Around this time two years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump seemed to recognize the political potency of energy prices as a campaign issue, which led the Republican to make some rather specific promises.
“We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,” he said in August 2024. Trump went on to claim, “We’re looking to cut them in half, and we think we’ll be able to do better … 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?”
In theory, it would have been quite good indeed. But this week, his presidency hit the 18-month mark, and it’s clear that he’s failed spectacularly to deliver on his promise.
From Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 to April 2026, the most recent month for which government data are available, residential electricity rates have risen by an eye-watering 18 percent. From April 2025 to April 2026, rates jumped by 7.3 percent, or about twice the rate of inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, for many consumers, there is not much relief in sight.
This does not include the increased costs consumers are facing in gasoline prices, which have also climbed during Trump’s 18-month second term.
In other words, as a candidate, the Republican said Americans could expect to see energy costs cut between 50% and 70% by July 2026. It’s now July 2026, and energy costs have gone up, not down.
That the president obviously failed to deliver on his unrealistic promises is itself notable, but what makes matters worse is how Trump has responded to his failure.
What I find remarkable is that, if he wanted to, he could plausibly make the case that rising consumer energy prices are not entirely his fault. But instead of presenting this borderline-credible defense, Trump has gone (perhaps unsurprisingly) in a more Trump-like direction and concocted an alternate reality he prefers to the truth.
“Electricity is down. It’s way down,” the president said last December. “You know, when the gasoline goes down and when the oil and oil and gas go down, the electricity comes down naturally. But it’s all coming down. It’s all coming down. It’s coming beautifully.”
It wasn’t true at the time. It’s even worse now.
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