Big Oil wins. You lose.
Oil prices are, of course, going up because Trump launched
an illegal war of aggression against Iran without considering the (incredibly
obvious) possibility that Iran might retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Gas prices have spiked 60
cents this month as oil hit $100 a barrel, and Energy Secretary Chris
Wright refused to rule out the possibility oil might even rise to
$200 a barrel.
Trump’s blasé trumpeting of the virtues of rising prices is
in part simple fecklessness — he’s a liar who insists everything he does is
brilliant and awesome.
But Trump’s decision to attack Iran and put upward pressure
on prices at home puts him a political pickle, since he excoriated Biden for
the high cost of gas during the 2024 campaign. In fact, the day before he
launched his war, Trump preened about
how far prices had fallen. But suddenly high prices are good,
because as long as Trump is shuffling gaseously from Mar-a-Lago to the White
House, it’s always an orange utopia in America.
To some degree, though, Trump’s love of high prices is
sincere. Our current fascist president is a crony capitalist and loves the idea
of screwing consumers, who he sees as suckers and marks. He identifies with the
wealthy and likes it when the rich get richer. His populist mouth noises have
always been a put on — as an instinctual oligarch, he gets a little shiver of
pleasure whenever he can harm the little guy.
He can’t fail, he can only be failed
The immediate reason Trump is trumpeting high prices is that
he just refuses to admit — to himself or anyone else — that anything could ever
go wrong in the administration of one Donald J. Trump. This was most flagrantly
evident during the covid crisis in his first administration, when he repeatedly
and grotesquely pretended that the massive, terrifying pandemic was no big
deal.
“We have it totally under control,” Trump boasted in
early 2020 — right before thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, of
Americans started dying.
Trump’s taken the same approach to inflation and
affordability. Again, during the 2024 campaign, he attacked Biden for high
inflation and spiking prices. And he’s repeatedly lied that prices are
plummeting under his administration.
“Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump
than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down,” he said in
November 2025.
But everybody does not in fact know that, because these
claims are a lie.
In fact, prices rose during
Trump’s first year in office. Inflation did ease slightly
from 2.9 percent in 2024 to 2.7 percent in 2025 — reflecting a trend that was
well underway under Biden. Trump’s (illegal) tariffs, though, cost households
$1,000 each in
2025.
In January, core prices rose 3.1
percent — the highest number in two years, and an indication that Trump’s
inflationary policies have finally overcome the improving economy he inherited
from Biden. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better now that Trump
has destabilized the Middle East and sent oil prices skyrocketing.
When Trump fails, he simply lies. And when that doesn’t
work, he claims up is down and consumer pain at the pump is actually good if
you look at it from the perspective of the bloated oil executives who donated tens
of millions of dollars to his campaign.
“They can have three or four dolls”
Despite his populist rhetoric (and populist lies) Trump does
in fact reflexively look at things from the perspective of uber-rich oligarchs.
There have been several moments during his presidency when he has let the mask
slip.
Last year, for example, when Trump was asked about how his
tariffs might affect the availability and price of consumer goods, he went on a
bizarre rant sneering at supposedly entitled American children.
“I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11
years old – needs to have 30 dolls,” Trump said on Meet the Press. “I think
they can have three dolls or four dolls because what we were doing with China
was just unbelievable.” (He also suggested school
children in the US have too many pencils.)
This year, Trump returned to the idea that low prices are a
luxury good and whiners just need to tighten their belts.
During a cabinet discussion of home prices and
affordability, Trump stomped all over his populist talking points, insisting
that “people that own their homes, we’re going to keep them wealthy. We’re
going to keep those prices up, we’re not going to destroy the value of their
homes, so that someone who didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”
For Trump — a wealthy real estate heir who spends hours
a day watching cable news and who put gold
fixtures in the Lincoln bathroom — the rich work hard and the
have-nots are lazy wastrels who deserve the nothing they get. The goal of the
government, in his view, is to preserve inequality and the status quo.
This commitment to crushing consumers isn’t just rhetorical.
Trump’s actual policies have been laser-focused on screwing workers in a range
of inventive ways. His FTC repealed Joe
Biden’s ban on noncompete clauses that put a huge burden on workers. Trump
also dropped Biden’s
push to force airlines to compensate passengers for delayed flights and scrapped rules
limiting credit card late fees and bank overdraft fees.
And there’s more. Trump’s Justice Department ended its
antitrust lawsuit against Live-Nation/Ticketmaster, letting the ticketing
oligopoly off with “a slap on the wrist” while allowing the company to
“continue its abusive practices,” in the words of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Trump has attacked collective
bargaining for government workers and gutted the
NLRB. He and Republicans have attacked the
Affordable Care Act, causing prices on the exchange to skyrocket and forcing
many to abandon health insurance altogether.
Most recently, Trump is working to sink a bipartisan housing
affordability bill that passed the
Senate 89-10. The bill relaxes regulations to boost homebuilding, provides
grants to homeowners and landlords to encourage repairs, and bans institutional
investors from buying some single-family homes.
The bill in theory addresses housing issues that Trump has
claimed are a priority for his administration. But after the bill’s passage in
the Senate, Trump told House Republicans that nobody cares about housing — by
which he of course meant that he didn’t care about housing.
Instead, Trump insists that
Congress pass his anti-voting, anti-democracy SAVE America Act before the
midterms. Given the choice between real accomplishments that would benefit
consumers and might provide an election platform and outright cheating, Trump
chooses cheating every time.
Trump wants you poor and supine
The reason Trump chooses cheating rather than actual
accomplishments for working people is straightforward — he does not want to
help working people.
As he showed in his massive Trump University scam, in which
he pretended to offer students valuable business advice and in fact offered
them garbage, Trump sees working people as dupes he can cheat and defraud. He
believes he deserves your money more than you do, and his whole career has been
devoted to transferring that money from you to him — not least through the
massive corruption he’s engaged in during his second term.
Trump will continue to claim prices are falling when they
aren’t, because he doesn’t care whether prices are falling and thinks the
electorate is too stupid to notice his lies. He will also occasionally continue
to boast that prices are up while doing everything he can to enact policies
that fleece consumers and harm working people.
The Trump administration is by and for the oligarchs — not
least for the oil companies for whom war, death, and suffering have provided a
windfall.
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