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“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Donald Trump boasted last week on Truth Social.
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 yesterday 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.
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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.