Trump Administration Admits GOP Will Pay Political Price for Higher Energy Costs
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Washington, D.C. – Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the GOP would pay a political price for rising energy costs. Trump, Wright, and the Republican Party backed a bill to gut clean energy — hiking household utility bills by $170/year and taking critical energy offline as demand surges. Now, they’re scrambling to escape the consequences of their own actions.
Read more below on the Trump administration’s admission that it has politically damaged the Republican Party by backing a bill that hikes electricity rates on working Americans to benefit billionaires.
Iowa — Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he knows Republicans could suffer political pain for the electricity prices that are rising before next year’s midterm elections. But he hopes voters will know to blame the Democrats instead.
The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told POLITICO during a visit to wind- and corn-rich Iowa. Still, he said: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We’re going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Electricity prices at the end of July averaged 5.5 percent higher than a year earlier amid surging power demand.
Wright’s acknowledgment of economic reality offered a bit of a contrast to President Donald Trump’s relentlessly sunny proclamations about the nation under his watch, from Trump’s promises of a new “golden age” to his predictions that “we’re going to have the greatest economic boom in history.” Wright’s words also look ahead to one of the potential sleeper issues of the 2026 election, as the parties seek to own the message about how Trump’s effort to thwart the development of wind and solar power is affecting electricity customers’ wallets...
Some power industry leaders have also cautioned that aggressive efforts to restrict development of wind and solar energy could raise electricity prices at a time when demand is soaring.