As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.
Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One after his departure from Beijing Capital Airport on May 15, 2026.
(Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
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So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”
It’s hard to imagine a more callous response to economic struggles than “that’s life.” Beyond rising oil prices there is a deepening mood of pessimism about the economy. As The New York Times reported on Sunday:
For Mr. Trump, the nation’s political and economic strains are laid bare in a series of dour reports released over the past two weeks. Consumer prices last month rose at their fastest clip in about three years, outpacing workers’ wages, while businesses saw their costs increase at a rate not seen since 2022.
Americans are racking up more debt. Families are saving less. And a key measure of consumer confidence dipped to an all-time low this month. The anxiety has bled into recent political polls, which have registered broad public disapproval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy.
To the extent there is good economic news, it is unevenly distributed. Retail sales are robust, but only because the wealthy are luxuriating in a bullish stock market. As The New York Times notes, “Lower- and middle-income households are the ones bearing the brunt of slower wage growth and rising prices.”
Trump, his family, and his cronies belong to the rarified club of the ultrarich who are thriving under current conditions. As Bloomberg reported on Thursday, “President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.” The news site notes that Wall Street insiders have “expressed surprise at the trading volume.”
One of the most catastrophic mistakes Democrats have made in the last decade is allowing Trump to steal the rhetoric of economic populism. Of course there was always something risible about Trump’s claims to stand up for ordinary Americans ripped off by the economic elites. But instead of portraying Trump as a dishonest avatar of plutocracy, Hillary Clinton in 2016 touted the fact that she had the support of much richer men such as Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. Joe Biden was equally damaging to the Democrats during his presidency, when he offered a Pollyannish message that the economy was fundamentally sound, an argument that rang as hollow amid Covid-era inflation as it did when John McCain tried it at the start of the Great Recession.
Trump won the White House in 2024 thanks in no small part to Biden’s out-of-touch economic boasts. Ironically, Trump is now replicating Biden’s mistakes. This creates a great opportunity for Democrats to reclaim economic populism as part of a larger anti-system politics. Trump’s war in Iran is a crime in and of itself, one that is causing suffering all over the world, including among ordinary Americans. Democrats would do well to focus on the costs of the war and remind voters that they are suffering even as the president is focused on his own personal glory and enrichment.
From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.
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