The energy markets, which typically favor stability and predictability, responded with little more than a shrug.
Crude prices dipped slightly and gas prices remained steady. Even as the war stretches past the six-month mark and the midterms creep closer, Trump has been able to keep retail prices lower than experts say they should be through the sheer power of promises – which have yet to come through – of a swift end to the conflict. On Monday, he took that a step further, chastising the major oil companies for “making too much money” off global oil shortages as a result of the war.
“They better cut the retail price, the consumer price,” Trump said. “I’ll say it loud and clear. I’m not happy about it.”
But Trump’s ability to jawbone the markets may be diminishing at a critical time, three months before the midterm elections when control of Congress is hanging in the balance and his approval is sinking to new lows amid voter anger over cost of living concerns. It comes as global crude oil supplies are running low, the war threatens more energy flows, refiners are running out of spare capacity and the administration has few tools to keep gas prices low.
“Labor Day is the point where gas prices are baked into the election,” said Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “That last summer trip determines how voters evaluate their cost of living.”
And the higher gas prices come at a time when Trump repeatedly promises to escalate the war and then says it’s almost over a few hours or days later. That is starting to degrade his ability to cause price drops, a former adviser cautioned.
“His credibility has been a little bit shot,” said a former Trump adviser close to the White House, granted anonymity to avoid reprisal.
“The markets aren’t paying attention to him, they’re paying attention to what’s happening and, with respect to oil prices, it is a huge liability for the Republicans,” the adviser said.
Trump on Monday acknowledged that dynamic but expressed no urgency. He told reporters in the Oval Office that he was in no rush to end the conflict, though he acknowledged the need to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of global energy supplies flowed before the war. He hinted at the midterm stakes for his party if the conflict does not end soon.
“I’m under no time constraint,” he said. “I don’t happen to be running, but a lot of very good Republicans are running.”
Trump’s ability to move the markets may be the only tool the administration has left to keep gas prices in check, said Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher and founder of the Commodity Context newsletter.
The Trump administration has drawn down the U.S. Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level since President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Oil majors are warning that the lack of refinery capacity could keep prices high for the foreseeable future.
“The market is so entrenched on this idea that eventually this will resolve by Trump deciding and ceding some ground on some issue, likely kind of even symbolic control of the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “So the market’s going to be constantly watching for any sign that he’s shifting there.”
While experts continue to marvel at Trump’s ability to get the markets to bend to his whims, there is little consensus on when that power will dissipate.
Trump has “less credibility” in terms of moving markets, but it has not totally dissipated, Patrick de Haan, head of petroleum analysis at pricing service GasBuddy.
“I don’t think credibility completely goes to zero,” he said. “Hard to know though when it really bends.”
Trump’s push to keep energy prices low has also been buoyed by reduced Chinese oil imports, the successful rerouting of about 7 million barrels per day of Saudi Arabian crude through the Red Sea and releases from strategic petroleum reserves.
The administration released nearly 3 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last week, bringing the reserves down to their lowest level since February 1983, according to Department of Energy data. About half of the 218.5 million barrels the Department of Energy said it would make available to the market have now left the salt caverns along the Gulf Coast.
As the summer driving season winds down, consumers expect gas prices to fall as well.
If the national average price of a gallon of gas is still above $4 by Saturday, de Haan noted, it will set a new record for the latest in the calendar year that prices are so high.
President Donald Trump turned up the heat on Exxon Mobil and Chevron over high gasoline prices on Monday, blasting his longtime industry allies for “making too much money” while Americans struggle with higher prices at the pump.
Oil majors have reported bumper quarterly earnings, buoyed by higher crude prices caused by the supply disruptions in the Middle East and the soaring profit margins for refineries. That has put targets on the backs of companies as the Trump administration faces mounting pressure to show it is working to bring down high gas prices ahead of the midterm elections.
“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday. “I don’t like it, and I should be the last one to say because I’m a big free enterprise guy — nobody bigger.”
Trump specifically called out the two biggest U.S. oil producers by name after both reported strong earnings on Friday.
“Chevron, too much money. Exxon Mobil, too much, too much money,” Trump said. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”
The average U.S. retail gasoline price has hovered near $4.10 a gallon for the past week, up from less than $3 before the United States and Israel launched their attacks against Iran in February.
