Factually! with Adam Conover - Trump made gas expensive and now his supporters hate him.

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)Trump's tired. Constantly owning yourself is hard. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. So I actually think that we might be watching Donald Trump destroy himself right now. Like literally, everything he does immediately turns into a gigantic cell phone. And he's always been essentially self-defeating, but now he is shitting himself on the global stage. And, you know, if you don't like the guy, that would be funny and satisfying. But unfortunately, we're all watching from the splash zone, and it's us who are getting covered with shit. So in February, Trump took his buddy Bebby N9. Netanyahu's advice and invaded Iran.

And, you know, Netanyahu had been trying to get basically every American president to do this for decades. And the reason they hadn't is that anyone could have told you this would simply be a world historical f*** up. Even George W. Bush was smart enough not to invade Iran. Not only has this war failed to remove Iran's government or its nuclear material, it has actually made Iran geopolitically stronger. Iran has now blocked the Strait of Hormuz and cut off

one-fifth of the world's oil supply, leading to, you know, it's just the worst energy crisis in history. Just, you know, throughout all of human history, that's all. Little thing. And, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, thwump didn't expect them to do that. So, he sent his underling scrambling to end of the war he started, but now he can't help torpedoing their efforts to help him and prolonging the catastrophic war with his dumb-ass social media posts. And look, I have trouble logging off, too.

Who amongst us has never been caught in my own? a flame war, but I generally have the sense to stop before it turns into Flame World War III. But, you know, Trump's flailing isn't just hurting others, you know, among them hundreds of thousands of Iranians and, of course, the American soldiers who are being put in harm's way. He's also plunging a dagger into the heart of his own political coalition. With this idiotic war, Trump has violated two of the key promises that led him to re-election. First, that he wouldn't entangle America in any more idiotic foreign wars. And second, that he's that he would keep consumer prices down.

And what he has done is, start the largest military conflict since the war on terror, which indirectly caused the largest increase in gas prices in 60 years. It's elegant in a way, kind of like a bicycle kick own goal. And a cuir, on the other side,

defensive, of Gouldfant, it's not possible. Oh, it's not possible. And look, I know liberals have been wishcasting about MAGA falling apart ever since the day after the election 2016, but this time, Trump's coalition is actually fracturing invisible ways.

Even Tucker Carlson is reassessing things. I do think it's like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. I mean, just imagine how bad you have to fuck up to make Tucker Carlson apologize for you. Now, don't worry, Tucker's apology was also an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. you can't expect a tiger to change his spots or a trust fund racist to lose his anti-Semitism.

But it's progress. But it's not just Trump's talking heads who are changing their tune. The actual Americans who voted for Trump, his actual fans, are seeing what's happening and they don't like it. If you could say something to President Trump and he was going to hear you right now,

what would it be? You're a worthless pile of shit. And you voted for him, how many times? Three times. That was my bad. Apparently, I'm an idiot. That was it. That was the perfect human apology.

Maybe the first good apology that's ever been given, actually. It's direct. It acknowledges error and provides explanation without making an excuse. Trump is a worthless pile of shit lady. Thank you for this, really. And you know, maybe folks like Trump is a worthless pile of shit lady are mad because Trump is actually making their lives and all of our lives worse. Remember how Trump was supposed to be president low prices?

Well, the longer the war continues, the less that's true, because it's not just gas prices going up. It is everything prices. The cost of flying is heading up, if we're lucky to have any fuel left after all of this. And the cost of food, which is dependent on fertilizer passing through the Strait of Hormuz, is getting jacked up too. Even condom prices are going up. Trump has literally raised the price of fucking. And, you know, maybe that doesn't bother him. After all, who needs to worry about protection when you're mostly fucking yourself?

Because while, yes, Trump's self-sabotage screws all of us over, I mean, every household in the U.S. has now paid an extra $200 in fuel costs already since the war began. It is also screwing him. Because Trump, the man who wants nothing more than to be admired, is now watching his public approval fall to an all-time low and his party's chances in the midterms dwindle. So, you know, we have to ask if the American people are losing, and in fact Trump himself, one of the most, selfish people alive is losing, who exactly is profiting from all of this? Well, in this video, I will explain exactly who's profiting and why. And I'm also going to explain why Trump's self-defeating Iran war and its oil shock actually fits a pattern.

It illuminates the way that Trump has already been fucking over all of America, our very country's prosperity, with his insane and ultimately self-destructive energy policy. Now, before we dive into that, I want to thank our sponsor Ground News for supporting this video. You know, following the war in Iran is not easy. There is so much happening every day. There's so much commentary and analysis coming out with every type of bias. The fog of war creates a fog of content, and it can be hard to navigate without a lamp. Well, ground news is an amazing tool for keeping up with huge complex and fast-changing stories like this one.

