Question for Trump: who is this “We” you’re talking about?
Olivia Rosane for Common Dreams
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| Add "We're making a freakin' fortune" to this list |
During a midterm campaign rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump
acknowledged the high price of oil and gas, but said that the US fossil fuel
industry was “making hundreds of billions of dollars.”
His advisers, he told the crowd, had instructed him not to
mention this “because people are paying a little higher,” he said in a
condescending voice. “That number’s going to come way down,” he continued, “but
what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has
never made before,” seemingly conflating the fortunes of wealthy oil and gas
companies with the US as a whole.
“Trump to people who want lower gas prices: ‘Fuck you, I’m
making money!’” Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for
New York Health, posted
on social media.
“Just run this as an ad.”
Nation writer Jeet Heer made a similar point, saying
that Trump’s remarks were an “amazing closing argument—for the Democrats. They
just need to run this clip.”
Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted the tone of Trump’s
voice.
“Trump here does a widdle baby voice to mock people who are
complaining about high gas prices, explaining that the oil and gas industry is
making ‘hundreds of billions, trillions,’” Grim wrote
on social media. “It’s never been clearer how much he hates the people who
voted for him.”
Trump seemed to anticipate a negative reaction to his statement, which echoed similar points he had made at a rally in Arizona over a week before.
“I can just see the fake headlines,” he said. “President
Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering
at the pump. That will be the headline. But I said, I don’t give a damn, I’m
going to say it: We’re making a freaking fortune.”
Yet his supposedly fake headline is just a factual
restatement of his own words.
It is true that major oil companies have made a killing from the Iran War, with ExxonMobil and Chevron reporting combined
second-quarter profits for 2026 of $26.5 billion. This has been good for Trump,
who owns stock in oil companies that has
made him between $1.5 million and $4.4 million richer since the illegal war
he started. However, this windfall has not reached ordinary Americans, who have
spent around $1,100 per household in additional gas and diesel costs since the
war began, according to the running Iran War Energy
Cost Tracker maintained by the Watson School of International and Public
Affairs and the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University.
In fact, and in contradiction to Trump’s boasting of shared
American prosperity, Big Oil’s windfall exists because of consumer suffering,
as Climate Solutions Lab director Jeff Colgan pointed out.
“The profits for Big Oil are huge, and they
are coming straight out of the pockets of American consumers at a time when
many people are feeling the pinch,” Colgan told HuffPost on Tuesday.
Ron Filipkowski, editor in chief at MediasTouch, also noted
the divide between the wealthy few benefiting from Trump’s policies and
everyone else when responding to Trump’s remarks on Saturday.
“We are making the oil oligarchs rich. We are making Trump
and his cronies rich. It is literally at our expense every day. There’s no
trickling down happening. And Trump is bragging about it knowing nobody in the Republican Party
will stand up to him and say enough,” he wrote on social media.
New Yorker writer Susan Glasser said
Saturday’s statement was “like the epigraph for the entire Trump 2.0
presidency: ‘I don’t give a damn. We’re making a fortune.’”
