Donald Trump Brutally Fact-Checked Over Gas Price Remarks

Donald Trump's claim that the price of gas in the U.S. has reached $8 a gallon was rebuffed by a gas expert, who said his company couldn't find "one single station" in the country where fuel costs that much.

Trump, the Republican 2024 frontrunner, was talking with former Fox News host Lou Dobbs during an interview aired on Mike Lindell's channel, Lindell-TV, on Monday when he claimed gas prices in the U.S. have seen unprecedented rises. Lindell, a longtime Trump's ally and the CEO of My Pillow, is facing several defamation lawsuits for his role in pushing claims that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

Trump said that when he was in the White House "you had gasoline selling for less than $2 and now you have it at $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon." He added that "by contrast, under the Trump leadership, my leadership, inflation was nonexistent, and we had gasoline down to $1.87 a gallon."

A clip of Trump making this statement was shared by MeidasTouch journalist Ron Filipkowski on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The former president's claim, aimed at stirring anger against President Joe Biden at a time when the two are widely expected to face a rematch in November, was immediately proven false by Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. GasBuddy is a large community-based fuel app that allows users to find the cheapest gas in the country.

"GasBuddy finds not one single station in our database of ~150,000 gas stations at $8 per gallon," De Haan wrote on X. "Meanwhile, over 50% of gas stations have gasoline priced at $2.89/gal or less today," he added in a later post.

Newsweek contacted De Haan for comment by email on Tuesday.

According to data from the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average gas price in the country was $3.078 a gallon as of Tuesday, January 9. Oklahoma had the lowest average price in the U.S., at $2.578 a gallon. California was the state with the highest gas price, with an average cost of $4.657 per gallon.

Gas prices did rise during Biden's presidency between 2022 and 2023, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and inflation contributed to pushing up the cost of the fuel.

When Biden took office in January 2021, gas prices were an average of $2.4 per gallon across the country, according to historical data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). By December of the same year, they had risen to over $3 per gallon. In June 2022, they peaked at an average of $5.06 per gallon, the highest on record, after which they started to drop below $4.

Since the peak in summer 2022, gas prices have steadily come down. Even in California, where gas is more expensive for a combination of factors including higher taxes and a lack of refining infrastructure, prices have significantly come down after reaching $6.43 per gallon in June 2022.

Gas prices and the state of the U.S. economy are expected to play a huge role in the 2024 election. Despite the fact that the country's economy is strong and has proven resilient to the challenges of the post-pandemic years, the majority of Americans, according to recent polling, aren't happy about it.

A recent CBS News/YouGov survey conducted between January 3 and 5 found that only 35 percent of Americans thought the national economy was doing "very" or "fairly good," compared with 59 percent who believed it was doing "fairly" or "very bad."

But there's a pinch of optimism to be found in this survey for Biden. More Americans, according to the poll, are now realizing that gas prices are coming down—28 percent compared with 6 percent in July 2023. The rate of respondents saying the economy is doing well has also slightly grown from July 2023, when it was 29 percent.