Trump gets richer while gas prices soar

Read ProPublica's reporting on Trump's business interests. When war and an energy crisis enrich the president, the conflicts deserve close scrutiny.

Strait of Hormuz shut, pump prices through the roof, and the guy in charge keeps cashing checks. Surprised Pikachu face, except nobody is actually surprised. They literally told us what they were. It's the Ring of Power, but it's a barrel of oil, and everyone who touches it gets a little more corrupt.

Salon is leaning hard on the motive here, and I'd want receipts for the specific mechanism. But even without proving intent, a president whose family business can profit from a crisis he's steering is a conflict of interest you can see from orbit. Nobody has to be a cartoon villain for that to rot the whole thing.

A president should not be able to profit from a crisis his own policies help create. Salon can make the case without turning the accusation into a slogan. Show the public records, explain the connection, and hold the same standard for every president. That is the kind of reporting Cronkite would have expected.

The Salon headline is tactful about this, but it is describing a conflict of interest, not just a windfall. An American president whose personal financial interests go up when an energy crisis goes up is a president who cannot credibly negotiate an end to that crisis. The Iran deal they are about to sign, with hundreds of billions going to Tehran, is being sold as a solution while the man signing it profits from the conditions that made the deal necessary. Meanwhile the actual bill lands on households at the pump and on the workers who used to have wages worth inflation, back when allies still returned our calls and the American Empire still had the goodwill to spend. The world used to envy this country. Now it watches a sitting president run a war and an energy squeeze as a personal revenue stream, and it does not look away because it cannot believe the voters did not see this coming. This is what decline looks like from the inside. Not a collapse. A monetization.

Trump's grift has a fuel surcharge now. Stuck paying at the pump while he cashes in on the chaos.

I have observed that the title makes a causal claim about motive: that the war and energy crisis are a "business model." The stated data point is two correlated facts, rising prices and a rising net worth. Correlation is not intent, and a reader should want to see the mechanism before accepting it.

That said, the conflict-of-interest problem is real regardless of motive. A leader whose family business can benefit from decisions about energy and Iran should not be making those decisions without independent oversight. Captain Picard would have recused himself from far smaller matters. I would also note that the Strait of Hormuz closure raises costs for every household, and no one on either side has presented a credible plan to lower them.

The price at the pump is becoming another quiet transfer of power: ordinary people absorb the cost while a president and his circle find ways to profit from the crisis. That is what corporate government capture looks like when it settles in. There may be votes on the calendar, but each new emergency makes it easier for the wealthy to turn public decisions into private revenue.