Former President Donald Trump’s big economic speech on Thursday was low energy in more ways than one. Among other things, he intoned to the audience at the Economic Club of New York that his plan would “cut energy prices in half, or more than that, within 12 months of taking office.” If history is any guide, that would portend a cataclysm in 2025 for either the US consumer or its oil industry. Most likely both.

When it comes to energy costs, gasoline figures largest in Americans’ minds and wallets. There is a persistent meme that gasoline prices today are much higher than when Trump left office, callously forgetting the crowded mortuaries and empty roads that characterized 2020. For all its studied ignorance, it does get at an important point about sudden drops in pump prices. Here’s how those have changed, year over year, back to the early 1990s. Notice anything about the periods when prices were cut bigly?

Ever ambitious, Trump’s pledge extends to all energy costs, which would include utility bills. Let’s gloss over the fact that a large share of the latter relates to relatively fixed charges for investment in networks rather than the cost of fuels to generate electricity. Let us also note that, with benchmark natural gas prices already close to $2 per million BTU, dropping them much further looks highly unrealistic, as well as detrimental to the economic welfare of a certain type of donor and voter in Texas (and Pennsylvania for that matter).

Still, for the sake of completeness, here’s the year-over-year change in per capita energy expenditures going all the way back to when Trump was a teenager and a very different sort of Republican, former President Dwight Eisenhower, was in the Oval Office.

We have seen these sorts of pledges from White House aspirants before, most recently from Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida during his failed attempt to out-Trump Trump. Trump also has a history of particularly outlandish energy-related claims (my personal favorite remains his claim that covering a border wall with solar panels would somehow fund its gargantuan cost). Still, Trump’s pledge to cut energy prices, however vacuous, is a useful way of reviving the theme of inflation that is a key contributor to voter discontent with the current administration.

Presidents, relatively powerless to shape energy prices, are best to concern themselves with ensuring that Americans have options to limit their exposure to volatile energy costs (including externalities like carbon emissions). That includes things like fostering efficiency or alternative technologies such as electric vehicles and heat pumps. Somehow, I suspect Trump will instead stick with his 50% pledge, however detached from reality or economic wellbeing.