At first it seems a bit unreal but think through the scenario if electricity cannot be restored within a month or two.
Rural areas would be better off that is until the people in the Urban areas started flooding in escaping the cities.
Rioting, Hoarding, looting would be rampant. Gasoline would be hard to come by (Pumps don't work without electricity) Hospitals would be mini disaster areas without electricity. There is no way they all have emergency generators to meet the needs of all the electrical systems. Imagine just losing the electrical monitors that send alarms to the nurses. You would lose lots more people just tot he fact that alarms wouldn't go off to alert nurses about needed emergency aide.
Grocery stiores would not be able to keep meat, or dairy, or produce for long. Our whole supply and demand system would go completely out of whack. Factories could not can food or package it. Yeah eventually stuff could be reverted to hand labor but it would take months.
So unless the effects of the EMP could be fixed in a few weeks I venture that lots of people in the USA would be starving inside of 6-7 weeks! (Supposedly there is only one month of food on average available in the USA at any given time.)
It could be done in a much lower-tech way. I don’t think I am giving them any ideas they haven’t thought of but: One man with a .22 or AK could destroy most of the transformers in a typical substation in seconds.
They have almost no security. Most of the ones around here only have a chainlink fence for security. They wouldn’t even need to dismount their ride. If a coordinated assault in the middle of a hot August night happened .......a chain of overload failures could occur like we have never seen.
It would take months to manufacture and replace all those cans!
Eat the ice cream first!!!