Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump’s Oil Tweet Was a Show of Farce

His own policies have helped lift prices, and blustering won’t solve it.

July 2, 2018 at 1:41 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

President Donald Trump, angry tweeter.
Photographer: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

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President Donald Trump indulged in a little “energy dominance” this weekend. In the process, he showed who really has the whip hand.

Trump’s Saturday morning tweet announcing Saudi Arabia would be raising oil output by two million barrels a day surprised everyone, not least Saudi Arabia’s leadership and the president’s own staff. The subsequent walk-back was a hurried, stumbling affair. And the damage was done anyway.