Trump Just Drilled His Billionaire Oil Donor

On Liberation Day, Harold Hamm got what he paid for

This is a guest column by TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen. Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, a leading fracker and Trump fundraiser explained in a March 13, 2025, interview how Trump’s policies are hurting his business, only without putting it that way. (Screengrab / Bloomberg video.)

Remember how Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm was revealed as the Big Oil guy who organized that Mar-a-Lago fundraiser where Donald Trump asked oil and gas execs for a billion dollars?

Trump said he’d lower their taxes and regulatory costs by even more than a billion. Regulations were Hamm’s big priorities.

After the dinner, Hamm worked the phones and got even more Big Oil execs to pony up for Trump. He hosted a Vance fundraiser, too. Fossil fuel lobbyists started drafting executive orders for Trump to lower drilling costs, presumably by ditching rules that protect the rest of us.

On day one of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders in line with Hamm’s three top regulatory complaints.

Hamm also reportedly got Trump to put his friend and fellow fracker, Chris Wright, in charge of the Energy Department. Hamm’s buddy Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) got Interior, which oversees drilling on federal lands. Hamm called them a “dream team” and paid for a big inaugural bash.

With Pres. Joe Biden’s rules out of the way, Hamm and his fellow oil billionaires would now be free to “drill, baby, drill,” just as Trump promised. Never mind that under Biden they pumped record amounts and saw profits higher than under Trump.

Less than three months into the second Trump presidency, things aren’t working out how Hamm planned.

Since Trump’s been in office, oil prices have plummeted. Especially recently, thanks to Trump’s newest tariffs.

That’s more than just a ding to oil profits. If oil gets too cheap, it no longer makes sense to invest in producing more.

And if the cost of drilling goes up, too, that makes the math even tougher. With that in mind, let’s review the year in Hamm so far, shall we?

January

Weak Chinese demand starts dragging oil down below $80 per barrel. How cheap can oil get before it’s not worth new drilling anymore? That’d be $80 per barrel, according to Hamm.

February

On Feb. 10, Trump announces he’ll slap a tariff on imported steel, adding 25% to the cost as of March 12. (Trump’s first-term steel tariffs did boost the U.S. steel industry, but hurt the rest of the economy.)

On Feb. 28, the New York Times reports that the price of steel is already rising in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs. And that oil companies are already revising budgets to account for higher material costs. Ruh-roh.

March

On March 12, Trump’s steel tariffs go into effect.

On March 13, Bloomberg posts an interview with Hamm. As Hamm explains, steel tariffs don’t help you drill, baby, drill if you line the walls of your wells with steel casings to keep the passages clear. Which he does.

On average, steel accounts for about 10% of the cost of drilling, baby, drilling a new well.

And steel is even more expensive for frackers. How come? Their wells aren’t just more complex, they also don’t just drill straight down. Frackers drill both deeper and laterally further than other wells.

Here’s what Hamm tells Bloomberg about the steel tariffs the day after they kicked in:

“One thing that we use a whole lot of is steel and we’ll have to see how this washes out with steel tariffs … that’s another thing that can add a great deal of cost to what we do…

“When you drill in a two-mile-deep well — two miles out to the right; four miles of tubers, casing, and tubing to complete that well — there’s a tremendous amount of cost that goes into it, so seeing how these tariffs, you know, play out in the end is going to be important.”

In other words, the cost of drilling is going up at the same time the return on that investment is going down with the falling price of oil. The low gas prices that his candidate promised turn out to be directly at odds with “Drill, baby, drill.” As Hamm says:

“When you get below the cost of supply, you know, you can’t drill, baby, drill. That shuts you down.”

Apparently, Hamm missed the fact that, earlier in March, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said Trump’s plan for inflation is to bring oil prices down to about $50 per barrel. Well below Hamm’s $80 threshold.

And as for Trump’s “dream team,” Hamm’s buddy Wright’s plan for oil companies to drill anyway, despite the low return on investment, is that the companies would “innovate” ways to drill cheaper. In other words the Trump administration’s plan at this point is to raise the cost of drilling, lower the price of gas, and count on oil companies to survive and drill more, anyway, because…they’ll invent stuff. In short: Magic.

On March 19, Hamm and other oil execs get a meeting with Trump. The agenda: Concerns about tariffs and falling oil prices. (Apparently Hamm hasn’t innovated yet.)

While the U.S. only imports about 13% of its steel, putting tariffs on those imports means domestic steel makers can raise their prices, too. Which they have.

