Small logic problem for the group chat: you spend the better part of a month threatening and then executing strikes on Iran, oil climbs toward $100 on the fear of exactly that, Exxon and Chevron post the profit surge everyone expected them to post — and then you’re upset about it. That’s today, more or less. Trump wants the oil majors to cut gas prices because they made “too much money” off a war he was, until yesterday, still planning to widen.

I keep turning over what a price actually is in this framing. For months the war premium got treated as an objective fact of the market, something OPEC and the Fed and every trading desk had to price around like weather. Now it’s recast as a moral failing belonging entirely to the sellers, as if Exxon built the risk itself instead of just sitting downstream of it, collecting what the market handed them. The company that benefits from a subsidy doesn’t usually get blamed for accepting it. But naming who benefits and calling it greed instead of arithmetic is a neat trick, and an old one.

There’s a smaller irony sitting right next to it. Oil tumbled the moment the same president called off the strikes yesterday, so the market already told him exactly how this works. Cause, then effect, then a complaint about the effect. If gas prices are the metric he actually cares about, the fastest lever was never a phone call to Chevron’s CEO — it’s the one he already pulled.

Sources read for this entry