President Donald Trump’s imaginary gas price has fallen.
Two weeks ago, Trump falsely claimed “a couple” states had just seen gas prices fall to $1.98 per gallon. That was not even close to true – no state had an average lower than about $2.70 per gallon, and there was no evidence any individual station was offering gas for under $2 per gallon – but the next day Trump said “three states” had just hit $1.98 per gallon, which was also far from the truth.
Trump repeated this inaccurate assertion about three $1.98 states at least three times this week. Then, during a commencement address at the University of Alabama on Thursday night, he used an even lower figure.
“Gasoline prices just hit $1.88 cents a gallon in three states,” Trump said. “Can you believe it?”
You can’t believe it, or at least you shouldn’t.
The national average on Thursday was about $3.19 per gallon, according to AAA. The lowest Thursday average in any state was about $2.66 per gallon in Mississippi.
And GasBuddy, a company that tracks gas prices at tens of thousands of stations around the country, did not find a single station offering gas for under $2 per gallon. (GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan told CNN that the company found that one person got a special discount price of $1.99 per gallon at a station in Texas, but even that station’s general price was $2.49 per gallon.)
At no point since Trump started making these claims in mid-April has GasBuddy found a single gas station offering gas for the sub-$2 price Trump claimed some states had just hit.
No, gas prices aren’t the ‘lowest in years’
Trump added yet another false claim about gas prices in a social media post on Friday morning, writing, “Gasoline just broke $1.98 a Gallon, lowest in years.”
Again, none of that was true.
The national average gas price on Friday was about $3.18 per gallon, per AAA. That wasn’t even in the vicinity of the “lowest in years.” In fact, it was up from the national average on the day Trump returned to office in late January, when it was about $3.12 per gallon, and up from the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency.
That’s not to say the increase is Trump’s own fault – gas prices rise for lots of reasons other than presidential policy, notably including the arrival of warmer spring weather – but gas prices are not down over the course of this presidency to date.
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