The GOP nominee has made dubious claims about U.S. oil output, pipelines and Vice President Kamala Harris’ plans for fracking, experts say, ignoring some easy targets.

By Ben Lefebvre and Zack Colman

09/13/2024 06:20 PM EDT

Donald Trump’s jumble of claims about energy policy is muddling what could be a winning attack on one of Kamala Harris’ biggest potential vulnerabilities.

Instead of a disciplined focus on one or two themes — such as the Biden era’s record-high gasoline prices and Harris’ flip-flop on banning fracking — Trump has spent weeks rollicking from message to message on energy, false and otherwise. Those include exaggerating his own efforts to block construction of a Russian natural gas pipeline in Europe, as well as offering what analysts call a massively inflated claim about how much his policies could have boosted the United States’ already world-leading oil production.

Trump’s constant ping-ponging has shown up in his rallies, his speech on economic policy last week in New York, and Tuesday’s prime-time debate with Harris. At the debate, his flurry 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 flustered. It’s very difficult for him to actually prosecute a single 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 would have easy pickings on showing that the Biden administration has consistently been hostile to protecting — let alone promoting — domestic oil and gas production,” said the person, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

By skimming over so many issues, campaign strategists and industry executives say, Trump has missed a chance to shine a negative light on Harris, whose policy views are still unclear to many voters.

One theme Trump keeps hammering is a potentially important one in the swing state of Pennsylvania — his insistence that Harris would indeed ban fracking, despite her recent denials and the steep hurdles that any such effort would face in Congress. But he has also dredged up issues less close to home, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Russia had used to supply natural gas to the rest of Europe.

Trump and his supporters have maintained that he blocked Nord Stream 2 when he was president, but in fact it was all but completed by the time he left office in early 2021.

Trump did impose sanctions on the Russian pipeline, which President Joe Biden later waived in an attempt to smooth relations with Germany. Biden subsequently imposed new sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The pipeline was shut down after a still-mysterious explosion later that year.

On Tuesday, Trump contrasted Biden’s handling of Nord Stream 2 with the president’s decision to pull the permits for the long-debated Keystone XL pipeline in 2021, effectively killing the Canada-to-Texas oil project. That’s an effective argument, said Sam Buchan, a former official in Trump’s Energy Department and National Economic Council.

“I think President Trump [did] a good job of breaking it down that Keystone XL would have helped us, and Nord Stream 2 helps our enemy, and the Biden-Harris administration chose the wrong pipeline,” Buchan said in an interview.

More hyperbolically, Trump has contended that U.S. oil production would have been far higher than current levels if he had remained in the White House. He has made that claim at both the debate and during last week’s economics address.

“It would have been five times, four times, five times higher, because you’re talking about three and a half years ago,” Trump said Tuesday.

At the same time, he seemed to acknowledge that oil production has surged on Biden’s watch, though he contended that that gusher came in response to the record-high gasoline prices that hit motorists in mid-2022.

“[Biden and Harris] saw what happened to gasoline, so they said, let’s go back to Trump,” Trump said Tuesday. “But if she won the election, the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead.”

The Trump campaign defended his messaging.

“President Trump spoke more about reinvigorating our energy industry, restoring energy dominance, and bringing down energy costs more in 90 minutes than Kamala Harris has done in 43 months as Vice President,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an email after the debate. “Kamala is a radical environmentalist extremist who will implement her long-awaited promised ban on fracking on day one if she’s given the chance.”

For the most part, Harris hasn’t engaged with Trump’s energy remarks, aside from reiterating her pledge not to ban fracking — while not offering any detailed explanation of what made her change her mind.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, when she was competing with fellow Democrats for support from the party’s progressive wing, Harris said that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” But when pressed on her views now, both during the debate and in a CNN interview last month, Harris has pointed to comments she made in 2020 as Biden’s running mate, when she said that “Joe Biden will not end fracking.”

Those remarks from four years ago made it “very clear” that “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said during the debate, adding that “I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States.” The vice president does not have the power to impose such a ban — and neither, arguably, does the president.
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On Tuesday, Harris also promoted the more than $1 trillion that the Biden administration is investing in clean energy and infrastructure via a series of landmark laws, including the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the record-high oil and gas production taking place on Biden’s watch.

“We have to invest in diverse sources of energy to reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said Tuesday. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production because of an approach that recognizes we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.”

Trump failed to call Harris out on any of her potential vulnerabilities, said Ryan Bernstein, a public affairs strategist at McGuireWoods Consulting and former aide to North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven.

“Trump hasn’t been able to clearly articulate his position or her positions and, really, she’s been able to kind of define herself,” Bernstein said. “She probably covered what she needed to cover in Pennsylvania. He kind of glossed over her inconsistencies and cobbled together all of these other issues in one package, which didn’t really hit home.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s argument that he could have pushed U.S. oil production to as much as four or five times current levels has drawn eye rolls from market analysts.

There is no way the United States, already the world’s largest oil producer, could quadruple its output, said Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration adviser and founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Production that large would exceed OPEC’s.

“The U.S. tripled oil production over the last decade and a half, and today produces more than 20 percent of world supply,” Bordoff said in an email. “There is no scenario where oil production in the US could have grown so much faster over that period that output today would be quadruple its current level.”

That level of production, if even possible, would be enough to feed half the world’s oil demand and crash the market. The last time something like that happened — when Saudi Arabia and Russia in early 2020 boosted their oil output in a market war — oil prices crashed so hard that Trump asked Saudi Arabia and Russia to tighten their spigots to protect American oil companies from going bankrupt.

For all Trump’s talking points on fossil fuels, his lack of even one message on climate change may have hurt him among some of his past supporters.

During the debate, Trump didn’t respond to a question on how he would battle climate change, which is driven in large part by burning the same oil, gas and coal he wants to double down on producing. Instead, he talked about factories moving out of the United States and Hunter Biden’s legal travails.

“Trump is pretty consistent in that he’s, from my perspective, stuck in the 20th century,” said Larry Howe, a 68-year-old Plano, Texas-based volunteer with the environmental group Citizens Climate Lobby who said he was a lifelong conservative and had 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 swath of Alaskan wilderness where Biden has barred oil drilling contains more crude than anyplace else in the world.

Trump was off by a factor of at least 20 when he told Fox News after the debate that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is “the biggest oil site in the world.” The Biden administration closed off that 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 could be pumped out of 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 up for oil drillers, a January 2021 lease sale there flopped as few companies thought drilling in the remote wilderness was worth the money or reputational risk.