Back during the 2024 presidential cycle, Donald Trump told Big Oil, out loud, in public, if you will, that they needed to raise $1 billion to fund his campaign, and if they did, he’d make sure they’d get bang for their bucks.
Basically, give me money, and I’ll do your bidding – and you can make billions.
The fundraising haul didn’t get to a billion dollars, but $215 million ain’t bad, and the Trump regime responded as the Big Orange Guy promised – among its actions: easing EPA regulations, loosening restrictions on drilling, deprioritizing the move toward clean energy vehicles.
The biggest thing that Trump did to help Big Oil was to start bombing Iran.
Talk about record profits – gas prices were below $3 a gallon before the start of the bombing campaign in February, and peaked at $4.51 a gallon nationally, before receding to the current level, which AAA pegs at $3.93 a gallon today.
Trump is now pretending to be upset with the industry that was a big factor in getting him elected.
“The gasoline, or the oil prices, have come down so much, and we are not seeing anything at the pump by comparison to what it should be. We should be, in my opinion, at $2.25 right now at the pump, and we’re higher than that, and we are doing a big investigation on it, yeah. They’re not reducing the prices commensurate with, uh, what’s happening,” Trump told reporters during a gaggle in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Uh, huh.
“A big investigation.”
This was actually a follow-up to a post on Truth Social on Tuesday night in which Trump claimed that he had “instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this.”
“Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” Trump wrote in the post.
He’s not fooling anybody – OK, he’s been fooling millions of us for 11 years now, but not all of us are as naïve as Ben Cline.
This is just another public show.
Big Oil is getting what it paid $215 million for.