On her Substack over the weekend, Mary Trump, the good Trump (there had to be one), recalled the following word salad her uncle gurgled out on the 2024 campaign trail:
“Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half. Mark it down. And you can get very angry at me if we don’t do it. Within 12 months, your energy prices will be cut in half. My plan will cut energy prices in half, or more than that, within 12 months. We will cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months. And that means for your homes, too. I will cut your energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months of taking office. We are going to bring energy down by 50 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent within 12 months from January 20th, which is the day we go into office.”
This is relevant to us today on two levels. The first is the more obvious: He was lying out his know-you-what without any regard for whether these words would end up being true. They just sounded good at the time, so he said them. Fifty percent in a year. Whoopee. I continue to be amazed that anyone was stupid enough to believe this con man, but let’s ponder that question another day.
The second level is more interesting—and more damning not only of Trump but of the entire Republican Party and of conservatism generally, in this country and across the world, and not just in Trump’s second term, but for all time. And that is this: There is probably some way in which Trump actually believed he could lower energy prices; maybe not by 50 percent in a year, but lower them substantially and noticeably. Why would he believe this?
He believed it because conservatives believe stupid, simplistic things about how the capitalist economy works. They believe that if you just let the free market do its thing, wonders will arise and all will be well. They believe this first and foremost because their big-money donors believe it. But they also believe it because the economists—or more precisely, the economists they prefer to listen to—say so, and they must know what they’re talking about.
This all goes back to what the discipline refers to as “neoclassical” economics—the ideas propounded in the late 1800s by economists like Alfred Marshall about supply and demand. These economists said some really silly things, notably two: first, that people act independently on the basis of perfect information; second, that people are “rational actors” who will always act to maximize their economic advantage. They’re silly ideas because almost nobody has perfect information, and because people act emotionally far more than they act rationally.
In our time, the economics profession has undergone tremendous change for the better, and those neoclassical nostrums have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a new generation of economists who have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct (another neoclassical assertion) and that sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends.
Republican politicians didn’t get the memo. Nor did the American electorate. So, it’s very easy to tell people, for example, that you’re going to open up federal lands to more drilling, and there’ll be more oil, and prices will go down. That’s about as much economics as your average person remembers from high school, and it makes intuitive sense.
Trump himself is fool enough to think this. And indeed, to the extent that he promulgated an “energy policy” in 2024, it was just what I said above: drill, baby, drill.
So, what has happened? Well, we are drilling, baby, drilling. Yep—there’s a promise he kept! Permits to drill on federal and Native American lands are up 55 percent since Trump returned to office. His administration has also dramatically increased lease sales (auctions where the government gives a company the right to explore for oil or gas), covering 328,000 acres of public land (that’s a little more than the city of Los Angeles). Yet the price of gasoline is up; ditto diesel gasoline (above $6 a gallon for the first time ever), home heating oil, home electricity bills … pretty much everything. Why?
There are specific answers. Some have to do with Trump, others don’t. His tariffs have roiled world markets with confusion. His war on Iran, I think you know the dreadful effects of that. Non-Trump factors include things like these data centers (which Trump of course supports), which have caused a huge demand surge. Utilities are spending more and more on grid modernization, which is a good thing in general, but it means of course that they pass those costs onto consumers. Ukraine has launched a number of successful drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, and God bless ’em for that, but it does contribute to higher prices.
It could be those factors, it could be other factors. But here’s the point: The world is complicated, and there will always be any number of factors that will interfere with the old, simplistic neoclassical theory of supply and demand. That’s why we’re drilling like crazy and gasoline prices are higher. Because the world doesn’t work the way 10th grade economics—and GOP talking points—say it does.
In the midterm campaign, Democrats are understandably focused on attacking Trump for his lies and making these higher prices we’re paying all about him. That makes political sense. When the opposing party president is sitting at 33 percent in the polls, you tee off on him and make it all about him. Rarely does that president oblige by insisting on making it all about himself, but hey, so much the better.
But longer term, the Democrats need to do much more. It would be great if they nominated a presidential candidate in 2028 who had the guts and the rhetorical skill to indict not just Trump, but conservatism and traditional economics more generally. It’s not an accident that the last three (now four) GOP presidents have wrecked the economy: Bush, Bush, Trump, and Trump. It’s not a coincidence that the last five recessions, and seven of the last eight, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, have hit during Republican presidencies. Republicans screw up the economy, and they screw it up because they believe in economic fairy tales that fit on a bumper sticker and sound plausible to most people but that ignore the world’s deep complexity and irrationality, and the constancy of the reality that no one, not even a president of the United States, has perfect information.
Democrats can win the short-term battle by banging away at Trump. But to win the longer war—which includes not just getting elected, but governing in a way stands a chance of improving people’s lives—they need to go much bigger than one man.
