Leo Hohmann – Leo’s Newsletter April 15, 2026

Short term pain for long term gain. That’s the White House mantra regarding energy supplies and rising costs of travel, home heating and cooling, food and just about everything else that gets shipped by diesel-fueled trucks.

Many MAGA-friendly news outlets have jumped on board putting out articles that try to reassure the voting public that Trump really does know what he’s doing and when the war against Iran is over, which Trump assures us will happen any day now, everything will go back to normal. It will all happen very, very quickly.

I’m here to tell you that is total B.S. And any conservative news outlet telling you differently is clearly sold out to the MAGA propaganda train. I will cite all my sources so you can follow up and do your own further research to see if I’m correct in my analysis.

My first source is OilPrice.com, a website that provides up-to-the-minute updates on the prices of global commodities related to petroleum along with articles analyzing supply and demand with future trends forecasting. Over the last couple of days there have been multiple articles suggesting that Trump’s ability to continue manipulating the global energy markets is soon going to end. At some point, relatively soon, the reality on the ground will overwhelm whatever rhetoric comes out of the White House that has thus far been able to keep oil prices from rising much above $100 a barrel. And the reality is that the supply lines of various types of petroleum, and there are many forms of this hydrocarbon energy source, are drying up.

Irina Slav at Oilprice.com reported in a Tuesday, April 14, article that the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns oil prices are set to rise further, as current futures prices fail to reflect the severity of supply disruptions.

“The Middle East war has slashed oil output by up to 13 million barrels per day and damaged key infrastructure, creating a deep and worsening supply crunch,” she reports, adding, “Despite falling futures prices, physical markets are extremely tight, with record spot prices and refiners cutting runs as shortages begin to hit Europe and Asia.”

IEA Director Fatih Biro said at an industry event this week, as quoted by Bloomberg:

“Prices are already high, but they are not reflecting the severity of the problem — I agree there is a disconnect. But I think soon we will see they will converge, which is an extremely sensitive issue for the global economy.”

Irina Slav further reports that Trump’s Iran war has so far cost Middle Eastern producers as much as 13 million barrels daily in lost output, “and that is just crude oil.” She notes that exports of crude plus refined products like diesel, jet fuel and gasoline, have shrunk by an estimated 20 million barrels, according to the IEA. More than 80 oil and gas facilities in the region have been damaged, contributing to the severity of the situation.

I know we hear a lot of blather from the Trump administration and repeated by its cronies in the conservative media that America is flush with cheap energy and a “net oil exporter.” Trump recently put out a post on his Truth Social account claiming that “completely empty oil tankers” are lining up to enter American ports so they can buy oil from us instead of the Middle East producers.

Trump said in an April 11 post to his Truth Social account:

“Massive numbers of completely empty oil tankers, some of the largest anywhere in the World, are heading, right now, to the United States to load up with the best and ‘sweetest’ oil and gas anywhere in the World. We have more oil than the next two largest oil economies combined – and higher quality.”

But this statement, it turns out, is complete fantasy. At best, these tankers might get some Liquified Propane Gas, but they are not going to be filling up with crude oil, at least not for long.

That’s because most of the oil the U.S. is selling is simply Donald Trump draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which as of March 20 stood at 415 million barrels, less than half the SPR’s total capacity. When that’s gone, and when other nations have burned through their reserves, energy prices are going to rise and rise quickly because the amount of new oil being pumped out of the ground is significantly less than before the war, due to the Arab Gulf nations being battered by Iranian missiles and then the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Even Russian oil output has been severely curtailed in recent weeks as Ukrainian drone attacks have repeatedly targeted Russian oil terminals on the Black Sea. Estimates are that Russia has lost 40 percent of its oil-producing capacity in just the last few weeks, thanks to Ukraine and its U.S./NATO backers.

The propaganda lies being fed by Trump and his media lackeys are best exposed by Chris Martenson, an economic researcher and data analyst who heads up Peak Prosperity. He did a deep dive on the energy issue in a video posted to his YouTube channel on April 14.

Martenson explains on his website why the U.S. is actually a “net IMPORTER of crude oil.”

Yet, Martensen adds, “Trump has promised to sell the world as much as it wants. Eventually the world will wake up to the truth.”

And when they finally do wake up, which Martensen predicts will happen in two to four weeks, it will be game over for Trump’s market manipulation games. Prices will finally reflect the true availability of oil on the market. When that happens, it will lead to a situation, perhaps this summer or fall, where very few Westerners who consider themselves the working class and the lower-tier middle class will be able to afford to drive anywhere outside of the most essential destinations.

Next, those skyrocketing fuel costs will start affecting food prices in a major way, followed by all material goods shipped by truck. With the supply-lines for urea, nitrogen and other critical fertilizers also being affected dramatically by the war’s continuation, farmers will be not only facing higher prices for the diesel that powers their equipment, but they will also have to settle for lower crop yields due to the fertilizer shortages. This means that by next winter and the spring of 2027, the world will be in full-blown famine.

I recommend watching Martenson’s entire 38-minute video (below) to get a full understanding of the subject so you won’t fall for any of the propaganda slop being fed to Americans by dishonest media outlets that are simply running cover for the administration. The deception lies in the definition of “petroleum” and how that term cannot and should not be used interchangeably with “oil.”

Like everything else Donald Trump tries to sell us, the devil is in the details, and Trump never does enough of his own homework to know what he’s talking about. That or he’s just an evil liar. Either way, it will be easy to get tricked into believing everything will return to normal as soon as this war ends, and that it will end soon. That is an absolutely false narrative because the war isn’t close to its end and when the end finally arrives, it will take years to rebuild the energy infrastructure and restore all the damaged and destroyed supply lines.

Then, you have to ask yourself, do the global power elites who fund such reconstruction projects want it to be rebuilt to its former levels? It would certainly serve their interests to curtail energy supplies to the masses, because that’s what they’ve been striving for under their Agenda 2030 plan for years.

As bad as the energy situation is about to get in America, it will be even worse in Europe, and much worse in East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines.

Not only will energy supplies be drastically and permanently reduced, but the consumption levels will also be dramatically lower after World War III and the resulting famine play out. The earth will be massively depopulated.

Let’s not forget about the Deagel report, which I have previously reported on over the years. The report was published in 2014 by the CIA-connected Deagel Corp., and it predicted that by the end of 2025 America’s population would be 68.5 percent lower, and most of the European nations would see population decreases of between 25 and 70 percent. Perhaps this private intelligence company was correct in its predicted outcome but off by a year or two in the timing?

Only time will tell. But with Donald Trump’s latest Middle East war adventure entering its seventh week and still affecting key international waterways, the facts are aligning in exactly the direction Deagel predicted.

I leave you with a couple of questions: Is it purely coincidence that during the first term of Donald Trump we had Covid-related lockdowns, and under his second term we are racing toward war-related energy lockdowns? And is it also a coincidence that both of these manufactured crises have led to the destruction of the middle class and the further shifting of wealth into the pockets of billionaire grifters and technocrats? I do not believe it is coincidence and it’s why I have designated Donald Trump as the Great Destroyer, who was hand-selected for the job of finishing off the United States as a great power and free republic. He is the destroyer of lives in Gaza, Syria and now Iran. He is the destroyer of the U.S. petro-dollar and the U.S. economy, and he is the destroyer of middle-class lifestyles across America and much of Europe.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. Feel free to disagree with my analysis of the facts as presented by my sources. All I ask is that you please keep it respectful.

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