‘Buckle up’: Panicked shock as Trump admin grapples with imminent crisis of its own making

Amid the ongoing and deeply unpopular U.S. war against Iran, the Trump administration has drained its supply of crude oil reserves to its lowest levels in more than 40 years, and a bleak prediction by the financial data company Barchart has onlookers panicking.

Sharing data from a Bank of America research chart on Monday, Barchart predicted that the United States has “just 41 days of crude oil inventory left” after the Trump administration had drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its “lowest level in half a century.” Established in the mid-1970s, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve previously held around 726 million barrels of crude oil in 2010 — as of Monday, according to Reuters, only 289.7 million barrels remain.

“This seems bad,” wrote Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) in a social media post on X.

Oil prices have surged amid the U.S. war against Iran and Tehran’s disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil trade historically flowed. While oil shipments through the strait have increased in recent weeks, they remain far below pre-war levels.

Prominent technology reviewer and inventor Zack Nelson warned that “the [Band-Aid] holding everything together is about to break,” and Christopher David, a Navy veteran and prominent Black-rights advocate, told his more than 70,000 followers on X to prepare themselves for imminent disaster.

“Buckle. The. F---. Up,” David wrote. "September 2nd are tank bottoms for the SPR.”

Decoding Fox News, a media-monitoring project created and operated by journalist Juliet Jeske, argued that the draining of the SPR would likely pose a serious political problem for President Donald Trump just months ahead of the midterms.

“Trump cannot bluff his way out of this,” reads an online post on X from Decoding Fox News. “The man bankrupted casinos. That takes a special kind of stupid.”