Rahm Emanuel Blames Trump for Expensive Electricity, While Ignoring the Real Culprit: Him
Rahm Emanuel has a message for you: your electric bill went up, and somehow it’s Donald Trump’s fault.
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Rising Electricity Price? Thank Trump,” the former Obama chief of staff does what Washington Democrats do best, rewrite history. He claims that cutting Biden’s green-energy subsidies through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act caused electricity prices to rise. But the facts, and basic economics, say the opposite.
When he was Mayor of Chicago, Emanuel proposed in 2012 that the city negotiate a surcharge on customers’ electricity bills to pay for his renewable energy and efficiency initiatives. In other words, he planned to add a fee to resident power bills to fund his climate agenda. The same man who now feigns outrage over rising costs literally tried to make electricity more expensive for working families to bankroll his green vanity projects.
Rahm Emanuel lecturing anyone about affordability is like an arsonist complaining about the cost of fire insurance.
Let’s start with the obvious: prices were already soaring under Biden. Between 2021 and 2024, residential electricity rates jumped nearly 30%, according to the Energy Information Administration. That happened while Rahm’s friends were showering hundreds of billions in subsidies, tax credits, and loans on the green energy industry. If handouts were supposed to make power cheaper, they failed spectacularly.
The truth is, Biden’s energy policies built the inflationary bonfire, and Trump is now cleaning up the mess. Our 2025 Energy Affordability Report showed that states most reliant on wind and solar saw the steepest increases in electricity prices over the last decade, while energy-diverse, fossil-fuel-friendly states kept power affordable. Why? Because intermittent, subsidized sources drive up transmission costs and grid instability. Consumers end up paying for both the unreliable “green” supply and the reliable backup that keeps the lights on.
Emanuel now cries foul because Trump ended the gravy train. But what he calls “cutting supply” is really ending corporate welfare for an industry that couldn’t survive without it. That $500 billion Rahm mourns isn’t investment—it’s redistribution from working families to well-connected developers. The real solution isn’t pouring more taxpayer money into politically favored technologies; it’s unleashing American energy across the board.
He also praises China’s “all-of-the-above” energy policy, but let’s be clear: America doesn’t need to copy communist central planning to meet its energy needs. The United States has abundant natural gas, coal, and oil reserves ready to power our grid affordably—if only blue states like California and New York would stop blocking pipelines and new generation.
This administration is doing exactly what energy workers have begged Washington to do for years: streamline permitting, reopen domestic resource development, and prioritize reliability over ideology. That’s how you lower prices, not through “Ratepayer Bills of Rights” that sound like populism but read like another Green New Deal.
Rahm Emanuel helped design the same subsidy-driven system that made energy unaffordable in the first place. Now he wants voters to forget. But Americans remember the $700 monthly utility bills, the rolling blackouts, and the condescending lectures about “net zero.”
The bottom line: Trump’s energy agenda is working to restore affordability, reliability, and sanity. And if Rahm Emanuel is mad about that, it’s only because his friends lost their taxpayer-funded cash cow.
At Power The Future, we’ll keep standing with the men and women who actually produce the energy—not the politicians who profit from pretending they can control it.
October 30, 2025