When it comes to the prices consumers pay at the pump, Donald Trump’s rhetoric tends to be problematic. The former president has spent the last couple of years, for example, trying to take credit for incredibly cheap gas in mid-2020, hoping the public doesn’t notice that it was a global pandemic and a recession — and not White House energy policies — that brought prices down.
The Republican has also taken the unusual step of claiming, more than once, that he took steps to deliberately raise gas prices in order to help oil industry profits.
This week, however, Trump returned to the subject, declaring at a rally in Iowa, “Gasoline prices are now five, six, seven dollars, even eight dollars a gallon.”
Such rhetoric might be true in other countries, but not this one. Bloomberg News reported:
The cheapest gasoline in 2 1/2 years is set to drive spending for US consumers this holiday shopping season. A gallon of regular gasoline now costs $3.087, down more than 10 cents from a year ago and the lowest since late-June 2021, according to data from the American Automobile Association. Fuel prices have steadily declined since the summer driving season ended in September, largely tracking losses in oil as well as reflecting soft seasonal demand and growing supplies.
A related report from Axios a day earlier added that the national per-gallon average is likely to soon fall below $3 for the first time since May 2021.
There’s obviously no mystery as to why Trump lied about this — it’s no secret that the former president just makes stuff up — but his demonstrably false rhetoric was a timely reminder that the gap between the political debate over gas prices and the energy reality is enormous.
Republicans and their allies have, for example, spent much of Joe Biden’s presidency insisting that the Democratic administration has curtailed domestic oil production. That’s the opposite of reality: To the frustration of much of the president’s progressive base, domestic oil production is actually higher now than when Trump was in office.
Politico recently published a report with a memorable headline: “The U.S. is pumping oil faster than ever. Republicans don’t care.” In context, it wasn’t that Republicans were indifferent to increased energy production; it’s that Republicans don’t care that their rhetoric is false. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell added in a recent column: “If ‘energy independence’ means exporting more than you import, we’ve achieved it in spades. The United States has been exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imports for 22 straight months now, far longer than was the case under Trump. If this is what waging war on fossil fuels looks like, Democrats apparently aren’t very good at it.” It’s against this backdrop that the Republican frontrunner is decrying $8-per-gallon gas, even as national averages drop to $3-per-gallon gas. If the White House’s critics want to debate how and why prices have fallen, that’s fine, of course, but can we at least have a debate rooted in reality?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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