You remember the pictures. The images of tech oligarchs kissing the ring at President Trump’s inauguration were instantly iconic, markers of a new and rather unnerving era. But months earlier, Mr. Trump made a corrosive pact with another set of moguls, and that one is already remaking global politics, wiping out jobs at home and strangling what little hope was left of avoiding a climate disaster. This one happened behind closed doors.
These moguls were leaders of the oil and gas industry, and Mr. Trump promised them he would do them so many favors that a billion dollars in donations would feel like a “deal.” The executives gave him only a fraction of the money he sought. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has given them more than they asked for — and some now say it’s backfiring.
As expected, he scaled back regulations and encouraged more drilling — 1.3 billion more acres of coastal waters this week alone. He has also, however, taken the extraordinary step of trying to crush the industry’s green competition. He pulled the plug on the largest solar project in North America, which was on track to supply enough power for nearly two million homes. He put a $5 billion wind farm project in New York on hold, threatening thousands of jobs, and reversed himself only when the state approved a new gas pipeline. And he killed incentives for electric vehicles, sales of which had more than doubled since his first term.
Overseas, Team Trump is warning the world to buy more fossil fuels — or else. The administration used the threat of tariffs to strong-arm allies into taking America’s gas. It reportedly sabotaged an agreement by more than 100 nations to slash cargo ships’ greenhouse gas emissions. When the rest of the world’s representatives were meeting at a climate conference in Brazil, Trump officials called the proceedings a “hoax” — and praised offshore drilling deals with Greece, the first there in more than 40 years.
Plenty of U.S. presidents have talked about freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil and keeping foreign petrostates from messing with our economy. That’s what “drill, baby, drill” was all about. This is something different. Now America is the planet’s leading producer of oil — and natural gas, too. And instead of trying to separate from the Persian Gulf petrostates, Mr. Trump is reshaping America to look more like them: top-down, iron-fisted, resource-rich and more than willing to flash those resources as weapons.
Like the leaders of oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms, Mr. Trump demands total deference. He openly uses his position to enrich America’s ruling clan — his family — with one billion-dollar deal after another. His Justice Department has all but abandoned the fight against corruption — unless it serves the president’s purposes. He’s authorized billions of dollars for America’s internal security services. He regards critical news coverage of him as “really illegal” and political opponents as terrorists. On Thursday he raised the possibility that six Democratic lawmakers should be executed.
Mr. Trump is also ordering the government to take an ownership stake in key companies, a classic strongman tactic that he executes in a manner Eric Cantor, the former House Republican leader, described — from Riyadh — as “not too dissimilar” from “the vision of the crown prince here in Saudi Arabia.”
Most of all, Mr. Trump and his people describe the nation’s fossil fuel reserves as the core to American influence across the globe, and treat competition to these assets as threats to America itself. “Maximum production, maximum prosperity and maximum power,” Mr. Trump said last month.
Mr. Trump’s political instincts were formed in the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC cartel cut production and brought the world economy to its knees. For decades afterward, he expressed a mixture of admiration and resentment of the kingdom’s resource wealth. “Saudi Arabia is a money machine,” he told Larry King in 1987. “Kuwait. These are money machines, the greatest ever created.” Four years later, when the future president was in financial trouble, he sold his yacht to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
Over time, Mr. Trump called for America to amass its own fossil fuel arsenal. “Take the Oil,” a chapter of his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough,” argues that the United States should seize fossil fuel assets from Iraq, all while increasing production at home. “We have such power if we knew how to use it,” he said at the time.
Once he became president, Mr. Trump made his relationship with the Saudis a top priority. When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a purge of his rivals in 2017, the president tweeted his “great confidence” in him and his father. “They know exactly what they are doing,” Mr. Trump added. “Some of those they are harshly treating have been milking their country for years!”
During President Trump’s first term, his first overseas trip was to Saudi Arabia. (Remember that picture of him and the Saudi king, with their hands on the glowing orb?) During his second term, his first call to a foreign leader was to the crown prince. The Saudi sovereign investment fund has invested $2 billion with Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, and a deal between a Saudi government-owned real estate firm and the Trump Organization is now reportedly in the works. And this week, Mr. Trump gave Prince Mohammed a lavish White House reception and staged an extraordinary pro-Saudi investment forum at the Kennedy Center, calling it a gathering of “the world’s two leading energy superpowers.” He referred to his royal guest as “a very good friend,” adding that “what he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.” According to the C.I.A., Prince Mohammed ordered the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi; Saudi Arabia has executed 241 people this year alone.
Of course, America is a far cry from Saudi Arabia. Political dissent remains legal, if embattled, and the economy is complex and unruly. An oil-rich nation can still be a liberal democracy — just look at Norway. But Mr. Trump is not trying to make America more like Norway.
The paradox is that these days, the Saudis are trying to make their economy and their energy profile more like America’s, diversifying away from fossil fuels. They’re even building massive solar farms and investing in wind farms. Until recently, some major fossil fuel producers appeared to be heading in that direction, too.
For Mr. Trump, though, energy isn’t ultimately about oil or gas or even his “beautiful coal.” It’s about muscle. It enables the president to act as he pleases on the world stage. One reason the United States felt emboldened to attack Iran this year: Tehran no longer has the power to upend global energy markets. “If we did not have energy dominance, we wouldn’t have the ability to deploy power the way we are,” Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s interior secretary, said afterward.
Small wonder, then, that the Trump administration views the $100 billion a year of solar and battery gear that China exports as a direct threat to America. Richard Goldberg, who recently left the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, told me the United States should threaten or punish any country that tries to “inhibit, prohibit, strangle, divest from” U.S. fossil fuels.
The reality, however, is that fossil fuels alone won’t be enough to meet the nation’s energy needs. The combination of more data centers and fewer renewables is spiking average Americans’ electric bills. Natural gas prices are up, thanks to Mr. Trump’s export deals. The rise of nuclear power will take years to really make a dent. “If you gave me a piece of paper and asked me to think about the most creative way, the most effective way, to raise electricity prices in the United States, it would look a lot like what they’ve done,” Ethan Zindler, a former climate counselor in the Biden Treasury Department who works on policy at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told me.
You might think the U.S. oil and gas business would be thrilled. Not exactly. The capricious attacks on renewables and the big swings in energy policy are a liability for an industry forced by the nature of its complex engineering projects to plan years, or even decades, ahead. Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Darren Woods, recently told The Times: “Ever-changing policy, particularly as administrations change, is not good for business. It’s not good for the economy and ultimately, it’s not good for people.”
Like many of Mr. Trump’s policies, his America First energy goals have their contradictions. In his total commitment to a hydrocarbon-heavy world, he has pushed not only domestic producers but also Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC nations to keep pumping out more, more, more cheap oil. That might be good news for consumers, offsetting some of these high electric rates. But with oil prices down to around $60 per barrel, American companies say they can’t afford to open up new wells, especially now that tariffs have made drilling equipment so expensive. The total number of active rigs is down year over year.
If energy executives are unhappy, they can’t really be surprised. Mr. Trump’s favor is always transactional. More than helping any individual company, he wants to use energy as a tool for American leverage and, in his case, his own personal power. As he has shown over and over, he believes these chief executives now work for him, not the other way around. “If they drill themselves out of business,” he told voters at a rally last year, “I don’t give a damn.”
Noah Shachtman is a longtime reporter on national security and a former editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast.
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