Donald Trump’s jumble of claims about energy policy clouds what could be a successful attack on one of Kamala Harris’ biggest potential vulnerabilities.
Instead of a disciplined focus on one or two themes — such as the record-high gas prices of the Biden era and Harris’ flip-flop on banning fracking — Trump has spent weeks wandering from message to message on energy, false and otherwise. Those have included exaggerating his own efforts to block construction of a Russian natural gas pipeline in Europe, as well as making what analysts call a wildly inflated claim about how much his policies could have boosted the United States’ already world-leading oil production.
Trump’s constant ping-ponging is on display at his rallies, his economic policy speech in New York last week and Tuesday’s prime-time debate with Harris. During the debate, his barrage of messages took time away from what should have been his main focus on energy, said longtime Republican campaign strategist David Kochel, who is not advising the Trump campaign.
“It’s almost incoherent,” Kochel said. “In the debate, he was clearly upset. It’s very difficult for him to actually follow one strategy. He was just all over the place.”
An oil industry lawyer agreed, saying Trump’s discussion of energy was “meme-level.”
“A more coherent and disciplined messenger could easily demonstrate that the Biden administration has been consistently hostile to protecting — let alone promoting — domestic oil and gas production,” said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Campaign strategists and industry executives say that by skipping so many issues, Trump has missed an opportunity to cast Harris in a negative light. His policy vision remains unclear to many voters.
One theme Trump has been hammering home is a potentially major one in the swing state of Pennsylvania: his insistence that Harris ban fracking, despite her recent denials and the steep obstacles such an effort would face in Congress. But he has also brought up issues less close to home, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Russia used to deliver natural gas to the rest of Europe.
Trump and his supporters claim he blocked Nord Stream 2 while he was president, but in reality the project was already nearly completed when he left office in early 2021.
Trump imposed sanctions on the Russian pipeline, which President Joe Biden later lifted in an effort to improve relations with Germany. Biden then imposed new sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The pipeline was shut down later that year after a still-mysterious explosion.
On Tuesday, Trump contrasted Biden’s handling of Nord Stream 2 with the president’s decision to revoke permits for the long-discussed Keystone XL pipeline in 2021, effectively killing the Canada-to-Texas oil project. That’s an effective argument, said Sam Buchan, a former official at Trump’s Energy Department and the National Economic Council.
“I think President Trump [did] “A good job of laying it out: Keystone XL would have helped us, and Nord Stream 2 helps our enemy, and the Biden-Harris administration picked the wrong pipeline,” Buchan said in an interview.
Even more hyperbolically, Trump has claimed that U.S. oil production would have been much higher than current levels if he had remained in the White House. He made that claim during the debate and during last week’s economic speech.
“It would have been five times, four times, five times higher, because we’re talking about three and a half years ago,” Trump said Tuesday.
At the same time, he appeared to acknowledge that oil production has surged under Biden, though he claimed that boom was a response to the record-high gas prices motorists faced in mid-2022.
“[Biden and Harris] “They saw what happened to gasoline, so they said, let’s go back to Trump,” Trump said Tuesday. “But if she wins the election, the day after the election they will destroy our country again and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead.”
Trump’s campaign defended his message.
“President Trump talked more about revitalizing our energy sector, restoring energy dominance, and lowering energy costs in 90 minutes than Kamala Harris has in 43 months as vice president,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an email after the debate. “Kamala is a radical environmental extremist who will implement her long-awaited fracking ban on day one if given the chance.”
Harris has generally not addressed Trump’s energy comments, other than to reiterate her pledge not to ban fracking. Nor has she provided a detailed explanation of what changed her mind.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, when she was competing with her fellow party members for support from the party’s progressive wing, Harris said that “there’s no question that I support a ban on fracking.” But when asked about her positions now, both during the debate and in an interview with CNN last month, Harris pointed to comments she made as Biden’s running mate in 2020, when she said that “Joe Biden is not going to end fracking.”
Those comments four years ago made it “very clear” that “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said during the debate, adding that “I did not ban fracking as vice president of the United States.” The vice president does not have the power to impose such a ban — and neither does the president, one might argue.
On Tuesday, Harris also promoted the Biden administration’s more than $1 trillion investment in clean energy and infrastructure through a series of landmark laws, including the Inflation Reduction Act, and the record oil and gas production taking place under Biden’s administration.
“We need to invest in diverse energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Harris said Tuesday. “We’ve had the largest increase in domestic oil production because of an approach that recognizes that we can’t be too dependent on foreign oil.”
Trump failed to alert Harris to her potential vulnerabilities, said Ryan Bernstein, a public affairs strategist at McGuireWoods Consulting and former adviser to Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota.
“Trump hasn’t been able to clearly articulate his position or her positions, and she’s been able to kind of define herself,” Bernstein said. “She probably covered what she needed to cover in Pennsylvania. He kind of overlooked her inconsistencies and lumped all these other issues together, which didn’t really get through.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s argument that he could have increased US oil production by four or five times what it is now has drawn outraged looks from market analysts.
There is no way the United States, already the world’s largest oil producer, can quadruple its output, said Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to the Obama administration and founder of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Output that high would dwarf that of OPEC.
“The U.S. has tripled its oil production over the past 15 years and now produces more than 20 percent of the world’s supply,” Bordoff said in an email. “There is no scenario in which U.S. oil production could have grown so much faster over that period that output would be what it is today quadruple the current level.”
That level of production, if possible, would be enough to feed half of global oil demand and send the market into meltdown. The last time something like that happened — when Saudi Arabia and Russia ramped up oil production in a market war in early 2020 — oil prices crashed so hard that Trump asked Saudi Arabia and Russia to turn off their taps to protect U.S. oil companies from bankruptcy.
Despite all of Trump’s talk about fossil fuels, his failure to offer any messages on climate change may have hurt some of his former supporters.
During the debate, Trump did not respond to a question about how he would combat climate change, which is largely caused by burning the same oil, gas and coal he wants to double down on producing. Instead, he spoke about factories leaving the United States and Hunter Biden’s legal troubles.
“Trump is pretty consistent in the sense that, from my perspective, he’s stuck in the 20th century,” said Larry Howe, a 68-year-old volunteer from Plano, Texas, with the environmental group Citizens Climate Lobby who said he’s been a conservative his whole life and voted for Trump in 2016 — but will back Harris in November. “I feel betrayed by the Republican Party.”
The former president has also repeatedly claimed that a stretch of Alaskan wilderness where Biden has banned oil drilling contains more crude oil than anywhere else in the world.
Trump was wrong at least 20 times when he told Fox News after the debate that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is “the largest oil site in the world.” The Biden administration has closed the area to drilling in 2023, reversing Trump’s earlier decision to open it.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that ANWR contains between 4 billion and nearly 12 billion barrels of oil that can be pumped from the ground. That’s not even close to Saudi Arabia’s reported 267 billion barrels of deliverable oil, let alone Venezuela’s 303 billion barrels.
Even after the Trump administration opened ANWR to oil drillers, a lease sale in January 2021 fell through because few companies found drilling in the remote wilderness worthwhile, nor the risk of reputational damage.