They pull headlines from all across the web into one space, and then they show you the political slant for each source. and the overall political slant for each story. And this is so helpful for sorting through what is happening in Iran, where hundreds of outlets are writing about the same story every day. I mean, check out this story from today about Iran offering to unblock the street of Ramuz, but refusing to give up its nuclear material.

You can see that the story has been covered a bit more on the right than on the left, but all of them are covering it, but you can use ground news to check out the differences in coverage between the right and the left. And if you subscribe to ground, They have this awesome feature where you can check out who owns the company that published a particular headline and see just how factual a report is. So if you want to be able to piece together the truest, smartest picture of what's happening in Iran or anything else happening anywhere in the world, join me and my team here in using Ground News.

If you use my special code factually, you can get 40% off. Just go to groundnews.com slash factually. So something kind of weird about Trump is that he has an unaccountable, nearly religious conviction that, fossil fuel is good. This man has never met Kingsford Brickette. He didn't want to grab by the Clissy. And it's not just that he thinks that fossil fuels are good. He thinks that renewable energy is bad.

Even more bizarrely, he thinks that like the very idea of efficiency, you know, using less energy and saving money on your energy bill, he thinks that that is bad. Like you remember how your dad used to yell at you for leaving the lights on when you leave a room because you're wasting money? Trump is the opposite. He wants you to leave America's lights on, leave our fridge doors open, and stick our heads

in the oven. I mean, he didn't just reverse the ruling that allowed the executive branch to regulate greenhouse gases. I mean, the man literally seems to have a personal vendetta against energy-efficient appliances. So the new light bulb costs you five times as much, and it makes you look orange. Anybody have a new dishwasher?

I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for that. It's worthless. We won't talk about toilets, but you know that's a... 10, 50s. But we don't talk about that. Okay, first of all, whatever happened to that fresh-faced and energetic young man?

Why, that can't be our desiccated and worn out Donald. This is from 2020, and you can really feel the emotion behind his hatred for energy-efficient dishwashers. What a performer. And that personal scorn is now public policy. Last year, the EPA got rid of the Energy Star program, which helped direct people towards energy-saving appliances. It was an incredibly popular program.

It didn't cost anybody extra. money. In fact, it helped both appliance makers and consumers save money. So trying to get rid of it was bonkers. And the bonkers behavior continues because, well, just take a look at the White House's AI slot video that they posted to celebrate the end of an Obama era program that encouraged carmakers to add fuel-efficient stop-start features. Now look, there's a lot of drivers out there who don't like auto-stop-start. I don't really have a strong opinion about that, but this ad is ridiculous. I mean, first of all, The non-AI Siddi Sweeney would never be caught dead drinking a coke heavy.

Everyone knows she made a lifelong commitment to only drink water at age 12, one of Sydney's many extremely normal beliefs. And those blue-haired lesbians in the Prius, I mean, talk about problematic. You expect me to believe these women are puttering around in a Toyota and not racing to their lakehouse in a Subaru cross track, and you're not even going to try to show their special needs rescue dogs, Tegan and Sarah yapping in the back. That is Bush League stereotyping.

So look, this ad doesn't just highlight the laziness of the White House's social media team made up of racist virgins. It also demonstrates that his energy policy isn't based on facts or efficiency, but just pure blind hatred. I mean, Trump hates clean energy so much, he will literally waste money to stop it from being built. I mean, last month, the Trump administration paid a French company won billion dollars to stop building wind farms, which would have generated electricity for Americans clean lives. and instead invest that money in fossil fuels for export. Yeah, that's right. Rather than lower Americans' energy bills,

that money will now go to exported gas production in the Gulf for other countries. And again, he spent money to waste this money. Because look, you know, we have this stereotype in America that clean energy costs more, that we have to give something up to use the greener option and save the planet. You know, like a rich mom deciding to spend more money

to get less organic produce at Whole Foods because it's better for you and better for the planet. But that is literally not true anymore. Wind and solar energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Clean energy isn't Whole Foods, it's a fucking Costco rotisserie chicken.

And just like a factory farm chicken, it is growing at a wild rate. Last year, renewables generated more electricity than coal, and the growth in solar power last year was the largest for any energy source ever. The green energy energy, transition is here. It has happened. It is no longer Ed Begley Jr. paying a lot of money for a

cookie electric car to drive to his Hollywood mansion. I mean, I've been to Ed's house. It's not actually that big. But the point is, clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels, and Trump is canceling clean energy projects, which means we are paying more. Trump's war on clean energy is actually a war on cheap energy, and that means he is forcing us to pay more than we have to. One place where you can really see where we're losing out is electric vehicles, or as they're starting to call them in the rest of the world vehicles. Remember, Trump's insane Iran war led to the biggest one-month increase in oil prices ever, which means there has never been a smarter time in history to buy a car that does not need oil.

So in Europe, the largest car market after the U.S., people bought a shi-ton of EVs the moment the war started. So the same thing should happen here in this United States, right? No. Wrong. It would be more, it would make more sense to go, wrong. Put that in because people should know that I, that, you know, about the process. So the same thing should happen here in these United States, right?

