January 20 marked the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Like previous presidents, the Trump White House will be measured by how well the president has fulfilled his campaign promises. We’ve already seen headlines that so far the president has failed to cut our grocery bills, one of candidate Trump’s earliest promises. Now, there is another campaign promise that he has missed by a wide mark.
Here’s Trump in his own words: “I will cut the price of energy and electricity in half,” he said at one rally in Detroit in October 2024. “12 months from January 20, your electric bill, including cars, air conditioning, heaters, everything, the total electric bill will be 50, 5-0 per cent, less.” Trump told voters at a separate event that “your energy bill within 12 months will be cut in half. That’s my pledge, all over the country.”
Instead, prices have continued upward. Federal data show U.S. electricity prices increased by 11% from January through September 2025, with the average household electricity bill in the U.S. 6.7% more expensive for all of 2025. This has placed additional strain on Americans’ personal finances.
Since 2020, electricity prices have risen by over 30%, outpacing the general rate of inflation. So it’s not just under Donald Trump that utility prices have soared, it happened also under his predecessor, President Joe Biden. But Trump was the one who promised us the moon and left us with a grain of sand. And prices are projected to continue their upward trajectory through 2026.
Different locations hit harder than others
The utility rates have increased more in some parts of the country than others. Washington D.C. has experienced the biggest increase, a 23% jump in electricity costs, followed by Indiana with a 17% increase, and then Illinois, a 15% rise. For more than a third of all Americans, electricity bills are now a “major” source of stress, polling has found, with colder-than-expected temperatures this winter pushing up heating bills by 9.2% on average last year. The average household will pay $995 on heating this winter, as families struggle with electricity prices that are the highest in a decade, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA).
On top of soaring electricity bills, U.S. households have also been confronted by rising home gas heating prices, which have jumped 5.2% on average in the past year, according to the Energy Information Administration. That has resulted in a surge in utility disconnections for unpaid bills across many states, with some households going without other essentials in order to keep the lights on. In New York, the rate of disconnections rose fivefold from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, energy affordability has become a top concern for American families and businesses, replacing groceries as the number one household worry. A recent poll conducted by Ipsos found that 73% of U.S. residents were concerned about their electricity and gas bills rising this year, and 80% of Americans admitted they feel powerless over how much they are charged by the utility companies. Now wonder some 68% of American adults describe the U.S. economy these days as “poor,” while 32% say it’s “good.”
Trump makes it harder for poor and working class Americans
While energy bills keep climbing, more lower and middle-income Americans have been hit with a double whammy: the Trump White House has slashed federal assistance and eliminated tax credits to help needy Americans with their energy essentials. That includes killing programs for home energy efficiency upgrades, and also attempting to scrap the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that helps more than six million low-income households pay their energy bills. LIHEAP still survives (for now), but it has been significantly obstructed after the Trump administration laid off the entire LIHEAP staff. The cuts have caused unprecedented delays in getting energy assistance aid to low-income households.
Meanwhile, Trump has claimed that his seizing of Venezuela’s oilfields will help drive down the cost of gas and electricity for U.S. consumers. Instead of “drill, baby, drill,” this is “take, baby, take.” But that doesn’t make sense, the U.S. already is the world's largest producer of oil by a significant margin. This is not a “more oil will solve it” type of problem. Trump has also killed programs designed to increase the use of renewable energy and reduce America’s use of oil, including killing funding for research and halting construction of five windfarms and other renewable projects that were set to provide electricity for tens of millions of American homes.
Trump is also aggressively supporting the rise of the artificial intelligence industry for national security reasons in America’s ongoing competition with China. But AI uses huge amounts of electricity for all the gargantuan data centers and server farms, which is having the effect of raising U.S. electricity demand for the first time in decades. Recently, PJM, the grid operator covering 13 mid-Atlantic and midwest states as well as the District of Columbia, called data centers the “primary reason” for the increased price of power.
Does Trump deserve all the blame?
No question, Donald Trump broke his campaign promise and has not come anywhere close to reducing utility bills by 50%. But the story gets more complex and interesting, the deeper you dig. That’s because electricity prices are especially high in traditionally Democratic/Blue states.
According to the business-friendly Institute for Energy Research, 86% of states with electricity prices above the national average are blue-voting states. In contrast, 80% of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices are reliably red GOP states. In California, for example, electricity rates are the highest in the nation among the Lower 48. The Golden State’s rates are more than double the national average.
Governor Gavin Newsom and California’s state legislature have embraced numerous policies that have increased electricity rates. These include renewable mandates, cost-shifting for homeowners with solar panels (net metering), and electric car charging subsidies. But another giant cost has resulted from damage from wildfires. Some of the most dangerous fires were caused by corrupt and incompetent utilities like PG&E, yet the state has allowed these utilities to jack up power rates to avoid bankruptcy from liability lawsuits. California ratepayers are covering for PG&E’s massive blunders, which has resulted in many deaths and billions in property damage, even as PG&E has made record profits of $2.5 billion for the last two years. In 2024 alone, California state regulators agreed to six separate rate increases.
On the one hand, you could say that California’s climate policies have allowed it to be a national leader, second in the nation in total electricity generation from renewable resources and leading the country in solar generation from utilities, with solar energy providing 32% of the state's total electricity generation. On the other hand, while originally this looked like climate leadership, as the federal government under Trump abandons renewables and climate change mitigation, and more states follow the federal lead, California ratepayers are increasingly paying a high price for shouldering more than their share of climate change mitigation. California ratepayers are understandably feeling abandoned by Governor Newsom.
With Donald Trump marking Year One of his second administration, many Americans are feeling frustrated and deserted by his policies. But with the next November election for picking the U.S. Congress fast approaching, will voters see the Democrats as enough of an alternative?
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote, and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.