As last week neared its end, struggling consumers confronted yet another discouraging development: Oil prices reached levels unseen since April. With so little time remaining in the midterm election cycle, and with affordability on the minds of so many Americans, common sense suggested this would be a topic Donald Trump would avoid at his latest campaign rallies.

And yet, the Republican president apparently couldn’t help himself.

Saturday night in Georgia, Trump began by assuring his supporters that gas prices would “be falling dramatically” just as soon as he figured out a way to end the war he launched against Iran. If he had stopped here, it would not have been notable.

But then he kept going.

“The United States’ oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” the president said, conceding that he wasn’t sure whether to bring this up, and that members of his own team advised him, “Please don’t mention that, sir.”

He blew off the good advice.

Trump’s own team told him not to celebrate higher energy prices shortly before Election Day, since Americans generally don’t want to be told to be happy about their pain at the pump. He decided not to listen, evidently because he’s delighted to see Big Oil cash in, regardless of the impact on unhappy consumers.

The president first rolled out this talking point just two weeks after launching the war, using his social media platform to argue, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

That line proved wildly unpersuasive and was quickly dropped from the White House’s talking points, before making an unexpected comeback at an event in Arizona two weeks ago. “Our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high,” Trump boasted, effectively telling American consumers to be glad they’re paying more at the pump.

As a substantive matter, the problem with Trump’s claim that “we’re making a fortune” is that the word “we” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s true that the United States is producing a lot of oil, and it’s also true that higher prices help generate oil industry profits. But since the number of Americans who benefit from oil industry profits is very small, few will likely celebrate the ongoing hit to their wallets.

But as a political matter, it’s remarkable to see the Republican — who has gone out of his way to make the midterms a referendum on himself — execute such a bizarre strategy at the worst possible time.

“I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump,’” he said. The trouble is, there’s nothing fake about such headlines: Trump really did talk about all the money Big Oil was making while people were suffering at the pump, which he then promptly followed with, “I don’t give a damn.”

If Republicans are very lucky, voters won’t hear about this.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump ignores his own team’s advice, celebrates higher oil prices appeared first on MS NOW.

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