How Trump set the Biden administration up for an economic disaster with a bargain made in 2020

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

As Donald Trump patches up the ever-growing hole in his finances resulting from his ongoing legal escapades with fossil fuel money, it looks as if a late-game gamble the former president made during his last year in office may be finally paying off.

That gamble may have also set up Joe Biden to deal with the effects of higher gas prices just as he was taking office a year later.

When Trump ran for re-election in 2020, he did so with a palpable sense of desperation. Early on, it was clear that the Republican president was worried about his opponent, Joe Biden. That impression was only made clearer after it came out that Trump had sought to pressure the president of Ukraine to open a criminal investigation into Biden with the intention of damaging his rival politically.

Beset by four years of Democratic attacks and now facing a response to the Covid pandemic which was killing Americans, Trump was seeking any advantage he could reach for.

But the Covid pandemic had incredibly far-reaching effects, and the global energy sector was one of the first to be hit. The near-overnight shutdown of global travel and the implementation of lockdown policies in some countries led to a massive downward spiral for world oil prices, which became mired in a trade war between Russia and OPEC.

Enter Harold Hamm, a supporter of Trump’s from 2016 who backed the president for re-election that year. Hamm, an oil tycoon, led the charge in pushing Trump to respond to this international trade war. Plunging oil prices were on track to devastate the energy economy of Texas — which is a major oil-producing hub, but could not compete with OPEC and Russia’s lower prices. Hamm warned Trump at the time that a collapse of the Lone Star State’s fossil fuel economy would certainly lead to his electoral defeat, as he reasoned that Texas would turn blue for the first time in decades.

It seemed like a far-fetched outcome, but one possibility was much more likely: Hamm’s contributions to the Republican Party, and money from others like him, would dry up alongside Texas’s oil wells. That was a far more worrying prospect. Hamm was described by one energy sector executive as capable of raising $1bn for a candidate and their respective side of the aisle in an election cycle, drawing from his deep connections through the industry.

So Trump attempted avert that outcome. The manner he did so was simple: by convincing OPEC and Russia to cease their price cut fight with a massive shared production cut, one that stabilized prices and dropped production by 9.7m barrels per day. The deal was finally inked in April of that year — but only after Trump reportedtly threatened to end a military partnership with Saudi Arabia over its government’s balking.

The US energy sector, and Texas in particular, however, could not be shielded from the effects of pandemic in perpetuity. Domestic oil production dropped by the greatest amount in recorded history while Texas’s oil companies shed more than 70,000 jobs in a one-year stretch between September 2019 and September 2020. But it won over Hamm and his allies. The billionaire lavished a number of state parties with donations that year, and he poured tens of thousands more into Trump’s PAC and other Republican causes.

When Biden took office in 2021, he immediately faced the prospect of responding to a number of Trump’s decisions made during his chaotic final year in office. That didn’t just include his meddling in global oil production; most famously, Biden was burdened with carrying out the politically fraught task of ending America’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. Oil prices, which kept climbing through 2021, seemed to reach a peak a year after the 2020 election, only to begin surging once more a few months later when Vladimir Putin and Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia’s war has been blamed for more than half of the value gained by crude oil over the past two years. Biden and his administration have worked to combat that surge — dubbed the “Putin Price Hike” by the White House — but oil prices have only recently returned to pre-invasion levels. They still sit much higher than before Trump’s orchestrations with OPEC and Russia took effect.

For Democrats, that means persistent anger about the economy and consumer prices from the electorate, despite the administration’s efforts to combat inflation over the past three years. Kamala Harris has only recently gone on the offense against her opponent in this regard; for months, Trump and his allies were bludgeoning their opponents with messaging about higher grocery prices and costs at the pump.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to see his cash windfall continue. Hamm is firmly back in his camp for the 2024 cycle, and according to FEC reports has already donated more than $600,000 to the ex-president’s joint fundraising committee, which shares donations between him, a host of state GOP chapters, and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

“Harold Hamm is back there — he’s my original oil guy that taught me so much about oil,” the ex-president was quoted as saying at a fundraiser which Hamm attended in May of 2024, according to The Washington Post.

At his rallies, Trump has taken a sharper tone in favor of fossil fuels, too. In numerous addresses, he has embraced the “drill, baby, drill!” slogan espoused by GOP supporters of surging domestic oil and gas production since the McCain-Palin era.

“President Trump is proud to be supported by people who share his vision of American energy dominance to protect our national security and bring down the cost of living for all Americans,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said when questioned about Hamm’s support by the Post last month.

Kamala Harris is not exactly pinching pennies either, however. The incumbent vice president has been buoyed by a fundraising rocketship that has taken off since she took over the Democratic ticket in mid-July. She brought in more than $500m during her first month campaigning, and more than $361m in August alone.

She’s heading into November backed by a powerful array of Democratic donors who all seem to be coming off the sidelines, one by one, in the wake of Biden’s decision to step aside.

But as Harris seeks the White House this fall, she’ll be doing so against an avalanche of fossil fuel money set in motion by Trump years ago — one which has had very real effects on American consumers and US foreign policy.