WASHINGTON — President Trump has become the latest target of a familiar response to soaring prices at the pump.
As the war with Iran continues, critics have begun placing decals blaming Trump for high gasoline costs on fuel pumps across the United States.
The stickers show Trump pointing toward the price display with the words “I did that!” — the same design used to ridicule his predecessor, Joe Biden, when inflation climbed to four-decade highs in the summer of 2022.
AAA reported that the national average price for diesel hit a fresh record of more than $6.39 a gallon Thursday. Regular gasoline averaged nearly $4.44 per gallon, an increase of seven cents from Wednesday.
“It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Wednesday night, predicting that fuel prices would be “going to come tumbling down … like a rocket ship in reverse.”
National average gas prices had fallen below $3 a gallon in February, before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic on Feb. 28.
Trump critics have also put the decals on products including meat in protest of the president’s duties on foreign goods. One version reads: “These prices are tariff-ic!”
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As of Thursday morning, a 100-count pack of stickers assigning Trump blame for various problems was listed on Amazon for about $8.
The increase in fuel prices has been linked to Iran’s disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route that carried more than one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil during peacetime.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox Business Network on Wednesday that “18 million barrels of oil and oil products went through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday,” modestly below the approximately 20 million barrels of oil that passed through the waterway 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.’”