As Donald Trump championed “drill, baby, drill” on the 2024 campaign trail, Republicans quietly coalesced around an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy—embracing fossil fuels, nuclear, geothermal, and, at least rhetorically, renewable sources such as wind and solar. As the growing share of renewable energy in deep red states showed, even anti-climate Republicans couldn’t forswear cheap renewable energy. Business was willing to ditch Trumpian rhetoric about the dangers of windmills for bottom-line logic: The economics of renewables—solar is the cheapest energy source in human history—spoke for itself. But Trump’s war on renewable energy since returning to office demonstrates the triumph of MAGA dogma over free-market principles. As the irrationality of the “Liberation Day” tariffs reveals, Trump won’t let what’s good for business get in his way this time.

Anything-but-renewables

The Trump administration has launched a full-throated war on renewable energy. From killing the residential solar industry to freezing billions earmarked for clean energy projects in low-income communities to crippling the Department of Energy’s ability to connect renewables to the grid, Trump 2.0 does not compromise.

This isn’t “all of the above,” it’s anything but renewables. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency, under the National Emergencies Act, explicitly defines ‘energy’ to exclude wind and solar. The Interior Department is fast-tracking permitting for all energy projects except wind and solar. The Republican-controlled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allows natural gas plants to leapfrog clean energy projects stuck in the permitting queue.

House Republicans recently passed a budget that would effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with its myriad clean-energy programs and incentives. They’re not just gutting the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits that formed the core of the IRA—credits that helped create over 330,000 jobs and catalyzed nearly half a trillion in private investment—Republicans are also axing grid modernization loans, energy efficiency programs, and electric vehicle (EV) rebates. If successful, repealing the IRA would decimate America’s nascent manufacturing renaissance, solidify China’s global green-tech dominance, and raise utility bills for American families.

As electricity demand rises, Republicans insist that only “reliable” energy—fossil fuel-powered plants that run 24/7 instead of “intermittent” renewable sources—can keep the lights on and the utility bills low. But solar, wind, and battery storage can and do meet demand affordably and reliably. It also ignores that Republican budget cuts will hamstring even non-intermittent clean energy technologies like nuclear and geothermal, the same tech Republicans have publicly endorsed. Unfortunately for Americans, this war on renewable energy comes with a higher cost.

Trump’s ‘clean coal’ policies purport to reinvigorate America’s coal industry but will only prolong the life of aging coal plants—99 percent of which are more costly to keep running than to replace with wind and solar. Trump recently issued executive orders promoting nuclear power. But many of the administration’s policies make building nuclear power more difficult, including cutting the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s budgets and limiting the latter’s traditional independence. Indeed, the budget that cleared the House last month requalified nuclear projects for tax credits but moved the start date to 2028, a timeline many nuclear projects cannot meet. Even natural gas, the only fossil fuel price competitive with renewable energy, can’t make up the slack. More investment in gas-fired power plants is unlikely to lower energy prices in the near term: Gas projects will take until at least 2030 to come online, and a massive backlog for new gas turbines stretches beyond 2029.

Of course, affordability was never really the point. The point is the MAGA worldview, where the wind never blows and the oil always flows.

MAGA Has Taken the Oil Pill

If Trump’s gutting of cutting-edge scientific research and persecuting corporations perceived as ideologically suspect didn’t alarm Washington, Trump’s on-and-off tariff policy seems to have broken through as ill-planned and doomed to fail.

Naïve as it was to claim to ‘reshore’ American manufacturing without an industrial policy (while gutting its predecessor’s), the administration has yet to lift tariffs on coffee, mangoes, and bananas—tropical crops that cannot be grown in the U.S. (Hawaii and Puerto Rico produce less than 1 percent of U.S. coffee demand.) Trump insists that tariff revenues are enough to obviate income taxes, and he simultaneously celebrates that tariffs will make imports unnecessary altogether. Both can’t be true.

Those with the most financial, ideological, and personal influence can, maybe, capture the president’s ear. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s 90-day tariff delay announced earlier this spring only happened because his Treasury and Commerce Secretaries ambushed the president while Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor and the administration’s most prominent booster of massive tariffs on every nation, had stepped out. They didn’t leave until Trump made the pause official on Truth Social.

The health of American industry now hinges on one’s informal and personal ties to the president, which doesn’t bode well for clean energy, especially since the president’s falling out with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The GOP is still, and has always been, the party of Big Oil. Trump’s tariffs may still harm long-term profits, but, notably, oil interests were one of the rare exceptions in Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Unfortunately, the logic behind Trump’s Fossil Fuels First strategy is the same as his tariff policy: there is none.

Fossil fuels are such a fundamental part of conservative identity that realism no longer applies.

As Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it: Climate change is “a side effect of building the modern world.” Trump recently posted a clip from the television show Landman, in which Billy Bob Thornton’s oilman character claims that pumping crude is too fundamental to the American way of life to stop: “We don’t do it ’cause we like it. We do it ’cause we run out of options.” But that’s precisely the lie. Trump and his movement drill because they like the war on renewable energy. despite having better options.

The MAGA agenda is irrational. Trump wants energy abundance but kneecaps the fastest-growing energy sector; he wants economic prosperity but imposes the greatest regressive tax in U.S. history. It’s a reflection of the modern conservative movement that has succumbed to far-right conspiracism, becoming so divorced from reality that not even a self-inflicted recession might check it.

Sabotage and Strategy

That’s precisely where Democrats can play their hand. There is an energy crisis: natural gas price volatility, climate-induced extreme weather, and the high cost of aging coal plants have created a perfect storm of rising energy prices. And Trump, Republicans, and their big oil donors are willfully exacerbating it by kneecapping clean energy. Democrats need a unified message that defends climate action as the response to the right’s economic sabotage.

While cheap solar and wind energy projects languish on the sidelines, Republicans are forcing Americans to pay more for dirty fuel. Keep it simple: Fossil fuels = higher prices; clean energy = lower prices.

But Democrats also need to counter the Republican agenda with a bold vision of the nation’s energy future, one of abundant clean supplies and good-paying union jobs.

If Democrats fail to act, they won’t just lose a net-zero-carbon future—they’ll lose the country to a movement that values ideology over prosperity and fantasy over fact.