Media Construct Conspiracy Theories About Trump’s Diesel Deal

President Donald Trump explained he wants more diesel on the market to lower costs for American “farmers, ranchers, and truckers” in announcing a new diesel deal with Russia. The propaganda press quickly responded to the affordability measure by rerunning the long-debunked “Trump is a Putin puppet” playbook.

“The president’s diesel deal sells out Ukraine, and does nothing for Americans,” writes The Atlantic’s David Frum.

“For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices,” Frum wrote. Frum himself has done little to hide his open disdain for the president, going so far as to try and victim-blame Trump for nearly being assassinated in Butler two years ago. Nor has Frum tried to hide his bloodthirst for war, gloating in a National Review article that people who questioned the invasion of Iraq in the days after its launch were antisemites “yearning for defeat.”

“But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale,” he continued.

Frum goes on to provide readers with a familiar framework for understanding the announcement: Nancy Pelosi’s baseless accusation that, with Trump, “all roads lead to Putin.”

Questioning whether a fuel purchase will lower prices is one thing, but insinuating hidden loyalties and multibillion-dollar corruption is another. Frum suggested the rationale behind the deal is a sinister one, a convenient approach for Frum and the rest of the propaganda press to take since it continues their favorite narrative that they’ve spent decades building: Whatever Trump’s stated objectives, his actions are really because of a hidden loyalty to Moscow.

The propaganda press has long peddled the Russia collusion hoax to undermine his presidency and the political objectives of those who elected him. One notable example is when Democrats and the legacy media falsely claimed that Trump negligently failed to act when Russia allegedly placed bounties on the heads of American troops (notably, both the Biden and Trump administrations’ assessments of such claims showed little to no confidence in the intelligence). In a simliar fashion the legacy media have weaponized the diesel deal to spin a conspiracy theory about a president with allegiance to a foreign adversary who makes his stated concern for Americans merely a cover story.

This is why the Americans paying higher diesel prices to fuel their tractors and trucks — a direct result of the Ukraine-Russia war — were not the top consideration of Frum. Instead, they were people Trump only “claims to be serving.”

But Trump explicitly identified how a deal would benefit those Americans. According to the announcement, Russia would make approximately 300,000 tons of diesel available to the United States and global markets, followed by another 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons afterward. But the possibility that the agreement might deliver relief is just a side note for the media, because the real point of the story is insinuating that Trump is really serving Putin.

“Trump’s US-Russia diesel deal draws bipartisan criticism,” CNN announced, framing the deal not as an affordability win, but as Trump “defying a federal law meant to crackdown on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.” (CNN cited Congress’s ban on “energy imports from Russia in 2022 to ‘prevent American dollars from financing Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine.’”)

Yet in the same article, CNN acknowledged how “skyrocketing fuel prices” are a major problem, before citing doubts about “whether Putin even has the amount of diesel that Trump cited to sell” and whether the quantities will have major effects on energy prices. CNN’s own description established the domestic problem while framing the administration’s efforts to address the real problem as problematic.

The BBC‘s headline likewise framed the announcement as a problem: “Trump announces deal for Russian diesel as Zelensky calls it a gift to Putin.” The headline emphasized Putin, rather than the truckers, farmers, and ranchers that Trump actually cited as the beneficiaries, to peddle the idea that the deal was struck to please Putin.

Politico offered: “Trump’s Russian diesel deal draws GOP, European pushback — and industry shrug.” Its coverage includes objections by Senate RINO’s Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn, who called the deal a “gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.”

The article included objections from European leaders, with Politico writing: “European leaders from Ireland to Latvia warned that Trump’s announcement would undermine Ukraine’s campaign against Russia. ‘This deal doesn’t help neither the price of oil products nor the unity of the transatlantic community,’ said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys.”

While Europe’s leader may be quick to criticize Trump, Europe has continued buying Russian energy throughout the war, further undermining the media narrative that buying fuel from Russia is allegiance to Putin. According to the European Commission’s own figures, the EU has imported $209 billion “worth of energy between March 2022 and July 2026.”

These are foreign policy objections, and those objections would likely exist regardless of whether the deliveries were large enough to lower Americans’ fuel bills. Increasing supply would not resolve the complaint from foreign nations that they dislike the deal.

Rarely touched on in any of these pieces — if at all — is that Trump’s stated interest isn’t our so-called “allies” or Ukraine. Trump’s stated interest — as it should be — is Americans struggling with rising fuel prices thanks to this seemingly never-ending war.

Their bills do not become less important because European opposition is loud — or because corporate media want to rerun the Russia collusion hoax — nor should Americans be expected to pay to preserve Washington’s preferred foreign policy toward Russia. Diesel deal or not, nothing will get in the way of the propaganda press’s preferred narrative that Trump is a Putin puppet, even if Americans have to suffer for it.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2