Wrong. Here, new EV sales in March went down year over year. Is that because European EV car dealers are just that much better at the jobs they barely go to? Did they stop taking three hour breaks in the middle of the day to drink wine and smoke cigarettes? No, it's policy. Last year, Trump canceled the tax incentive for, EVs made in the United States, and he made it more expensive and in many cases impossible to buy foreign EVs by tariffing them into oblivion.

I mean, Chinese EVs are cheaper and better than basically any American car. BYD's Dolphin Mini Plus can get 252 miles on a single charge, and in Mexico, it costs just $23,000 bucks. That's $13,000 less than the starting price of the cheapest Tesla. And that's before you mark up the Tesla for the amount of your dignity you'll have to pay to buy it. Now look, the fact that Americans have to pay more to get less car is also the fault of our car companies. For decades, they have been making even traditional gas cars more and more expensive and less and less affordable by making them ever larger, more luxurious, and hence

more profitable to them. They have basically killed the affordable American car, and likewise, that has pushed EV prices out of reach for everyone besides the rich. So these tariffs aren't really protecting the American car industry. They're coddling Ford and General Motors like Widotini babies, protecting them from the Chinese competition that would force them to make cars we can actually afford, that would force them to make American EVs that are better, cheaper, or that even fucking exist.

So as a result, people in China, Europe, and Mexico, and other countries are able to use those cheap EVs that we don't get to completely avoid the worst impact of Trump's stupid war, while Americans have to keep buying fucking gas. His dumb-ass foreign policy is making oil more expensive, and his dumb-ass energy policy is forcing us to use the oil he just made expensive. So all of this is a perfect example of why energy efficiency and, you know, clean energy are just good things.

They're not ideological, they're not liberal, they're not leftist. They just make your society more efficient, and that means your country can get more done more cheaply than other countries that don't. Missing out on the Green Energy Revolution is like missing out on the discovery of the internal combustion engine. By keeping us locked on fossil fuels, Trump is making us weaker and poorer as a country than we would be otherwise. And we are paying more for everything. So if the people of America are suffering, if we are paying more for basic necessities, And if Trump is actually being harmed politically by all of this, well, again, who is benefiting?

Well, surprise, surprise, the only ones benefiting are the fossil fucking fuel companies. The oil industry is cashing in from the war in Iran. Not only are they making huge profits from spiking prices. They are reinvesting billions of that money into even more oil exploration to further entrench this industry that is literally impoverishing us and murdering. our future. This is not an American industry that makes us all more wealthy. It's an American industry that is sucking money out of our pockets and enriching themselves at our expense. And at Trump's political expense. So you have to ask, why is Trump doing this? Is he corrupt? Or is he just a stupid old insane man? Well, as my therapist said, when I asked her if I'm crazy or if

everyone hates me, Adam, both things can be true. I mean, the argument for outright corruption is pretty compelling. During his 2024 campaign, Trump literally promised the oil industry he would scrap Biden's energy policy for a billion bucks. Now, he ended up getting a fraction of that, but you know, a fraction of a billion is

many, many millions. And the oil industry was an essential source of corporate money for Trump's campaign. And ever since Trump has been in office, well, he has given the fossil fuel industry everything it could have ever dreamed of. He's undone environmental rules. He has showered it with tax incentives, and he has placed

fossil fuel cronies in charge of agencies that regulate their industry. Like, for instance, the oil executive and now Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. Here's this dickhead's genius take on our energy future. I'm pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production when I die. I mean, this man is saying this. Just as renewables surpassed coal in electricity generation. That is fucking stupid. I'm not even going to write a joke.

It's just dumb. There is a willful denial of reality going on here that is the same as Trump's. You look at everything he's done, from energy policy to the war in Iran, and it's all self-defeating, to America's interest, to his voters' interests, even to his own political interests. In fact, Trump's actions are so dumb. They are actually ultimately going to harm the interests of the very fossil fuel industry that is bankrolling him, because the final irony,

is that all of this, the oil shock, the Iran War, all of it, is actually hastening the Green Revolution. Because of the oil shock, sales of EVs, plug-ins, solar, and batteries are now surging all over the world. Countries are pledging to remove themselves from dependency on the fossil fuels that Trump is jacking up the prices of. And countries as far apart as France, India, Egypt, South Korea, Japan, and the UK are making a huge push,

towards renewables, investing billions to transform their energy systems because of Trump's actions. So at the end of the day, you have to conclude that, yeah, Trump may be corrupt, but he is also just a crazy, stupid old man who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. I mean, asking what is Trump's master plan

is kind of like asking what grandpa's master plan is right after he pisses his pants. Eventually, you just gotta stop asking, you gotta buy him a diaper, and you got to just kick him out of the house. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown.

And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast, That Was Us, now on HeadGum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive from our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes.

A little bit. Are we going to laugh? A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify. New episodes every Tuesday.