Donald Trumps campaign published and withdrew a policy platform Thursday that included an arcane ethanol proposal that would benefit billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a friend and supporter whom the Republican nominee has touted as a potential treasury secretary.
The proposal is unusually wonky by Trump standards, but it would satisfy a major priority for Icahn, who owns an oil refining company saddled with $200 million a year in expenses to buy credits required by a federal program that guarantees ethanol a share of the U.S. gasoline supply.
The 80-year-old activist investors company, CVR, has joined other small refiners in pushing to move the credits' financial burden elsewhere, fighting bigger oil companies that, in turn, are battling the corn lobby to demand that the entire ethanol mandate be overhauled or ended. Trumps policy statement appeared to take Icahns side in the tangled dispute, charging that these regulations will give Big Oil an oligopoly by destroying the small to midsize refineries.
Icahn expressed the same argument in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency last month, when he also complained of an oligopoly in the making.
Within the oil and ethanol industries, Trumps policy statements triggered an almost immediate debate on whether he has shifted from the strong pro-ethanol stance he took before this years GOP caucus in corn-rich Iowa.