How Trump set the Biden administration up for an economic disaster with a bargain made in 2020

As Donald Trump patches up the ever-growing hole in his finances resulting from his ongoing legal escapades with fossil fuel money, it looks as if a late-game gamble the former president made during his last year in office may be finally paying off.

That gamble may have also set up Joe Biden to deal with the effects of higher gas prices just as he was taking office a year later.

When Trump ran for re-election in 2020, he did so with a palpable sense of desperation. Early on, it was clear that the Republican president was worried about his opponent, Joe Biden. That impression was only made clearer after it came out that Trump had sought to pressure the president of Ukraine to open a criminal investigation into Biden with the intention of damaging his rival politically.

Beset by four years of Democratic attacks and now facing a response to the Covid pandemic which was killing Americans, Trump was seeking any advantage he could reach for.

But the Covid pandemic had incredibly far-reaching effects, and the global energy sector was one of the first to be hit. The near-overnight shutdown of global travel and the implementation of lockdown policies in some countries led to a massive downward spiral for world oil prices, which became mired in a trade war between Russia and OPEC.

Enter Harold Hamm, a supporter of Trump’s from 2016 who backed the president for re-election that year. Hamm, an oil tycoon, led the charge in pushing Trump to respond to this international trade war. Plunging oil prices were on track to devastate the energy economy of Texas — which is a major oil-producing hub, but could not compete with OPEC and Russia’s lower prices. Hamm warned Trump at the time that a collapse of the Lone Star State’s fossil fuel