Last week’s reminder from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani seemed wholly unremarkable. As the city confronted an usually rough heat wave, the mayor published a July 1 post encouraging New Yorkers to set the air conditioners to 78 degrees, turn off electronics they’re not using and unplug as much as possible, all in the hopes of helping the power grid.

Plenty of officials in many states have said the same thing for the same reason in recent years. Nevertheless, to put it mildly, Republicans did not take Mamdani’s message well.

Failed presidential candidate Nikki Haley responded with a “welcome to socialism” message, despite the fact that she made similar recommendations as South Carolina’s governor. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas added, “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C,” apparently oblivious to his own home state having issued similar directives many times without incident. Fox News’ Jesse Watters told viewers, in reference to Mandani’s recommendations, “It’s a slippery slope; they’re going to say one-child policy next. This is how communism starts; they start rationing things.”

But that’s not the funny part. What took this story to a new level is what the Trump administration did. Talking Points Memo reported:

Of course, if the 78 degrees guidance sounds familiar, it’s because it is nothing new. Mayors Bill DeBlasio and Eric Adams also gave it, as did governor Kathy Hochul. 

And so did the federal Department of Energy. 

Or, at least, it did. Those web pages seem to have been deleted at some point in the last few days.

As recently as Thursday, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy had a website that recommended indoor temperatures of “between 75-78°F during the day … for energy efficiency.” A day later, after reporters started taking note of the disconnect between the GOP freakout and the Trump administration’s own guidance, the website disappeared.

To be sure, this might just be an extraordinary coincidence. Maybe this page on the DOE’s site was scrapped for entirely unrelated reasons.

But consider the brief timeline of events:

• July 1: Mamdani offered anodyne energy guidance.
• July 1: Prominent Republicans freaked out over the mayor’s anodyne energy guidance.
• July 2: Reporters started noticing that the Trump administration’s DOE offered similar recommendations to Mamdani.
• July 3: The relevant page of the DOE’s website was taken down.

It’s hardly unreasonable to think this wasn’t a coincidence.

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