Big Oil Record Profits
Exxon Mobil reported a second quarter profit of $14.5 billion for April through June, more than double the same three months a year ago and its best quarter since 2022. Chevron reported $12.07 billion, up from $2.49 billion, nearly five times over and the biggest quarter in the company’s history. Shell reported $10.82 billion, triple what it earned a year earlier. TotalEnergies doubled to $5.4 billion. Oil averaged about $96 dollars a barrel this spring, up 45 percent from a year ago, because the war with Iran turned the Strait of Hormuz into a battleground, and every one of those companies rode that barrel price straight to the best numbers posted in years.
On Exxon’s earnings call, chief executive Darren Woods said, and I am quoting him, “While we didn’t anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it.” Read that twice. They were ready to cash in on a war.
Where Your Money Did Not Go
When gas jumped this spring, none of that money came back to you. Not a dime. Wood Mackenzie, the industry’s own consultants, says the companies are holding their spending on new oil and gas production flat to slightly lower than 2025 and letting the extra cash pile up on their balance sheets, with the rest going out the door to shareholders as dividends and buybacks. Exxon alone handed shareholders $9.4 billion in the quarter. So you got no discount and no new supply. They kept it or paid it to their investors.
By late June crude had dropped more than a third from its May peak. Your price at the pump barely moved. On June 24 the President accused Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell of gouging you and said he had ordered the Justice Department to look into it. Nine days later the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission wrote a letter handing the job to the state attorneys general and asking them to investigate under their own laws. No announced federal case followed. No reported subpoenas followed. You are still paying the same price you paid the morning he made the accusation, and the man who promised you an investigation has spent the weeks since building a 400 million dollar ballroom and calling Democrats communists.
I broke this whole thing down earlier this morning on my TikTok, and if you want the short version before you read the long one, go watch it right now.
Follow the Money Backward
For his first inauguration, Chevron wrote a $525,000 check and Exxon wrote one for $500,000. In April 2024 he sat more than 20 oil executives down at Mar-a-Lago and asked for one billion dollars, calling it a deal given the taxes and rules they would avoid. The industry put more than $20 million into his campaign and the political action committees backing him, tallies that include allied groups run close to $100 million, and all in the industry spent about $219 million dollars on the 2024 election. For his second inauguration Chevron gave $2 million. Exxon and ConocoPhillips each gave a million, and Occidental matched them. On the donor list for the White House ballroom, a project now estimated at $400 million dollars, sits Harold Hamm, the fracking billionaire who founded Continental Resources.
That is the money going in. Now watch the money coming out.
His Own Brokerage Account
Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure listed between $12.5 million and $45.6 million in oil and gas stocks. His largest energy holdings were Exxon and Chevron, with Valero and Marathon Petroleum on the list too. Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee ran those holdings against this year’s share prices and found they rose about 39 percent through mid August, putting the pile between $17.2 million and $61.1 million and the gain as high as $15.5 million. Those are estimates built on the broad ranges the disclosure rules allow, and the real number sits somewhere inside them. Valero and Marathon have more than doubled since January. The same report found major producers booked about $125 billion in profit in the first half of 2026, and Americans spent about $71.5 billion dollars more on gasoline since the shooting started.
Now the trades themselves, because the filings show his accounts did far more than sit still. In the first three months of 2026, the window covering the Venezuela operation and the start of the Iran war, his accounts bought as much as $3.6 million in additional oil and gas stock, including hundreds of thousands in Chevron in the weeks after Venezuela, the one American company holding oil rights there. On March 2, the first trading day after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, his accounts bought shares in eight oil and gas companies, including $100,000 to $250,000 of Exxon on top of the $3.2 to $12.5 million he already held. On April 7, the day he announced a ceasefire, his accounts sold between $500,000 and one million dollars of Exxon. Exxon dropped six and a half percent the next day. In June, the month a peace deal was announced, his accounts logged more than 1,000 trades, including Exxon and Chevron trades and three sales of ConocoPhillips.
The White House says independent managers run the portfolio through computer models that mirror indexes like the Schwab 1000, that the accounts sit in a trust overseen by Donald Trump Jr., and that the President plays no role in any trade.1
Look, here’s the deal. I have tried enough cases to tell you what a jury does with that answer. A defendant who owns millions in oil stock, takes hundreds of millions from oil donors, starts a war that sends oil to $96 a barrel, and then watches his own account grow by up to $15 million does not get to end the conversation by saying somebody else clicks the button. The conflict is the ownership. He held the stock the whole time, and every decision he made about that war made him more money.
Why the War Story Matters
Look at what a war does to a news cycle. It buries everything underneath it. Grocery prices, the jobs numbers, the Epstein files, the names inside those files, all of it slides off the front page under a map of the Strait of Hormuz. In a courtroom we call that changing the subject, and juries are warned during jury selection and opening statements, to notice when a party does it. Meanwhile the companies that wrote the inaugural checks and sat at that Mar-a-Lago table are posting the biggest quarters they have seen in years, off a barrel price that only went up because the shooting started, and the man who took their checks holds their stock.
So count the winners. He walks away with a subject change and a fatter brokerage statement, the companies walk away with $14 billion dollars in a single quarter, and you walk away from the pump on a Tuesday morning having paid for both of them, one gallon at a time.
Enough is enough.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Here is what you need to know about that trust. It is not a “blind trust.” It’s a revocable trust with his own son as the overseer. He is allowed to see every holding, every trade, and every dollar it earns, and he is allowed to pick up the phone and tell his son what he wants done any day he chooses. A real blind trust puts the assets behind a wall the owner never sees through. This one has no wall. The word trust here is a talking point, and it changes nothing about how much he knows or how much he controls.
Trump is a mob boss, not a president. he's taken so much money for himself for government favors that took money away from the poor and middle class. he's done NOTHING FOR THE US.
Trump is a piece of 💩