Bernie Trump

The president is railing against Big Oil’s profits. He’s ignoring the more important issue: profit margins.

Photo credit: GQ.com/Rex Features

I do my best to avoid listening to President Trump. The man talks way too much. As US Sen. John Kennedy, the Republican from Louisiana, recently said, Trump gets “anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.”

But try as I might to plug my ears and cover my eyes, I can’t ignore the loony-round-the-bend comment that came out of Trump’s hyperactive mouth on Monday when he claimed that Exxon Mobil and Chevron were making “too much money” and that the oil giants “ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price.”

I’ll be darned if Trump doesn’t sound just like US Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent (Socialist) from Vermont.

In May, Bernie wrote on X/Twitter that “Big Oil is making a $30 million windfall profit every HOUR by using the Iran war as an excuse to rip off commuters at the gas pump.” Sanders went on to say the US should end the Iran war and “pass a windfall profits tax – NOW.”

It’s remarkable to hear a Republican president — particularly one who made $1.4 billion last year on his cryptocurrency investments — sounding so much like a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s also remarkable to hear him lambast the oil industry when he was the one who started the Iran war, which is fueling the surge in hydrocarbon prices.

Sure, Exxon made a lot of money ($14.7 billion) in the second quarter. But neither Trump nor Sanders bothered to note that the Texas-based oil giant lost $22.4 billion, the largest loss in its history, back in 2020. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall Bernie holding a bake sale in Burlington for Darren Woods.

Trump’s latest bout of logorrhea spurred me to dive into the 2025 revenues, profits, and profit margins of the biggest corporations in the US. Doing so tells a story that even a politician could understand.

And to paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the margins, stupid.” Let’s take a look.