Good morning! Grand Island, Nebraska is a harvest town in October. The combines are out, the grain trucks are running, and all of them burn diesel, a fuel that has been setting price records all fall.
That’s where the president goes today, and it’s the only substantive item on his schedule: a rally at the Nebraska State Fair’s Pinnacle Bank Expo Center for Sen. Pete Ricketts, one stop on a midterm swing through states that shouldn’t need the attention. Trump hasn’t set foot in Nebraska since 2022. He carried it comfortably twice. When a Republican incumbent there needs a presidential visit with less than a month to go, the party is telling you how it reads the map. Last month, most of the state’s Republican officeholders found reasons to skip the party’s midterm convention in Texas, while Trump’s approval rating sank to 32%.
The farmers in that expo hall have reason to ask about the price of diesel. Trump’s ready answer doesn’t survive the numbers.
Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February, the national average for diesel has climbed nearly 65%, topping $6 a gallon in September, an all-time high. Gasoline gets the headlines, but diesel is the fuel the economy actually runs on. When gasoline spikes, people drive less. A farmer halfway through harvest doesn’t have that option. He pays, and the cost shows up later at the grocery store.
The squeeze is in refining. Before the war, turning a barrel of crude into diesel added about $20 to its price. In September that margin hit a record $108.
Trump’s explanation came on September 13, at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland. The shortage “isn’t done by the Middle East,” he told reporters, and Zelensky “has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.” Two weeks later, at Joint Base Andrews, he called it “more of a Russia problem.”
Here’s what the record shows. The United States hasn’t imported Russian diesel since 2022. Russia’s exports had already collapsed to about 150,000 barrels a day, down 81% from their five-year average, partly because Moscow banned diesel exports itself in July. The International Energy Agency puts it plainly: combined net diesel exports from the Gulf and Russia, which together made up almost 45% of the world’s seaborne trade, fell by 1.6 million barrels a day between February and August. Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries are real. But they hit a market the Iran war had already drained, and the Gulf share of that loss traces directly to the US - Iran war. A senior European official, speaking to Politico, called the idea that Russian diesel matters to American consumers “absurd.”
The administration recently threatened to restrict American diesel exports as prices climbed. That sounds intuitively appealing, keep more diesel here, lower American prices, except the United States is now one of the world’s essential suppliers of refined petroleum products. Restricting exports can distort refinery economics, reduce incentives to produce and push global prices still higher, eventually feeding back into the American market.
The administration backed away after the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels of oil and diesel from strategic reserves, with a heavy diesel release in the first 20 days and a pledge of no export restrictions among members. Trump then declared the ban had been “never really on the table,” less than two weeks after telling reporters, “I’ve called for it.”
We have reached the stage of energy policy where the world’s leading economies are repeatedly dipping into emergency stockpiles to stabilize the consequences of a war the White House still describes as going very well.
While the president is in Grand Island, the Supreme Court opens its new term with a question that sits right next to the diesel story. The diesel crisis is about who pays for the war. This case is about who pays for the weather.
Since 2018, the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, have been suing Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil in state court. Boulder wants the companies to cover part of what local taxpayers already spend protecting property and residents from the effects of climate change, and it alleges the companies spent years misleading the public about what their products were doing to the planet. Colorado’s Supreme Court allowed the case to proceed. The companies asked the justices to end it, and dozens of similar suits around the country are waiting on the answer.
The companies’ argument is that climate change is too global for any state court to handle. In their view, the Constitution leaves cross-border pollution and foreign affairs to Washington, and the Clean Air Act hands the job to the EPA. The Trump administration filed a brief on their side, dismissing Boulder’s case as a “butterfly-effect theory of state authority.”
Boulder’s reply has the detail worth remembering. The administration’s own EPA has recently suggested the Clean Air Act may not authorize it to regulate some greenhouse gas emissions, possibly any. Taken together, Boulder argues, the two positions threaten to leave communities with fewer avenues for recovering those costs: state claims displaced by federal law, while federal regulatory authority is narrowed at the same time.
Costs flow down to taxpayers and local governments, and protection flows up to the producers. This case fits the same pattern as the diesel crisis.
There’s a wrinkle. Justice Samuel Alito, who owns oil and gas stock, announced on September 28 that he would sit out the case. With eight justices, a 4-4 tie would leave Colorado’s ruling in place, so Boulder’s suit would go forward, but without setting a national precedent. The justices could also avoid the merits altogether by ruling they lack jurisdiction, since the case hasn’t reached a final judgment in state court.
