Tom: Dad, Trucker, Razorback

My name doesn’t matter. I run a small trucking company in central Arkansas. Seven employees. Been doing it for nineteen years. I pay my taxes. I file my paperwork. I follow the regulations because that’s what you do when you live in a country built on the idea that the rules apply to everyone.

What country am I’m living in right now.

Reuters reported today that Russia will collect $9 billion in oil tax revenue this April alone — double what it made last month — because of the energy price spike caused by the US war on Iran. Nine billion dollars. In one month. Into Putin’s war machine. Because of a war the United States started.

I’m paying $6 a gallon to fuel my trucks. My margins are gone. My guys are asking me if I can keep the doors open. And the country I voted for — the one that told me it was putting America first — just ran the most profitable month in Russian oil history.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a policy outcome.

And then this morning Reuters reports that a Chinese firm hired lobbyists with direct ties to Donald Trump Jr. and walked away with a win in Washington. Since Trump won reelection, there have been more than 380 new registrations as foreign lobbyists — higher than any comparable period under any of the last seven presidents.

Ballard Partners — the lobbying firm that employed both the White House Chief of Staff and the Attorney General — raked in over $88 million last year, with foreign governments and companies among its biggest clients. Saudi Arabia. Albania. Chinese-linked firms. TikTok. All paying for access to the same administration that told me it was draining the swamp.

I run a trucking company. If I tried to take money from a foreign government while making decisions that affected their interests, they’d put me in federal prison. There’s a word for that. Several words, actually.

But if you’re connected to the right people? If you went to the inauguration? If you put the right lobbyist on retainer? Washington is open for business. Your business. Their business. Any business except mine.

I am not a liberal. I am not a Democrat. I am a small business owner in Arkansas who has watched this administration start a war that doubled Russia’s oil revenue, welcome Chinese money through the side door they publicly rage against, and then tell me the rising prices are a “small price to pay.”

I paid. My employees paid. The developing world is paying with hunger.

Who got paid back?

Check the lobbying disclosures. Check the oil revenues. Check the inauguration donor list.

That’s not a conspiracy theory.

That’s a transaction.

And I’m done pretending I don’t see it.