If American voters are looking for a presidential candidate who’s desperate to please Big Oil, Donald Trump is running the right kind of campaign. The Washington Post reported this week:
In a rambling fundraising pitch to oil executives in Houston on Wednesday, former president Donald Trump promised them that he would immediately approve their projects and expand drilling in a second term — just as he worked to expedite the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines soon after taking office in 2017.
So let me see if I have this straight. The presumptive Republican nominee — ostensibly a “populist,” running as a man-of-the-people candidate — headlined an event organized by three oil executives. At the gathering, Trump, talking to people who paid $250,000 per person to be there, assured his wealthy supporters that he’d do everything the oil industry wants, including lifting the natural gas export ban, scraping existing energy safeguards, and opening up more federal lands to oil drilling.
The comments, the Post’s report added, drew “cheers from the audience.”
This comes on the heels of a Politico report indicating that oil industry executives are writing up presidential executive orders now, in the hopes that Trump will simply sign them if/when he returns to the White House. A few days later, the Post also reported on the former president recently huddling with Big Oil leaders at Mar-a-Lago.
If the account is accurate, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee told the oil industry executives that they should raise $1 billion to return him to the White House — and if they did, he’d reward them by eliminating environmental safeguards and approving new tax breaks.
The “deal” that Trump described, the Post added, “stunned several of the executives in the room.”
It’s an increasingly bizarre dynamic: Democrats are accusing Trump of being in Big Oil’s back pocket, to the which the former president is effectively responding, “Yep.”
But that’s not all Democrats are saying. The New York Times reported: Senate Democrats opened an investigation on Thursday into former President Donald J. Trump’s meeting with oil and gas executives last month to determine whether Mr. Trump offered a “policies-for-money transaction” when he asked for $1 billion for his 2024 campaign so he could retake the White House and delete President Biden’s climate regulations.
The Times’ report added that two Senate committee chairs — Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — sent letters to top executives of eight oil companies and a trade group this week, seeking details of the Mar-a-Lago meeting. “Time and time again, both Mr. Trump and the U.S. oil and gas industry have proved they are willing to sell out Americans to pad their own pockets,” the senators wrote, adding that they’re concerned the industry and the Trump campaign are “conferring on how to trade campaign cash for policy changes.” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee launched a similar effort this week, but given the fact that they’re in the minority and have no subpoena power, oil industry executives and their lawyers will probably be uninterested in the outrage. The letters from Senate Democratic committee chairs, however, will be harder to ignore.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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