but also that he’s not prioritizing the issue.”
Electricity costs are up more than 7% from the time Trump took office through last month, according to figures compiled by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Heating oil was slightly higher, a half percentage point increase, while natural gas was a whopping 87% more expensive year over year.
Overall, the Fed’s “household energy” price index increased 6.6%.
“He lied,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said of Trump. “Also this isn’t something presidents can do. He knows this.”
Trump White House staff would not respond to HuffPost queries about Trump’s broken energy price promise. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers instead falsely stated that energy costs were coming down and attacked the policies of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.
“Unfortunately, left-wing governors and legislatures in blue states are still doubling down on Joe Biden’s failed and costly ‘Green New Scam’ policies, which are inflating energy prices and hurting families. If these elected officials abandon their failed approach and embrace the president’s energy dominance agenda, their constituents would see lower costs as well,” she said.
Trump himself, as he does on most topics, simply lies and claims that energy costs are down, as he did during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. “Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers and especially energy, when they see energy going down to numbers like that,” he said, confusingly but falsely.
On Friday, Trump is to be in the oil export hub of Corpus Christi, part of what his aides have hyped as a tour to highlight the president’s purported focus on affordability. The stop is also coming just days before Texas holds its primary elections, and much of Trump’s appearance could focus on hyping GOP candidates he has endorsed.
Trump and his aides and allies most often point to the price of gasoline as evidence of his success, likely because it is the only energy commodity that has decreased in price during his first year back in office and one that most Americans have reason to notice several times a week. According to the federal data, gasoline prices fell 9.6% in the year since Trump took office, which many analysts attribute to the OPEC cartel increasing its production of crude oil last year.
Even there, though, the decrease in retail gas prices continued a longer-term decline that started under Biden in the late summer of 2022. Over the past month, gas prices have started to increase again, as they typically do each year after the winter holidays. The increase in recent weeks has already erased nearly half of the price drop in Trump’s first year.
“This is just a continuance of what was already happening,” said Matt Randolph, a longtime oil industry executive.
Economists also pointed out that oil is a global commodity, meaning that even drastically increased domestic production would not change the price that gasoline refiners pay that much.
“Energy is traded on global markets. So reducing the cost of energy means that he would have to add enough supply to push down global prices. The U.S. isn’t big enough to do that,” Wolfers said. “But you know what would help? Allowing wind turbines to spin. Solar to be collected, et cetera.”
Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama White House and now a professor at Harvard University, agreed that Trump’s gutting of wind and solar programs in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has pushed electricity prices higher. “Their big action was repealing energy credits from IRA which raised costs,” he said.