A decision likely won’t come before spring. This morning’s argument will show which way the justices lean.
Some of what this administration does can be undone by the next election. This can’t.
Across his two terms, Trump has put 31 people in their 30s on the federal bench, with at least two more nominations pending, according to a Politico analysis. Biden appointed 13 judges under 40. Obama, in eight years, appointed nine. The count looks lopsided, and it holds up even after adjusting for time in office: about five a year for Trump, a little over three for Biden, barely one for Obama. Federal judgeships are for life, and a judge confirmed in their 30s can serve for half a century or more. One sitting federal judge is 102.
The nominee who best explains the strategy is Samuel Adkisson, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office who was 33 when Trump picked him for a district court seat in eastern Tennessee, one of the youngest nominees ever. When Trump announced the nomination, he praised Adkisson’s work on the case that widened the president’s control over executive branch agencies. Helping expand presidential power was one of the credentials Trump chose to advertise while offering him a lifetime appointment. Adkisson’s confirmation hearing was delayed last week after Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, one of his home-state senators, declined to sign off. She hasn’t said why.
These appointments have consequences. Kathryn Kimball Mizelle was 33 when Trump put her on a Florida district court in 2020, over an American Bar Association rating of “not qualified,” largely for lack of experience. Less than two years later, she struck down the national mask mandate for planes and public transit with a single ruling. Orin Kerr, a Stanford law professor and no progressive, warned years ago that judges who reach the bench young may be the most tempted by judicial power.
Presidents leave. Their judges stay, and these will keep deciding cases about voting rights, agency power and the limits of the presidency long after anyone remembers who was press secretary in 2026.
Last month on Air Force One, Beni Rae Harmony, the White House correspondent for the pro-Trump network Real America’s Voice, asked the president a string of friendly questions. Associated Press photos of the exchange show Trump holding a sheaf of papers with her name at the top of the first page. TMZ suggested it may have been her résumé. On Friday, Harmony announced she’s joining the White House press office as an assistant press secretary.
The White House didn’t treat the timing as a problem. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly praised Harmony as “a trusted voice for the MAGA movement as a White House correspondent.” That’s the administration saying on the record that it valued her reporting as advocacy, and that the advocacy earned her the job. It’s the same pattern as Adkisson: his credential was expanding presidential power, hers was asking the president easy questions, and both were rewarded.
The setting matters. This White House has tried to bar CNN, Politico and MS NOW, and its aides now choose which outlets get to question the president, reserving slots for correspondents who openly support him. Harmony got the Real America’s Voice post after her predecessor, Brian Glenn, fell out of favor when his partner, Marjorie Taylor Greene, broke with Trump. Whatever anyone intended, the press pool has begun to look uncomfortably like a hiring pipeline.
The rest of her résumé fits. She’s worked for Turning Point USA, produced for Jack Posobiec, and handled press for Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz. In 2021 she recorded a defense of Gosar after the House censured him for posting an animated video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her right-wing profile grew in 2025 when she said a Springfield, Illinois, TV station suspended her over an on-air tribute to Charlie Kirk. The station’s news director says she wasn’t suspended and was never part of the news team. She hosted a sales-department show where clients paid to be interviewed.
Then there’s the photo making the rounds: Harmony in 2021, holding a rifle in a “F— Joe Biden” shirt next to her uncle, in front of Christmas decorations. The rifle photo is ugly, but the real story is how easily the distance between covering the White House and joining it disappeared.
Look at the day as a whole and the sorting is plain. Farmers, truckers and Boulder taxpayers get the bill. Oil majors get a federal brief arguing no court can touch them. A 33-year-old who helped widen presidential power gets a lifetime seat, and a correspondent who asked the right questions gets a job. In Grand Island tonight, the president will ask Nebraska farmers to keep his party in charge while blaming Ukraine for what they pay at the pump.
Not all of it can be undone in November. Judges keep their seats, and the Supreme Court will rule on its own schedule. But accountability isn’t only what courts and elections deliver. It’s the record: who said what, when, and what it cost. People in power behave differently when they know the record is being kept and will be read. That’s why it’s worth keeping.
So keep it. If someone tells you the diesel shortage is Ukraine’s fault, give them the numbers. The next time the White House calls an export ban “never really on the table,” point to the week it was. Share what you know with someone who doesn’t follow this as closely as you do.
Double check your registration today, not next week. The election is 29 days away. The bill has gone out, and on November 3 voters get to decide where it lands.