Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump Rocked Energy in 2018, But Next Year Could Be Wilder

From tweets to trade wars, he has found new ways to disrupt the market, and he’ll have even more incentive in 2019.

December 21, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

President Donald Trump disrupted the oil market in 2018. Expect more of the same in 2019.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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President Donald Trump’s love of coal, rejection of climate science and disdain for things like fuel efficiency hark back to a smokier, smudgier era. Yet if this year has shown anything, he is one of the biggest disruptors in energy. He just does a different kind of disruption.

In a prescient essay published late last year, Jason Bordoff, founder of the Center on Global Energy Policy, wrote that Trump’s energy-specific policies would have less of an impact than his broader shifts in foreign and domestic policy. One look at the minimal impact of efforts to revive coal mining suggests Bordoff was on to something. When it comes to Trump and energy, macro trumps micro.