Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Problems

ExxonMobil stock price: Source: CNBC

If Republicans do implode as badly next Tuesday as the current polls suggest, there will be two main reasons. One is Trump’s epic corruption, which finally seems to be getting traction as a campaign issue, second only to the cost of living. The other is soaring energy prices, which are both a major cause of overall inflation and especially visible since they’re posted on big signs in front of every gas station across the country.

It’s a highly ironic situation because Trump’s promises to slash those prices were a key theme of his 2024 campaign. These promises were explicit: he cited numbers, asserting that he would cut energy prices in half within 12 months.

Disastrously for Trump and the Republicans, the opposite has happened, with gasoline and especially diesel prices way up, mainly because of Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran.

One measure of energy prices I find useful is the average price of the products refined from a barrel of oil — typically 2/3 of a barrel of gasoline and 1/3 of a barrel of diesel. I focus on refined products because those, not crude oil, are what people actually burn. And refined products are up in price both because crude prices are up and because the “crack spread” between crude and refined products has soared.

Here’s what has happened to the price of refined products:

Those prices are roughly back to their Biden-era peak, and far above the prices Trump inherited when he took office. Furthermore, Biden wasn’t responsible for that temporary surge in prices, which was mainly caused by post-Covid supply-chain disruptions. Trump, on the other hand, bears almost all the responsibility for current high prices: his war of choice has disrupted the flow of oil, both crude and especially refined products, out of the Persian Gulf. (Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries are also contributing, but the Ukrainians are only doing what they must — and Trump, who is effectively backing Russia, has no standing to complain.)

The cost to American consumers of the Trump spike in energy costs is remarkably high. The U.S. consumes about 7.5 billion barrels of petroleum products annually. As you can see from the chart above, Trump’s war has raised the price of these products by about $75 a barrel. So this war is costing U.S. consumers around $560 billion a year at an annual rate, which is a lot even in a $30 trillion economy.

But Trump claims not to care:

The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it — we’re making a freaking fortune.

The obvious response is, what do you mean “we,” white man?

It’s true that oil and gas companies are making a lot of money thanks to the fallout from the Iran debacle, and oil-company stock prices have soared. But this does nothing for ordinary Americans who aren’t big investors in oil-company stocks, such as workers paying more for their daily commute and farmers who need diesel for their tractors.

So when Trump says “We’re making a freaking fortune,” what he really means is that his policies are taking more than half a trillion dollars at an annual rate out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, and giving that money to the oil industry (which gave 88 percent of its 2024 campaign contributions to Republicans.) Some people might consider this a bad thing, but by his own account he “doesn’t give a damn.”

Remind me again why people call Trump a “populist”?

NONMUSICAL CODA