At home and abroad, Big Oil reaps the benefits of a Trump White House | Editorial

Apologies to Jed Clampett, but there is a common thread running through Donald Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran: oil, black gold, Trump tea.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump met with oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club and essentially pledged to do their bidding in return for $1 billion for his reelection campaign.

At the time, Trump was facing four criminal indictments and was desperate to take back the White House and dodge the Big House.

Publicly, he told voters he would lower prices, deport the worst of the worst, and end America’s involvement in foreign wars.

Privately, he promised oil executives he would slash regulations, speed up permits, end green energy initiatives, and drill, baby, drill.

The public promises have all fizzled.

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Prices are up, mass deportations backfired so badly Republicans can no longer mention them, and the United States is mired in a war of Trump’s making.

Even the unprovoked war in Ukraine that Trump promised more than 50 times to end on Day One drags on. That’s after he rolled out a literal red carpet for Russian ruler Vladimir Putin and ambushed Ukraine’s valiant President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

Despite Trump’s hanging Ukraine out to dry, Zelensky has sent interceptor drones and experts to help protect U.S. military bases in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump looks the other way as Putin helps Iran attack the U.S.

How much humiliation can Trump endure?

Yet privately, all is good.

Trump is making billions and the Big Oil executives received a quick return on their investment. For only $445 million — less than half of the original ask — the president’s signature policy, his One Big Beautiful Bill, saved the oil and gas industry roughly $18 billion in new and expanded tax benefits, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, which analyzes tax policies for Congress.

That’s on top of the $35 billion in annual tax breaks baked into the tax code for the oil and gas industry.

In addition, Trump took 145 actions in his first 100 days to eliminate rules to protect clean air, water, and a livable climate.

He fast-tracked permits to allow for mining, drilling, and fossil fuel production and transportation on public land.

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The Trump administration canceled more than $83 billion in loans for clean energy projects to help fight climate change.

He installed fossil fuel allies to run government agencies, including climate change denier Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency and oil industry CEO Chris Wright to lead the Energy Department.

Last month, Trump eliminated the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 EPA rule that found greenhouse gases were an existential threat to public life.

Erasing the landmark scientific finding eliminates the federal government’s ability to control the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that contribute to worsening droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and other extreme weather.

In other words, pollute, baby, pollute.

ExxonMobile made nearly $29 billion last year, while Chevron’s net income was $12.48 billion. Profits at both companies were lower than the previous year, thanks to a drop in oil prices.

But that was before the war in Iran. Oil prices have jumped roughly 42% since the airstrikes began. The price for a barrel of oil increased to more than $100 from about $67 before the war, or “little excursion” as Trump called it.

For motorists, the price of gas has increased about 50 cents a gallon in less than two weeks.

Trump told Americans that higher gas prices were a “very small price to pay” for safety and peace.

Just over two weeks ago, Trump used his long State of the Union speech to tout lower gas prices that he said were “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states and in some places, $1.99 a gallon.”

Now, the national average is $3.58 a gallon.

While consumers dig deeper, the biggest winners of Trump’s war in Iran and invasion in Venezuela are the oil companies.

In fact, Big Oil has also profited handsomely from the war in Ukraine. Since the war started in February 2022, Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobile, and Total Energies have made almost $500 billion.

Trump once boasted about how the U.S. was energy independent. But the wars in Ukraine and Iran both showed how the oil industry is interconnected.

The only true energy independence rests in freedom from oil.

But then Trump could not enrich his Big Oil buddies.