One of the most oft-repeated conservative criticisms of President Biden concerned the price of gasoline, which briefly reached a national average of over $5 per gallon, mainly thanks to disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine. Republicans blamed Biden—as if he had a big button on his desk labeled “raise gas prices” he could not help but press over and over—and howled at him for attempting to mitigate the situation by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “He’s using the strategic reserves, which is meant for military, which is meant for war, and very important things,” Trump said in 2024. He promised he would “refill our reserves right up to the top again.”

Well, now Trump is in (what’s left of) the White House, and when it comes to the oil market, he has turned out to be even worse than the Republican caricature of Biden. While the Biden administration tried to prevent Russia’s war on Ukraine, and then dealt with the consequences for oil prices in an effective and rather clever fashion, Trump has started his own war of aggression that is if anything even more senseless than Putin’s, and having even worse effects on the global oil supply—and meanwhile, rather than keeping his promise, Trump apparently just forgot to refill the SPR when prices were low.

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Wind the clock back to 2022, when supply disruptions from the Ukraine invasion were really starting to bite, and Biden went hat in hand to Saudi Arabia to beg for them to pump more oil. The Saudi leadership, enjoying some easy superprofits and possibly hoping to make Biden lose in 2024, told him to pound sand.

So Biden turned into maybe the biggest commodity trader in history. He sold off some 180 million barrels out of the SPR, at about $95 a barrel, and promised to start buying it back once the price dipped down to $67–$72. About a year later, when the target price was hit, Biden started buying, making a cool $582 million in profit for the taxpayer on the first batch of orders. In the process, gas prices went down by about 40 cents. No less than The Economist called him a “master oil trader.”

The interesting thing about this trade was not just that it cut gas prices for American drivers (which was helpful for individuals but bad for the climate) but also how it set an example of how government might guide all manner of markets. The global oil market, like most commodity markets, tends to be highly erratic—depending not just on thousands of production and distribution networks spread all over the globe, but also highly complex associated financial markets and the whims of oil-producing states like Russia and Saudi Arabia. That’s a recipe for major and unpredictable price swings.

Biden’s big trade acted as a shock absorber for the entire oil system. By selling off such a huge amount, and credibly promising to keep doing it, he caused oil futures traders to assume the price was going to fall, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conversely, by credibly committing to start buying again once oil reached a lower price—just a bit above where fracking pencils out, which was not a coincidence—Biden gave producers a strong incentive to invest and boost production, rather than holding back out of fear the price would soon collapse. That ensured that the price reduction created by selling off SPR oil would be sustained over the medium term—and in the process, it broke the stranglehold OPEC had on oil prices.

This kind of “price guardrails” strategy could be done in all kinds of markets where a consistent supply at a reasonably stable price is important—food, lithium, steel, copper, rare earth minerals, semiconductors, computer memory, you name it.

Alas, Trump and congressional Republicans learned nothing from Biden’s innovation. And despite attacking him over and over for dipping into the SPR, they simply neglected to fill it back up. Biden legally “bought” 200 million barrels, but most of that was canceling future planned sales. Only about 60 million barrels of actual orders were placed.

Now, the SPR can only take in about three million barrels a month, so Trump couldn’t have filled it all the way up. But that adds up to a theoretical maximum intake of 42 million barrels since he took office. Just 20 million barrels have actually been added, almost all of which were from orders Biden had placed. Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, requested $20 billion from congressional Republicans to fill it back up; he received less than $171 million. It seems the party was too focused on tax cuts and boosting funding for ICE storm troopers to bother.

So Biden handed Trump arguably the most powerful weapon for stabilizing the price of oil in history, and Trump (and his party) completely neglected it. Then he started a war that has disrupted the oil market more than any conflict since the Second World War. As my colleague James Baratta recently detailed, a fifth of global oil production passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and with traffic almost totally halted, fields in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are being forced to ramp down production. The longer this goes on, the longer it will take to turn them back on. As we learned in 2022, a serious supply disruption can lead to aftershocks that last for years—and shutting the Strait of Hormuz is maybe an order-of-magnitude bigger disruption than the Ukraine shock. An oil price of $200 a barrel is not at all implausible, should the closure persist.

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Now the administration has put out an APB on how to deal with the price shock, when a proven solution was staring them in the face and they ignored it. Marco Rubio’s solution is apparently to whine that Iran is “trying to hold the world hostage,” which is pretty rich considering who struck whose critical infrastructure first. Whenever Trump is asked about the crisis, he sounds like he sounds on every other topic: running his mouth, saying whatever pops into his head that seems to sound good. There has been some discussion of an SPR release coordinated with the G7, but the only actual option the administration has presented thus far that might have some effect on prices is to relax sanctions on Russian oil exports. Funny how that works!

Oil traders seem to be assuming that Trump will chicken out. Though futures and the spot price of oil spiked on Monday to over $115, it fell back down below $85 at time of writing, after Trump floated that the war was nearing its end, though he later took that back. For the moment, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes continue, as do Iranian counterattacks. Trump has pronounced himself “not happy” with the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei to be the next supreme leader. It would not be difficult for Iran to keep the strait mostly closed even if its conventional military is wiped out, as attack drones are relatively easy to build and conceal, and oil tankers are incredibly huge and slow. Iran doesn’t even have to sink any of them, just convince insurance companies it’s not worth risking billions of dollars in losses. And as I was finishing this article, American intelligence told reporters that Iran is starting to put mines in the strait.

Ultimately, the next step is anybody’s guess. But one thing is clear: Trump is by far the most callous, careless, idiotic bungler ever to hold high American office. Bitter anti-American critics used to accuse this country of laying waste to the globe so that suburban McMansion dwellers could have cheap gas for their SUVs. If only the administration were that farsighted and rational.

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Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.