With the second term of Trump at the helm of the White House underway, the US president is seizing almost any opportunity to vigorously defend his policies, and that includes his personal war against electric cars.
A few days ago, Trump held a rally at the Red Rock Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and among many other things he criticized environmental policies that push for transport electrification, claiming that the US has infinite oil to keep using internal-combustion vehicles.
“You’re driving an electric car and they have a disease, you know?”
Among the reasons why electric cars are promoted as an alternative to combustion engines is resource scarcity: the oil from which gasoline and diesel are produced is not infinite. This has been clear for decades, yet Donald Trump has just asserted that the US has unlimited resources.
He said it during a rally held a few days ago in Las Vegas, USA. Since day one of his second term as US president, Trump has focused much of his efforts on fighting against electric cars.
In addition to scrapping public subsidies for purchasing these vehicles and proposing a special tax for these cars, he announced the dawn of a new era of oil, proposing to increase fossil-fuel production: “We are going to drill, baby, drill,” the politician said on the very day he returned to the White House.
More than a year and a half later, Trump has said that the US has so much oil that it is unnecessary to think about electric cars and that people prefer combustion vehicles: “We have a thousand years of gasoline, and that’s what people prefer.”
According to him, he has already done away with what he calls the “electric vehicle mandate” pushed by the Biden administration in the previous term. Now that the owner of Tesla, Elon Musk, is no longer part of the US government, he speaks about it openly, though he does not forget to throw a few affectionate words to his friend Elon: “You know, I ended the electric vehicle mandate. I don’t want to talk about it because Elon wasn’t exactly thrilled with me, but I had to do it. We love Elon.”
Trump explains that “he ‘ended it’ because that supposed mandate established “a very short period of time, like 20 or 30 years” for everyone to have an electric car, even though there was no way to charge it.”
And then, true to his style, he resorted to demeaning electric-car users: “Have you ever seen the signs? You’re driving an electric car and they have a disease, you know? It’s a disease. It’s like they get nervous. They’re driving and you realize the battery is running low, and they start thinking about it when it’s still at three quarters of capacity.”
Trump refers to the so-called range anxiety, which is what some electric-car drivers experience as they worry and continuously fret about range: “These people are crazy,” Trump comments.
Paradoxically, in that same speech, the US president said that he likes electric cars, but pointed out that barely 7% of cars sold in the United States are of this type, attempting to relegated them to a mere ceremonial role.
“The point is that we have unlimited resources. We have more gasoline and we have more oil and gas than any other country in the world. Now add Venezuela to that. Add Venezuela and we have 60% of the world’s oil and gas, including Venezuela. Think about it. What a great thing,” says Trump.
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