As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised voters that he’d slash consumers’ energy costs in half in his first year. “We’re looking to cut them in half, and we think we’ll be able to do better,” the Republican said in August 2024. He further claimed, “You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump. Have you heard of him? So we think your energy bills will be down by 50% to 70%. How good would that be?”
A year later, the president has obviously failed to deliver on his promise. In fact, consumers’ electricity prices have climbed considerably in 2025.
Trump has responded to his failure in predictable fashion. He has presented the public with another round of make-believe. Energy costs, the president claimed earlier this month, “are plummeting.” He pushed a similar line two weeks later, boasting that consumer costs are “tumbling down,” thanks in large part to his successes on energy policy. The president similarly told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “We’ve done so much. You know, energy is way down.”
While Trump frequently peddles an alternate reality in which his failures are billed as his triumphs, for many American households, the president’s lies are at odds with their personal crises.
The Associated Press reported last week, for example, that a growing number of Americans “are falling behind on paying their bills to keep on the lights and heat their homes.” The Washington Post published a related report this week:
Soaring electricity prices are triggering a wave of power shutoffs nationwide, leaving more Americans in the dark as unpaid bills pile up. Although there is no national count of electricity shutoffs, data from select utilities in 11 states show that disconnections have risen in at least eight of them since last year, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago, utility filings show. “So we think your energy bills will be down by 50% to 70%. How good would that be?” As for the near future, the Republican administration’s agenda on the issue is, at best, murky. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, told ABC News earlier this month, “Look, there are things the federal government can control. Local electricity prices are not one of them.” This week, however, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News, “I think you will soon see a stop in the rise of electricity prices. We’re going to achieve that, I think, hopefully in the first half of 2026.” Trump isn’t just failing to keep his promise. His team can’t even decide among themselves whether this is an issue they’re capable of addressing.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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