Gas under Trump 2.0 is now more expensive than it was under Biden

By Matt Egan, CNN

New York (CNN) — On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to make gas dirt-cheap again and blamed record-high gas prices on the Biden-Harris “war on energy.”

But then an actual war got in the way: Trump’s deeply unpopular conflict with Iran.

Nearly eight months into a war that has destabilized the global energy system, the average price of gas during Trump’s second term is now more expensive than it was during the Biden era, according to a CNN analysis of AAA data.

That milestone — a nearly unthinkable outcome as recently as January — underscores the frustration over high prices that has engulfed Trump and the Republican party leading up to the midterm elections.

“It’s pretty astonishing,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, said of the fact that gas is now more expensive under Trump than former President Joe Biden. “I don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 months ago.”

It’s a major reversal of the return to sub-$2 gas that Trump promised in the summer of 2024 as he successfully convinced voters to return him to the White House.

Polar opposite of Trump 1.0

During his first term, the national average for regular gas was just $2.47 a gallon. During the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, gas prices plunged to as low as $1.77 nationally in April 2020.

The health emergency caused demand for fuel to crash to the point that the world ran out of room to store oil, a phenomenon that briefly drove crude oil futures below zero for the first time ever.

At one point in April 2020, Trump even pleaded with Saudi Arabia and Russia to stop pumping so much oil to halt a crash that threatened to bankrupt US oil companies and kill countless jobs.

The situation couldn’t be more different today.

The White House has waged a last-minute scramble to contain the damage from high fuel prices by taking a wide range of steps, including throwing farmers an $8 billion financial lifeline, buying millions of barrels of Russian diesel and examining steps to drive down extremely high shipping costs.

“President Trump is fixing these long-term problems by taking tangible steps to increase our refining capacity here in the United States, while also taking immediate actions, such as releasing oil from our (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) to add supply to the market, temporarily waiving the Jones Act, and allowing red-dyed diesel for highway use, to lower prices at the pump,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told CNN.

Gas was cheap — before the war

The outlook for gasoline and diesel prices was very favorable for Americans when the year started.

Gas prices were safely below $3 a gallon, and, if anything, the energy market was worried about a supply glut that could keep fuel prices low.

“If Trump really wanted to keep his promise to keep gas prices low, what he should have done was nothing,” said Gregory Brew, senior analyst at consulting firm Eurasia Group. “The market was oversupplied. There was a lot of crude sloshing around. Inventories were quite large. But Trump reversed that with the war.”

Trump has argued that elevated gas prices are a small price to pay for keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

But the spike in gas prices has angered voters who were hoping for the opposite under Trump.

“High gas prices do not bode well for incumbents. They didn’t bode well for Biden either,” GasBuddy’s De Haan said.

Stuck above $4

Gas prices spiked even higher under Biden, zooming to an all-time high of $5.02 a gallon in June 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

However, gas prices came down faster under Biden.

In fact, 2026 has already shattered the Biden-era record for the most number of days with $4 gas or higher.

The war with Iran led to the unthinkable: The unprecedented closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway the world relied on to get oil out of the Middle East.

While oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz have largely recovered, the cost to get that crude out has skyrocketed because of expensive and inefficient workarounds being used. The cost of hiring an oil tanker has skyrocketed from $65,000 a day last year to $1.6 million earlier this month.

A shortage of refining

Not only that, but the world is now grappling with a global refining shortage. Refineries that would normally churn out diesel, jet fuel and gasoline have been damaged in the Middle East and Russia. China has held back its own fuel exports.

To make up for lost refinery output, the world has drawn fuel from commercial and emergency stockpiles.

But that leaves the intricate energy system vulnerable to shocks.

Case in point: A recent, unexpected outage at ExxonMobil’s Joliet, Illinois, refinery caused gasoline prices to go through the roof in Michigan, Ohio and other Great Lakes states in recent days.

“Right now, there is no cushion. Commercial inventories are very low,” said Brew. “When there is any kind of outage, everyone starts to scramble.”

Refiners, incentivized by the ability to make incredible profits due to the shortage, are producing as much fuel as possible even though normally this is the time of year operations slow for routine repairs.

“Refiners have been running flat-out for months. If you own a refinery, you are printing money. Some are skipping maintenance because there is money to be made right now,” said Brew. “But if you run refiners for months on end, they will break down.”

Once the Exxon refinery returns to normal, gas prices should come back down. However, that relief will likely be offset by the fact that oil prices have surged to seven-month highs as traders brace for the risk of a return to all-out war in the Middle East after the election.

De Haan said Trump is “pulling every small lever he can” to cushion the blow from high prices.

“Unfortunately, they’re not adding up to much,” he said. “Until the biggest lever — diplomacy — is pulled, he’s going to continue to fight against very elevated gas and record diesel. It’s fairly ominous.”

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