You won’t read or hear much about this in the mainstream media, but the United States of America has reversed a dangerous energy trend.

For decades we became more and more dependent on foreign oil. From the 1970s forward, we became increasingly dependent on the Middle East and unstable countries such as Venezuela for oil, the lifeblood of our advanced economy. This left us vulnerable to every ripple in the world’s most unstable regions.

Presidents from Bush 41 through Clinton, through Bush 43 and Obama never had an answer for this growing crisis. Some of them made it worse.

President Barack Obama certainly made it worse. He spent time traveling around the world apologizing for the alleged sins of America. He used the government bureaucracy to assail Americans private property rights and jobs. The EPA, the Bureau of the Interior and other federal agencies became weapons against the American dream. At the same time, President Obama subsidized green energy vanity projects like Solyndra, the now failed company that was supposed to promote solar energy at the expense of fossil fuels, which Obama hoped to bankrupt, starting with coal. Obama fought the Keystone XL Pipeline and opposed fracking, further signaling his hostility to progress in American energy. He also opposed lifting the oil export ban on U.S. oil, but allowed it as part of a bipartisan spending package in late 2015.

In 2011, gas prices under Obama soared to around $4 per gallon nationwide. This hurt the economy, and especially lower income Americans. Obama scolded Americans who believed increasing drilling would be an answer. In May 2011 at an energy forum, as gas prices continued to soar, Obama declared “We can’t just drill our way out of the problem. If we’re serious about addressing our energy problems, were going to have to do more than drill.” That was one of Obama's favorite false formulations anyone who disagrees with him just wasn't serious. It was equally arrogant, clever and hollow, with a dash of demagoguery.

Donald Trump is not Barack Obama. Trump strongly supported the Keystone XL. Years before his presidential run, Trump tweeted “Fracking will lead to American energy independence. With price of natural gas continuing to drop, we can be at a tremendous advantage.” Trump tweeted that on May 3, 2012. The contrast between Obama’s sullen, strategic defeatism and Trump’s optimism could not be more clear.

On May 26, 2016 in Billings, MT, Candidate Trump gave one of his most memorable statements when he said under his leadership, America would win and keep on winning. “We’re going to win. We’re going to win so much...We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.”

Now two and a half years into his term Trump has delivered a huge victory that was unthinkable under Obama. This summer, the United States shattered its previous record for daily oil drilling output. American producers topped 12 million barrels per day, with Texas producing 5 million of that. The oil finds in west Texas have led to a staggering boom town in Midland, Texas, where barbers can make six figures and hotel rooms that cost $100 a night now fetch nearly four times that price. North Dakota’s oil boom continues as well. Trump also approved the Keystone XL pipeline.

President Trump has had science on his side. Under his watch and encouragement, we have gotten better at finding oil to extract. Energy research firm Rystad recently estimated the United States now has 293 billion barrels of recoverable oil under our feet. That’s 20 billion more than Saudi Arabia, and 100 billion more than Russia our nearest competitors.

Engineering has improved too, as Mr. Trump has made sure the federal government no longer gets in the way of new extraction techniques. Both fracking and horizontal drilling have enabled American producers to recover more oil and natural gas than ever before. Natural gas has become so cheap that producers have practically started paying to have it taken to market. As China moves away from coal to natural gas, America is producing more of it and more cheaply, so naturally it will buy American energy at some point. A Texas firm recently finalized a deal to begin exporting natural gas – to Saudi Arabia.

The results are clear: The United States has found more oil and under this president we are bringing more of it out of the ground. The U.S. became a net oil exporter for the first time in decades in late 2018, and broke its own daily production record this year. Gas prices have settled to between $2 and $2.50 per gallon outside the high-tax blue states. This helps the whole American economy, and lower income Americans who spend proportionally more of their budgets on fuel benefit the most. The United States can now afford to shrug off Iran’s deranged bellicosity to some extent, and socialist Venezuela’s collapse is now a humanitarian issue but it is irrelevant to the world economy. The U.S. economy is also enjoying the longest expansion period in history. As in, ever.

Trump's oil boom shows no signs of slowing down. He has ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work with the Texas ports of Corpus Christi and Brownsville to deepen and improve them to accommodate larger ships, so they can move even more American oil to markets abroad. Trump also approved fracking in federal California lands that Obama had put off limits. That will probably mean even more American oil is found, and more will be extracted.

America is now winning the energy wars for the first time in decades. President Trump prophetically predicted this would happen, and as president he has done everything he could to make it happen. Our new energy dominance benefits Americans across the board, and it belongs to the producers in our oilfields and to President Donald J. Trump.

A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premiere millennial-owned communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, Anthony Scaramucci, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and many others. Find out more at publiuspr.com.