Trump touts low oil prices, as well as high oil prices, crediting his 'friend' the Saudi prince

There are not many bright spots in the coronavirus pandemic, but President Trump during the past few weeks has managed to find one: With the world’s economy at a near-standstill, demand for gasoline has collapsed. And with Saudi Arabia and Russia fighting for market share and keeping production up, prices at the pump have fallen precipitously.

Here he is on Fox News a couple of weeks ago, saying oil prices were “at a point that I would have dreamed about. ... With gasoline prices coming down, that’s like a tax cut, a big tax cut, not a little tax cut for the consumer. There’s something about that that I like.”

Oil prices have been falling for months, from above $60 a barrel at the beginning of the year to about $20 last week — amid predictions that the glut of crude might lead the world to run out of storage capacity. Sporadic efforts to get Russia and Saudi Arabia to agree on production cuts have failed.

By this week, however, Trump was becoming cognizant of the downside of lower oil prices — namely, the economic damage it would inflict on America’s own energy companies. The U.S. is now the world’s top oil producer after a decade of rapid expansion, but the industry has struggled in recent years due to falling prices.

Even as he was still touting the prospect of 99-cents-per-gallon gasoline as “the greatest tax cut ever given,” Trump expressed concern at his Wednesday coronavirus press briefing that “it’s hurtful to one of our biggest industries — that’s the oil industry. It’s really — it’s not even feasible, what’s going on.”

He said he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and “they’re going to get together and we’re all going to get together, and we’re going to see what we can do because you don’t want to lose an industry. You’re going to lose an industry over it. Thousands and thousands of jobs.”

And by Thursday morning he was claiming victory, after speaking to “my friend MBS (Crown Prince) of Saudi Arabia” — the same crown prince who was censured by a unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate, which found him “responsible for the murder” of U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Trump said that he now expected Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut back their oil production by “approximately 10 Million Barrels,” which he said would be “GREAT for the oil and gas industry!”

Exactly what arrangement had been reached between Riyadh and Moscow was unclear, but oil prices shot up after Trump’s tweet, along with the stock market, which as of 1 p.m. was up almost 2 percent — on a day when the Labor Department reported that new unemployment claims from the previous week had exceeded 6 million, an order of magnitude above even the levels of the 2009 financial crisis.

_____

Click here for the latest coronavirus news and updates. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC and WHO’s resource guides.

Read more:

• What to do if you think you have the coronavirus

• What are the symptoms of coronavirus?

• Suspected SARS virus and flu samples found in luggage: FBI report describes China's 'biosecurity risk'

• Carbon emissions have fallen, but climate change remains an existential threat

• Coronavirus good news: Community camaraderie, cute pets, funny videos and more

• Is $2 trillion enough to save the economy?