Former President Donald Trump frequently disparages electric vehicle charging stations on the campaign trail, exaggerating their weaknesses. At a rally in Florida last month, he said, “You don’t want to drive for 45 minutes and then stop for three hours.”
But Trump the businessman sees the charging station differently. At the same venue where he spoke — his golf resort in Doral, Florida — his company operates three recharging stalls and has offered the service since 2016, the year he won the presidency.
The Trump Organization also quietly makes charging stations available to customers at hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago, and at three condo buildings in Florida and New York, according to public data from the Department of Energy and PlugShare, a charger mapping service. The organization’s other properties do not offer chargers, according to the data.
The Trump-backed stations represent “a stark discrepancy, between Trump’s priorities in having EV infrastructure, and his connections to oil and gas,” said Katherine Garcia, the director of clean transportation at the Sierra Club.
Trump is in the unique spot of being a provider of charging stations who also, if reelected president, would be in a position to dramatically slow America’s adoption of them by guiding federal funding.
On the campaign trail, Trump has focused on ending what he terms President Joe Biden’s EV “mandate,” referring to EPA emission regulations that effectively would spur automakers to produce rising numbers of electric cars, even though there is no direct requirement to do so. In recent weeks, he has shifted his rhetoric to say he supports EVs generally, but wants the market to drive their use.
Luxury travelers are driving more and more EVs, and as a hotelier, Trump is obliged to service them. Yet EV chargers, and the administration’s efforts to fund them, remain a focus of Trump attacks.
Tom Pyle, head of the right-leaning American Energy Alliance and a former member of Trump’s 2016 transition team, said the gap between the former president’s message and practice makes sense.
“I think what the president is trying to do is show the folly of this agenda to force EVs into the market place through subsidies, through regulations, through mandates,” Pyle said. But he added, “If you’re in the luxury resort business and you’re not being responsive to your customers, then you’re not a very good businessman.”
The Trump Organization did not reply to a request for comment. Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said the ex-president “has consistently said he’s not against electric vehicles, he just wants consumers to have a choice.”
Hating on the station
While charging stations at Trump’s hotels were installed before Biden-backed incentives came into effect, a U.S. network would rely heavily on federal funding.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law offered $7.5 billion to build fast-charging stations on highways and to fund local build-outs. Also, the Inflation Reduction Act included a tax break for businesses that install charging stations.
EV advocates fear that a second Trump administration could thwart the rollout by slow-walking the funding or changing the rules so fewer projects are eligible.
Trump could push a lot of EV benefits “to Europe and China by stopping the effort here,” said Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy, which studies EVs in the policy arena.
Trump’s shifting tone on EVs — which occurred after Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed him last month — has raised questions about whether he might be warming to the technology. In a conversation with Musk on X on Tuesday night, Trump told the Tesla CEO, “I love your product.”
But in some of the same speeches where Trump has praised Musk and EVs generally, the former president has continued to point out what he says are shortcomings of chargers. In Minnesota in late July, Trump said he loved electric cars before reiterating his usual reservations about spotty charging infrastructure. “Some people like to drive long distances,” he said in arguing that EVs are not for everyone.
Trump’s view of charging stations fits into his long-standing pattern of criticizing technologies that reduce emissions or lessen impact on the environment but might be inconvenient.
When he occupied the White House, he criticized energy-efficient windows as too small, claimed that water-saving dishwashers don’t get dishes clean and dismissed water-conserving shower heads because “if you’re like me, you can’t wash your beautiful hair properly.”
Trump’s EV charging attacks sometimes include claims that are not backed by evidence. At a rally in New Hampshire last November, he said that “you can’t get out of New Hampshire in an electric car.”
“Where are you going? ‘I’m going to Massachusetts.’ Well, you better get yourself a gas turbine because this car is not going to get you there. Well, you could, if you stop about four times now,” Trump said.
In reality, how often a traveler needs to stop to charge, and how far that charge takes the car, depends on the circumstances.
The plugs people use in their garages — and the type that exist at Trump’s hotels — refill a battery in roughly eight hours. Another kind of station commonly used on road trips, called direct-current fast charging, issues a torrent of electrons. Depending on the variety of charger and car, it can mostly recharge a battery in 15 to 45 minutes and enable a trip of up to 200 miles or more.
Service laggard
As Trump weighs in on the technology, his properties are falling behind in EV charging, which is evolving into a desirable amenity at many hotels.
A year ago, Hilton and Marriott, two of the country’s largest hotel chains, publicized their plans to install chargers at thousands of properties. The reason is clear: Hotel patrons are travelers, and the length of a hotel stay matches up neatly with the amount of time it takes for a garden-variety charging station to refill the EV’s battery.
“Having chargers is something that I would say is coming to be standard at a middle- to high-end property,” said Michael Krauthamer, a consultant who specializes in siting charging stations.
Compared to many other hotel chains, Trump’s EV charging plazas often have a low public profile. Unlike chargers at many other hotels, the ones at Trump’s properties in Las Vegas and Florida are nearly invisible to the public.
At the Doral golf resort and the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, the stations are kept in parking lots closed off to hotel patrons and accessible only by valets, according to front desk personnel. The chargers at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago are in a public area and people can plug in themselves.
The Trump condo buildings that offer chargers use them solely for residents’ private use. A search for “electric vehicle” on the Trump Organization’s website yields nothing.
The Chicago hotel has by far the largest charging plaza with 14 plug points. The Las Vegas hotel has eight, and the Doral resort, three. The Doral location is the only spot to have Tesla charging stations in the mix, according to multiple data sources. It is unclear whether the Trump Organization owns the charging stations or acts as host to another company that operates them.
Regardless of whether Trump wins in November — and whether or not he succeeds in denting the rise of the EV — his hotels will likely only get more pressure from his well-heeled customers to plug them in.
“Those who drive EVs live in a world where EV charging is relatively common,” Krauthamer said. “They see it at high-end shopping centers, they see it in their communities, they expect to see it in the places they patronize.”
