WASHINGTON — President Trump is on the receiving end of some sticker shock.
Detractors of the president have slapped decals faulting Trump for high gasoline prices on pumps across the country as the war with Iran grinds on.
The stickers, which feature Trump pointing at the price window alongside the caption “I did that!” are identical to labels that mocked his predecessor, Joe Biden, as inflation hit four-decade highs in the summer of 2022.
According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of diesel fuel reached a new record Thursday at more than $6.39, while the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline stood at almost $4.44, up seven cents from Wednesday’s number.
“It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina Wednesday evening, before predicting that prices were “going to come tumbling down … like a rocket ship in reverse.”
Average gas prices had dipped below $3 per gallon nationally back in February, before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic Feb. 28.
Other anti-Trump wags have slapped the stickers on goods like meat to protest the president’s duties on foreign goods, with one variation of the message reading: “These prices are tariff-ic!”
A hundred-count package of labels blaming Trump for various problems was selling for about $8 on Amazon as of Thursday morning.
The high gas prices have been attributed to Iran wreak havoc in the in the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which more than one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil flowed during peacetime.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox Business Network Wednesday that “18 million barrels of oil and oil products went through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday,” slightly down from the roughly 20 million barrels of oil that transited the strait each day before the war.
Despite the uptick in oil shipping, gas prices have kept going up after Yemen’s Houthis carried out attacks on a Saudi pipeline that had been used to reroute oil from the strait, forcing it to shut down. Wright said Wednesday that he anticipated the pipeline would be back up and running “soon.”
The Houthis have also taken islands near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which roughly 7% of the world’s oil supply passed in June, per data from shipping tracker Kpler.
Biden was similarly vexed by high prices, with the average cost of regular gas briefly topping $5 a gallon in June 2022 amid fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine and a post-COVID pandemic supply shock.
They use the word ‘affordability,’ right? It’s fake,” Trump complained at last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas. “They are so fake. Because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, ‘crisis.’”