In late June, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate big oil companies for not bringing gasoline prices down fast enough as crude oil prices weakened. Pump prices are generally set by the retailers, often sole proprietors, who own gas stations, rather than major oil producers.
Chevron declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, and Exxon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The two companies’ chief executives warned in earnings calls Friday that a shortage of refining capacity could keep gasoline prices high through the fall.
Andrea Woods, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, which represents major oil producers, said in a statement that higher prices are “driven by global supply, demand and continued uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz and other critical shipping lanes—not by any one company.”
“Our industry shares the goal of delivering affordable, reliable energy for consumers,” she said.
Trump also criticized Chevron CEO Mike Wirth in a social media post Monday morning for failing to credit the administration’s policies for the company’s record quarter.
“The only thing he conveniently forgot to mention is that, without the genius, foresight, strength, and stability, of the TRUMP Administration, the Oil Industry, and our Country itself, would be DEAD!” Trump wrote, adding that all oil companies must “get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!”
Charlotte was cleaning out her parents’ garage last summer when she found a box of catalogs, circa 1996–1999. dELiA*s, MoxieGirl, Alloy — they were all there. “Instant flashback,” she says, describing how she sat right down on the concrete floor to page through them. Growing up in what she calls “rural suburban” Pennsylvania, Charlotte and her older sister made yearly pilgrimages to the Urban Outfitters flagship store in Philadelphia to spend their summer-job money on baby tees and suede Converse One-Stars. But in between, Charlotte, now 43, says they fought over who got the first look at the mail-order catalogs that, at the time, were the first to cater specifically to a tween and teen-girl audience.
Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future.
Flipping through them three decades on, she realized what made dELiA*s and its ilk so different from the other mail-order catalogs that materialized every few months in her family’s mail pile like L.L. Bean, J. Crew, Tweeds and Talbot’s. “The whole thing was very Girl Power. [The models] looked their age and made goofy faces or looked like they were shouting. It wasn’t like ‘okay, stand there and look pretty.’” The catalogs delivered a rush, Charlotte said, because “It felt like they were telling a story that regular teen magazines kind of couldn’t.”
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These days, nostalgia for a more analog world keeps growing, even for those who weren’t alive during much of it (one marketing survey found that more than a third of Gen Z is nostalgic for the 1990s) and that might explain the Instagram Reels, Reddit forums, YouTube videos, and Tumblrs that look wistfully or snarkily or earnestly back to a decade when everything was so much slower. The internet was slower and the information more avoidable; both waiting and anticipation were part of the standard framework of living. And shopping was something that required time, planning and forethought. Before the advent of yawning, warehouse-sized big-box stores, print catalogs served as portals to the future: Just opening one, Charlotte’s sister, Aimée, says, “was a completely different experience than walking into a store, because you were alone with your imagination and immersed in possibility.”
As a form of media, mail-order catalogs themselves were a story of longing and aspiration that came to define shopping as an American way of life. What you bought and where you bought it from was a statement about who you were and who you could be. This was as true of the inch-thick catalogs from department stores like Sears (whose holiday-season edition was upgraded from mere catalog to “Wish Book”) as it was of the thousands of specialty retail catalogs, from J. Crew and Tweeds to Swiss Colony and Fingerhut, that followed its lead.
(Denver Post via Getty Images) A woman shopping from a JCPenney catalog
Aimée thinks that Millennials in particular have so much nostalgia for catalogs because they were the generation that witnessed e-commerce overtake mail order. “We didn’t know at the time that the internet was going to basically turn into a 24-7 shopping mall,” intent on making shopping quotidian and constant, she says. “I think a lot of us weren’t prepared for the way that having tons of choices for what to buy and where to buy them would become kind of paralyzing.”
But there’s also a nostalgia for catalogs as self-contained and curated; a static set of choices rather than pages and pages of search results. There’s a stark contrast between the frantic sense of urgency online retail often whips up (It’s limited edition! This item never goes on sale except right now! OMG there’s only one pair left in your size!) and the catalog’s invitation to flip, peruse, think, rethink — basically, to shop deliberately rather than reflexively.
For a long time, the only catalogs that mattered to me were the ones from Scholastic Books handed out in elementary school classrooms, and the catalog from a little shop in Vermont called The Enchanted Dollhouse. The former was purpose-driven, with check boxes next to each book; the latter, pure fantasy that was much more inspirational than acquisitive. Then, at the home of my Friend With Cool Parents, I got a load of catalogs from Think Big!, a 1980s-era retailer devoted to giant versions of normally small things (crayons, paper clips, forks) and Esprit, whose catalogs were the first I’d ever seen that featured real people (often Esprit employees), modeling the label’s bright sweatshirts and shorts.
