The Liar with the Red Cap - Trump’s Energy World: Promised Oil, Delivered Crises - a Political Style the AfD Copies

Donald Trump acted for a year as if he could flip the country with a switch: more oil, more gas, more drilling, fewer rules, fewer environmental standards. The great renaissance of the fossil world. Only very little of that promise remains. What he created instead is a political power move that is expensive, chaotic, and brings no advantage to ordinary households. The price of oil has fallen, but not because of Trump. Companies are producing somewhat more than before, but they owe that to their own technical improvements, not to the government. And despite all the talk of liquid gold, the industry is neither booming nor celebrating. It is struggling with Trump’s own tariffs, which make steel, aluminum, and every new drill hole more expensive. You cannot drill, drill, drill and at the same time drive up material prices. That is economic policy born of political helplessness, not of reason.

For the population it looks just as sobering. Gasoline prices are practically at the same level as a year ago. The bill Trump promised half price refueling was political show business, nothing more. And electricity prices are already rising in double digits, because Trump is keeping coal plants online that should actually be shut down, while at the same time canceling wind and solar projects that would provide cheaper electricity.

Lies can be scattered in all directions as Donald Trump demonstrated on November 12, 2024, when he promised that America would have the lowest energy costs of all industrialized nations.

Jobs? More than 158,000 lost positions in renewable energy, many of them in regions that take anything they can get. What is growing instead are tax benefits for oil and gas giants billions that now land in executive suites because Trump pushed through a law that is sold as an incentive program but, at its core, is nothing more than a gift to the fossil lobby. Companies like Devon, Occidental, or Cheniere are already counting millions in savings and it is precisely their executives who dutifully donated to Trump’s campaign committee. A cycle that explains itself.

The lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the least regulations that is how President Trump describes his offer to every major company and manufacturer in the world, tied to only one single condition. (September 2024) The same reality denying fairy tale world that the AfD has made the basis of its politics.

The climate damage, meanwhile, is barely measurable in numbers. Between 22 and 32 billion tons of additional emissions over the coming decades four times what the United States emits in a single year. Hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, billions in health care costs, higher energy prices for everyone. Trump calls that energy dominance. The numbers come from a model calculation by the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the most important environmental and health organizations in the United States. The EDF regularly produces comprehensive health and emissions analyses for political decision makers, and in this current assessment the experts calculate the long term consequences of the Trump administration’s fossil course: up to 340,000 additional premature deaths, around 490,000 additional hospital and emergency room visits, and economic damages of up to 6.7 trillion dollars in the coming decades. These magnitudes correspond exactly to the scenarios the EDF has used for years in its major health and climate reports.

In truth, this is a bill the entire country must pay for decades. While the UN climate meeting in Belém discussed how to stabilize the planet, Trump preferred to meet with the Saudi crown prince a man who has just as little interest in global climate goals as he does. The irony: Saudi Arabia is now trying to diversify its economy away from oil. Trump pretends it is the material of the future.

Anyone who looks at what Trump has caused in the United States sees a pattern that is already being repeated in Germany and by exactly those parties that claim to stand on the side of the little people. In reality they are copying a program that has already made electricity more expensive elsewhere, destroyed jobs, and harmed people’s health. Right wing politics always means braking instead of progress, dependency instead of security, slogans instead of solutions. And yet, it is astonishing how willingly these parties are supported by their own voters in every respect even when the consequences cut directly into their lives, as long as the war chest remains full. This is also shown by the latest poll in Germany from November 25, 2025:

In Germany the AfD sells this as saving the country. Yet its catalog would trigger the exact opposite. If fossil energy is kept artificially cheap, citizens pay the bill in the end with higher prices because every modern technology is blocked, and with dirtier air because old power plants are kept alive. If climate protection is dismissed as ideology, then not only pollutants rise but also doctor visits. This is not theory, it is happening in real time in the United States. And if future industries like wind, solar, batteries, or electric mobility are attacked, these industries disappear to where they are wanted to China, to India, to the United States. The pace is brutal, and Germany is already falling behind.

That is why one must ask the question many prefer to skip: What makes someone voluntarily vote for a party whose policies make their own life more expensive, more insecure, and more difficult? What is the incentive to trade one’s own future for a program that has been failing for years everywhere it has been tried? One does not vote against the system. One votes against one’s own apartment, against one’s own job, against one’s own health, against one’s family. The AfD talks about liberation. In reality, it delivers a package that devours prosperity and destroys opportunity. It is the same mixture as with Trump: grandiose, loud, angry and in the end exactly the people who expect help pay for it. The result is not new freedom, but a country that makes itself small.

In the end, one year of Trump policy remains that does not strengthen, but shocks. Industry is confused, the market is wobbling, families are paying more, nature and climate are being crushed while the government claims the opposite is happening. Trump wanted to make America an energy empire. What emerged is an expensive lie that does not benefit the population in the slightest and destroys.