June 23, 2025 02:20 PM UTC

Trump Pulls Plug On Gabe Evans' Renewable Energy Lip Service

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Ever since the Republican trifecta in Washington, D.C. under President Donald Trump started work on their reconciliation budget package intended to jam though Trump’s agenda without a single Democratic vote, America’s Most Vulnerable Freshman™ Rep. Gabe Evans has walked a delicate tightrope between the interests of his swing congressional district and the historic cuts to institutional government programs like Medicaid and food assistance that tens of thousands of Coloradans Evans represents rely on as a matter of literal survival. The polls show Evans’ attempts to please these polar opposite interests is not going well, with Evans’ popularity sagging even more than Trump’s in a district that only narrowly elected both men last November.

Evans has made no attempt to soften the blow to Medicaid patients whose health coverage he voted to make more difficult to obtain and will result in thousands going uninsured. But on the issue of renewable energy tax credits, also slated for dramatic reductions in the “We’re All Going To Die Act” passed by the House, Evans belatedly attempted to skirt the blame for his vote by asking U.S. Senators to undo the cuts Evans himself cast a deciding vote to pass. Needless to say, Colorado’s Democratic Senators were already going to attempt exactly that, and Evans’ chance to take meaningful action to protect these tax credits was before he cast the deciding vote to eliminate them.

But then on Saturday, as the Moonie Times reports, Trump himself made a fool of Evans’ CYA strategy on the renewable energy tax credits he himself voted to kill, by instructing the GOP Senate majority to eliminate said credits with all-caps prejudice:

President Trump is urging congressional Republicans to fully repeal clean energy tax credits in his “big, beautiful bill,” taking conservatives’ side in an internal GOP conflict…

Fiscal conservatives have pushed to fully repeal the credits and quickly, while more centrist Republicans want to retain some of the tax breaks and phase others out over a slower period of time.

Mr. Trump decided to take a side Saturday, and he believes the credits need to go.

“I HATE ‘GREEN TAX CREDITS’ IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” the president posted on social media. “They are largely a giant SCAM.”

Mr. Trump said he would prefer the federal dollars being spent on the tax subsidies “be used somewhere else, including [deficit] reductions.”

“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world,” he said.

Gabe Evans, who recently made a big deal of touring the Vestas wind turbine nacelle factory in Brighton, knows that renewable energy technology is not “almost exclusively made in China,” and that this technology is neither “junk” nor ten times the cost of fossil fuels. All of these statements are absolute nonsense…

But for politically inexplicable reasons, the last person who can admit that it seems is Gabe Evans. This is the clearest example yet of Trump rewarding Evans’s canine loyalty with the shaft on an issue important to Evans’ political future, but not the first. After Evans joined another half-hearted letter from Latino Republicans asking the administration to maybe ease up on arrests on undocumented migrants with no criminal record, ICE doubled down on workplace and agriculture raids.

In 2024, Gabe Evans staked his political career on supporting Trump. But Trump apparently doesn’t care enough in return to make even a token attempt to help Gabe Evans. Perhaps Trump has already written off control of the House after the midterms, or maybe Gabe Evans was never important enough to be worth an actual policy concession to protect?

Either way, Trump just left Gabe Evans to publicly twist in the wind.