Incompetence, Part 3,479

2. Corruption

Here’s a chart of oil prices yesterday, March 10, 2026. Guess what happened around the starred section:

What happened is the secretary of Energy tweeted out this:

The price of oil dropped by almost 20 percent. Then it turned out that the secretary of Energy was wrong. Prices rose almost 20 percent.

If we had a functioning Justice Department or SEC, I’d be interested in an investigation about trades made around this brief window. Because if you knew that:

• Wright was about to tweet that statement about Navy escorts, or

• That Wright’s statement was false, or,

• Both,

Then you could have made an absolute killing over the course of two hours.

What we’re talking about is market manipulation in its purest form. But we are also talking about boring norms and procedures and processes. Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, government officials had strict protocols for issuing public statements. No matter where you were in the chain—whether you were a deputy assistant undersecretary or the president’s chief of staff—you were not allowed to make public statements without clearing them ahead of time.

For instance, if you wanted to issue a press release touting accomplishment X, you first had to check with the division that did X. Then you had to check with your agency’s general counsel. Then you had to check with the White House. The White House would put you on hold while it checked with both its political operation and its office of legal affairs. Only when everyone had signed off in this heavily vetted and lawyered process could you put out your press release about accomplishment X, via your agency’s public affairs department.

Why did this tedious process exist? Lots of reasons. One of them is that the government has incredible power to move markets. You cannot foreclose the possibility of insider trading on the part of government employees who are privy to sensitive information. But by using a structured process with clearly defined points of accountability, you could at least prevent people in the government from manipulating markets and creating liquidity events.

Today, cabinet members just take out their phones and tweet stuff. YOLO, I guess.

The old way of doing government was clunky and inefficient. There was a ton of friction built into the system to force people with power to behave ethically.

The Trump administration dispensed with all of that. Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright’s tweet is of a piece with the destruction of the Hatch Act, the use of Signal to circumvent laws about the preservation of government records, the idea that there is separation between the Department of Justice and White House, the conception of the FBI as a non-partisan law enforcement agency, et cetera et cetera.

All those norms are gone. Totally and completely obliterated. In return we have seen industrial-scale government corruption unlike anything in our nation’s history.

And here’s the thing: The public has basically accepted it.

So why would any future administration act differently?

America was run on the honor system. That system has been broken. It will not come back. The best we can hope for is to have one political party which adheres to norms and processes while the other luxuriates in corruption.

Which is to say: The best we can hope for is a system that adheres to the rule of law sometimes.

Good luck with that.