Oil company tycoons are his buddies. Elite billionnaires who lick his stinking cankled feet in gratitude while attending his disgusting "ballroom" gatherings where they lavish praise on the generally dozing old geezer, the Great Moron.
Trump has butchered social services and programs that help the middle class and the poor; he has dismissed tens of thousands of civil servants who make the government work; the money he says he saved goes to his wealthy elite friends, among whom the oil companies. Who benefits from government services? Not his billionnaires friends.
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Opinion
Trump’s crooked ‘art of the deal’ with Big Oil
William S. Becker, opinion contributor
Mon, May 11, 2026
The American people have seen several big oil scandals over the last century. We have survived Teapot Dome, the collapse of Enron, windfall profiteering during the 1970s oil crisis, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon and more. But President Trump’s deal with Big Oil is the most corrupt in our history. Its cost pervades everything from household budgets to public health, national security, the climate, and the future.
During his first term and now in his second, Trump has delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in favors to the industry, including tax breaks and subsidies, access to more federal land and waters, a major rollback of environmental regulations, the suppression of competition from clean energy technologies, access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, and of course the very profitable Iran war. No one has stopped him.
This arrangement is clearly unethical, if not illegal. That became obvious in April 2024 when candidate Trump offered the oil industry a deal, telling its executives that if they gave $1 billion to his campaign, he would deliver their wish list when he recaptured the White House.
He has been delivering ever since.
The deal betrays the middle- and lower-income voters who helped elect him. By cutting important social programs and safety nets to pay for the oil industry’s tax breaks and subsidies and by raising consumer prices, Trump’s energy policies are transferring wealth from American families to one of the world’s most powerful industries.
Oil companies ended up providing nearly $100 million to Trump’s campaign organization and affiliated political action committees, not counting dark-money contributions. They also gave nearly $12 million to Trump’s inauguration and have continued contributing millions more to Trump’s PAC since he took office.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued making promises. Last July, his One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave oil and gas more than $70 billion in new and expanded tax subsidies through 2034, along with $250 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans. This was on top of his 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which gave 17 oil and gas companies a combined $25 billion in one-time benefits, along with a permanent 40 percent reduction in their tax bills.
Nine oil companies reaped at least $1 billion in immediate tax savings. To pay for these windfalls, families got “the largest cuts to basic needs programs in U.S. history.”
In 2022, during the Biden presidency, the Inflation Reduction Act had provided incentives for electric vehicles that would have spared families from today’s rising gasoline prices. The bill’s incentives for solar and wind power, the cheapest ways to generate electricity, would have helped mitigate rising electric rates. But in 2025, Trump’s beautiful budget bill terminated many of these incentives.
Now, utilities will generate up to 60 percent less clean energy through 2035, and other industries will pay up to $11 billion more for power in 2035, costs that will inevitably pass on to electric consumers.
Last August, the Trump administration canceled nearly $680 million in funding for offshore wind projects. Trump is now using about $2 billion in tax dollars to pay power companies to abandon offshore wind projects and invest instead in fossil fuels.
Fossil-fuel pollution causes more than 91,000 premature deaths in America each year, plus hundreds of thousands of illnesses. according to the non-profit Stockholm Environment Institute. Yet the Trump administration is doing the oil industry another favor with at least 145 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules.
Climate instability caused by fossil fuel pollution costs families in some regions over $1,000 annually due to higher prices for energy, food, insurance, property damage and medical care. Billion-dollar disasters, which drive up the government’s need for tax revenues, cost the equivalent of $1,500 per person in 2023 and 2024.
By the end of April, the Iran war cost taxpayers at least $25 billion. Some analysts estimate it could cost them $1 trillion. The war has resulted in thousands of deaths, including those of 13 U.S. soldiers. Hundreds of GIs have been wounded. It has triggered the worst global energy crisis in history.
Meanwhile, the 100 biggest oil companies earned more than $30 million in windfall profits every hour during the war’s first month. If oil prices remain elevated, they are expected to rake in $234 billion in extra profits by the end of this year.
Political candidates always make promises, but Trump’s seemed to involve a clear quid pro quo. Trump solicited the $1 billion one month after he became the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee. Trump’s April 2024 deal with oil executives seemed illegal on its face. It is a felony to solicit or receive anything of value after one is officially informed that he or she will be nominated for public office.
But what is unethical may not be illegal under the U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. As a law expert explained, “Unless Trump wrote on a napkin during the meeting an exact amount of money he wanted deposited in a specific campaign vehicle in exchange for a specific policy goal, there’s little chance it would violate bribery laws as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court.”
What is indisputable is that Trump’s relationship with the carbon cartel is like an oil spill spreading through the environment, the economy, consumer prices, the tax burden, and the future. It will take an entirely new Congress to stop the spill and begin the cleanup.
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