In a scene ripped from a political thriller, President Donald Trump summoned the nation’s top oil refining executives to the hallowed halls of the White House this week for a closed-door, high-stakes summit. The mission? To beg, cajole, and pressure the industry to magically lower soaring gas prices before November’s midterm elections. With the specter of voter fury over cost-of-living concerns looming, the President is pulling out all the stops, even if it means cozying up to the very titans of industry he once claimed to dominate.

Sources inside the Cabinet Room reveal a tense hour where Trump made his desires painfully clear: Americans need relief at the pump, and he needs it now. The guest list read like a who’s who of fossil fuel royalty—executives from Valero, Marathon Petroleum, PBF Energy, and Delek US Holdings all sat across from a president feeling the heat. In return, the magnates gave Trump an earful, turning the plea session into a grievance airing, primarily targeting the administration’s own biofuel-blending mandates.

These refinery bosses argued, with the midterms hanging in the balance, that federal rules forcing them to mix corn-based ethanol into gasoline are themselves inflating prices. The irony was thick enough to bottle. Here was Trump, who campaigned on deregulation and energy dominance, getting a crash course in the messy realities of his own policies from the beneficiaries of his pro-oil agenda. The political peril is palpable, dividing his key constituencies between heartland farmers and the oil patch.

The meeting underscored a brutal reality for the administration: the war with Iran continues to disrupt global crude flows, keeping prices stubbornly high. Despite a recent Jones Act waiver and desperate overtures to unlock more crude from Venezuela, the relief Trump promises remains elusive. He told reporters he couldn’t guarantee lower prices before Election Day—a stark admission that even presidential pressure has its limits.

This extraordinary confab reveals a president in political triage mode. With gasoline averaging over $4 a gallon and diesel near $6, the pocketbook issue is now an existential threat to his party’s congressional hopes. The image of Trump, the dealmaker, pleading with oil executives in the Oval Office is one his opponents will savor—a potent symbol of a leader scrambling for a solution as his central campaign promise slips through his fingers.