April

On Liberation Day, April 2, Trump’s new tariffs exempt steel — but don’t end the 25% steel tariff from March. And throwing up a bigger protectionist wall than the U.S. has had in a century rocks the global economy in other ways affecting Hamm.

By April 4, yesterday, oil prices are down even more. That’s because traders are now expecting a broad-based global downturn — which will depress demand for gas.

And other nations decided not to cut oil production as expected. Meaning there’s more oil supply than anticipated, so prices go down even more.

Hamm yesterday told the Financial Times he still supports Trump’s plans. For now:

“But it is also true that you cannot drill, baby, drill if you are producing oil and gas below the cost of supply. Shale producers hope the current market turbulence is a temporary situation so they can deliver on the president’s agenda to unleash American energy dominance.”

Today

Because Hamm’s company is privately owned, stock tickers aren’t tracking his daily suffering as a result of Trump’s policies.

But we can look at his peers. Wright’s old company is Liberty Energy. And yesterday, CNBC’s headline about Liberty read, “U.S. energy secretary’s former company crushed by oil sell-off after Trump tariff escalation.”

Liberty was liberated of almost a third of its value in just two days after Liberation Day.

The benchmark crude-oil price as of Friday was almost down to $60 per barrel, the lowest it’s been since no one was going anywhere during the pandemic.

According to Saul Kavonic, who heads energy research for MST Marquee, frackers “have been very big supporters and have a close relationship with Trump, [but] are not going to be happy with this.”

Kavonic told CNBC, “If you start to see further downward pressure here… that’s going to put pressure on the folks down in Texas and Louisiana and elsewhere to pull off the rigs and not drill [baby, drill] as much.”

Oil Blindness

Hamm’s been a fan of tariffs in the past. When the pandemic cratered demand, Hamm wanted Trump to slap tariffs on imported oil to raise the price at U.S. gas pumps.

But Hamm doesn’t seem to have thought much about tariffs on the materials he needs, or the power of broad tariffs to do just what the pandemic did and crater oil demand.

Consider Continental’s regulatory filings. The company’s not publicly traded, but does have to disclose some information to the federal government — more of those regulations Hamm hates. But those regulations also require Hamm to flag risks to his business.

Which he seems to have ignored.

Hamm’s February 2024 annual report, however, did have multiple warnings about the threats posed by the Biden administration. Continental complained that past and possible future Biden legislation and regulations represented potentially “significant liabilities.” Complying, or failing to comply, “could have a material adverse effect” on Continental.

“President Biden, in pursuit of his regulatory agenda, has issued, and may continue to issue, executive orders that result in more stringent and costly requirements.” Brrr! Scary!

The alleged threats posed by Biden didn’t prevent Continental from clocking $2 billion in profits last year as the nation’s 13th biggest oil producer.

By contrast, the February 2025 annual report had no mention of the risks to Continental posed by Trump. Even though Trump has campaigned on imposing tariffs again.

…and even though both financial reports warned multiple times of the risks posed by, you guessed it, tariffs and trade restrictions.

But until last month, Hamm seems to have ignored the threat of tariffs that his own company was required by Democratic regulations to flag and that his own candidate was promising.

Accounts of Hamm’s priorities during the campaign last year didn’t mention tariffs, even though Trump did. Hamm’s 2023 book doesn’t mention tariffs.

Continental didn’t lobby Trump about tariffs during his first term. (And didn’t lobby Biden at all. Presumably because of cooties.)

And when Continental registered to start lobbying again this year, its lobbyists disclosed that they’d focus on legislation and regulations (presumably rolling back Biden’s). There was nothing about tariffs or even trade. That registration was filed Feb. 13, three days after Trump announced his steel tariff.

In other words, it’s quite possible that Hamm saw Democratic regulations — which didn’t prevent record drilling and profits — as a threat simply because he doesn’t like hearing “no” from people who sometimes stand up for people who don’t look or act like Hamm. So he went with Trump.

It didn’t matter that Hamm preferred Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) or former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) as the 2024 GOP candidate. It didn’t matter that Trump mocked Hamm for paying his ex-wife $1 billion in their divorce.

For whatever reason, Hamm appears to have been blinded to the threats posed by a documented con man, even though his company’s own filings warned of the dangers posed by the very tariff policies the con man ran on.

In Hamm’s case, at least, maybe the operative word in “drill, baby, drill” isn’t “drill.” Maybe it’s the implication that Big Oil executives aren’t business geniuses, they’re just babies.