The war Trump's own voters are deserting is, it turns out, a boom time for the men who already own the country's refineries.

"There is a massive transfer of wealth occurring as billions around the world struggle with high energy prices while an elite few reap the windfall."

— Oil Change International

The war is unpopular. The war is, by several polls, the least popular war of Donald Trump's second term, and the one he has the least explained to the American public. A Reuters/Ipsos survey in late July found just 33 percent support for the fight with Iran, the lowest mark since it began, with 69 percent saying the president had failed to spell out what the operation was actually for.

But unpopularity has a funny way of becoming invisible when the money is flowing in the wrong direction: straight up.

In the second quarter of 2026, ExxonMobil and Chevron, the two largest oil companies in the United States, together booked $26.5 billion in net income. The Financial Times was blunt about why: the two firms "cashed in on surging crude and petrol prices caused by Donald Trump's Iran war."

The year-over-year numbers make the shape of the thing hard to miss. ExxonMobil's second-quarter earnings jumped from $7.08 billion in 2025 to $14.53 billion this year, a more than doubling, and its best quarter since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine sent prices skyward. Chevron is the more extreme case. Its second-quarter earnings went from $2.49 billion to $12.07 billion, a rise of roughly 384 percent, the largest quarterly haul in its history.

Translation: the war is not costing American industry. It is, for a small slice of American industry, printing money.

A Guardian study of the eight largest oil companies on the planet found the group collectively took in more than $90 billion over the spring quarter, which its authors put at "more than $700,000 of profit every minute."

The mechanism is simple, and it is worth stating plainly. The war has disrupted global oil and gas supply chains through strikes on infrastructure across the Middle East and, most importantly, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil moves. Scarcity raises price. Price raises margin. Margin flows to whoever can keep pumping and refining while everyone else is shut.

Integrated giants with operations everywhere, Exxon and Chevron chief among them, can do exactly that. The Financial Times reported both companies "have boosted production to near-record levels and are running refineries close to maximum capacity" to sell to the customers the conflict has squeezed. In a market where supply is constrained by war, the firm that is still supplying is the firm that sets the terms.

This is the part the windfall-tax crowd keeps pointing at. The New York Times summarized it without irony: "The longer the war drags on, the more profitable this year is likely to be for oil companies, which generally benefit when energy is scarce and prices are high."

The war, in other words, is a business model. The longer it runs, the better the quarter.

Money like this does not stay at the refinery. It climbs.

ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods has taken more than $113 million in total compensation since 2023, and held 374,437 shares worth roughly $60 million as of late February. Only about 10 percent of his direct pay is base salary; 70 percent is structured to move with long-term shareholder returns, which means his compensation is wired, by design, to the same war-driven stock surge that is moving the company's shares. Chevron's CEO, Mike Wirth, has taken over $86 million since 2023 and held 1,312,423 shares worth more than $250 million. On August 5, Wirth sold 5,547 of them, worth just over $10 million, a tidy exit while the war is still on and the stock is still up.

The boardrooms are built the same way, with stock awards as a chunk of director pay, and the directors themselves drawn from a small interlocking world of oil, defense, finance, and insurance. Board seats at Exxon and Chevron overlap with the boards and advisory roles at Meta, Lockheed Martin, Liberty Mutual, Mastercard, Raytheon, Caterpillar, Walmart, and the asset-manager giants that own their stock.

The interlock matters. It is not coincidence that the people who profit from the war and the people who advise and advise on the institutions that fund and staff it sit at the same tables.

At the top of the ownership stack sits the same Wall Street that has been driving the data center boom: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, the three largest holders of both Exxon and Chevron. BlackRock, which oversees $15.3 trillion, holds stakes in both; Berkshire Hathaway owns about 6.7 percent of Chevron, though it sold $8 billion of the stock in May as the price ran up.

In the second quarter alone, ExxonMobil returned $9.4 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, $4.3 billion in dividends and $5.1 billion in repurchases. That is a conveyor belt, running from the strait to the balance sheet, moving the profits of a war the country has not voted for and the president has not explained.

So who is paying? The people at the pumps. Oil Change International put it in one sentence, the one that should be on the front page of every earnings release: the billions around the world "struggle with high energy prices" while "an elite few reap the windfall."

There is a response, or at least the outline of one. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ro Khanna reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act this past March, a levy on the extra wartime margins that would, the sponsors say, raise tens of billions and return rebates of a few hundred dollars to households.

It has a long road, and the president's own party has spent two years treating the profit motive as a virtue to be protected rather than a thing to be checked. But the bill names the thing clearly, which is more than most of the public debate has done. It says out loud what the earnings reports are already saying: the war is being paid for twice. Once in bodies, on both sides, more than 3,400 Iranians dead by one count and dozens of American service members. And once in the pockets of a handful of executives and the funds they manage.

The war is unpopular. That is the fact the polling keeps confirming and the money keeps ignoring. But popularity has never been the thing a war needs to continue; it is the thing a war needs to end. What the windfall needs is the opposite of a popular audience. It needs a supply line still running, a strait still closed, and a board of directors who can watch the price go up and call it a strong quarter.

The question is not whether Big Oil is profiting from the war. The earnings are public, the numbers are huge, and the mechanism is plain. The question is why a president whose voters are leaving him at 33 percent support is still, every day, the best customer the fossil fuel complex has ever had.