Catalogs have long had a formative impact on would-be consumers, offering a sense of aspiration on behalf of a future self, or a peek into the pasts of their loved ones. J. Crew was a revelation to one friend who was elated, at age 15, to have pages and pages of unisex garments — barn jackets, rugby shirts, roll-neck sweaters — that could be emulated with some judicious thrifting. Another noticed that his father always seemed to be in a good mood when a catalog from Orvis showed up in the mail, and was able to slowly piece together a close relationship that started when he asked his dad to explain fly fishing. A longtime IKEA enthusiast, meanwhile, described a moment of heartache when she ordered something from the company and found out that not only does the company no longer pack its latest catalog in the box with merchandise, there are no more paper catalogs at all. “The stores always stressed me out. I could go through [the catalog] in the peace and quiet of my own apartment and actually be able to breathe while browsing, then make a list, with aisle numbers, for what I wanted to buy. They have digital versions of their catalogs now, but I just can’t see that process being as fun.”
It’s too simple to say that the internet killed the catalog, especially since the demise of mail-order retail was consistently predicted as early as 1990, in a New York Times piece reporting that “Even for J. Crew, the Mail-Order Boom Days are Over”: “[T]hese are tremulous times for consumer buying, and the years of dynamic growth for mail-order catalogs are dusty memories. Even the fabled Lands’ End, one of the most successful and envied mail-order catalogue operations, has been struggling with sinking profits recently.”
The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance.
Mail-order retailers actually embraced the internet fairly early on, in part because so many of them already had the fulfillment infrastructure and marketing to transition catalog customers smoothly online. In many cases, it wasn’t the internet that changed their fortunes, but financial restructurings involving private equity that turned fulfillment protocol away from customer service and toward speed and efficiency. (One former J. Crew call-center employee recalls “wanting to explain to people why they were paying more money for increasingly bad quality even though I had nothing to do with it.”)
By 2005, when the trade publication Catalog Age changed its name to Multichannel Merchant to reflect the rise of e-commerce, even legacy brands like Lands’ End and L.L. Bean could see that the future of mail-order retail was online, even if many of their customers remained staunchly analog. E-commerce scaled and sped everything up; even dELiA*s successful proto–fast-fashion model, which gave customers access to trends while they were still peaking, couldn’t match the European fast-fashion juggernaut of H&M, Zara, Mango and more that arrived in the United States in the early 2000s. Charlotte wonders if what resonates with Gen-Z about dELiA*s-era mail order might be the gap between when items were ordered and when they arrived: “You had a few weeks of imagining how this cargo skirt or that track jacket was going to make you just a little bit more confident, and that was a lot of the magic.” It’s not that the clothes were ever disappointing, she clarifies — it’s just that the anticipation was such a big part of the process.
The diminishing returns of instant gratification might explain why catalogs are nearly always, according to trade publications and business journals, on the verge of a renaissance. Even Amazon can recognize the importance of a piece of direct mail that makes holiday shopping less likely to cause choice paralysis. But retail businesses have in many cases lost the consumer trust that originally made their catalogs a promise of consistency and quality. What customers are more likely to count on these days is that corporate restructuring will result in worse quality — erratic sizing, cheaper materials, and more slapdash production — and a matching level of customer service.
Meg and Hamilton Swan, the insufferable yuppies of “Best in Show,” are introduced in the mockumentary rhapsodizing about the ease of mail-order shopping (“We are so lucky to have been raised amongst catalogs”), particularly as it sidesteps the need to talk to strangers in person. It’s tempting to think that if the Swans were shopping in 2026, they’d be longing to once again hear the friendly tones of an L.L. Bean representative rather than deal with yet another AI assistant on the website from a company whose parent company is plagued by data leaks.
Online shopping, says Charlotte, “is something I avoid, especially as I get older — I just don’t have the patience to decode the sizing differences of four different brands selling basically the same shirt.” She and Aimée have joked about the prospect of starting a dELiA*s for middle-aged former indie girls, but it always ends, she says, “with us on Instagram, looking for something we know is already out there.”
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