By Ben R. Williams
The price of a gallon of gas has crept up to about $4.20 in Henry County and Martinsville, and it shows no signs of dropping any time soon. I don’t know about you, but every time I fill my tank now, I look away from the pump as though the screen is displaying a particularly gory trap from the “Saw” franchise.
But if you even mention that gas is getting expensive, you’ll hear the same thing:
“Still cheaper than it was under Biden.”
“Not as bad as when Biden was in office.”
“Sounds like TDS. Now let me tell you about how bad Biden is nearly 16 months after he left office.”
There are two points I want to make here. Let’s start with a brief lesson in recent history.
During President Donald Trump’s first term in 2020, the global pandemic coupled with a price war between the Saudi government and Russia caused oil prices to plummet. This was bad news for the fossil fuel backers who had donated to Trump’s campaign; folks like Harold Hamm, who asked Trump to bail out the oil industry after he lost $3 billion in the price war.
As a result, in April 2020, Trump cut a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and OPEC to intentionally increase oil prices to save his donors from becoming, if not destitute, then slightly less grotesquely wealthy.
This was reported on extensively. See the April 30, 2020 Reuters piece “Special Report: Trump told Saudi: Cut oil supply or lose U.S. military support.” There’s also a USA Today editorial from April 16, 2020 titled “Amid coronavirus pandemic, why is Donald Trump trying to push up fuel prices?” You could also check out the Bloomberg piece titled “Trump became the first American President to push for higher oil prices in more than 30 years, reversing his personal opposition to the cartel.”
But if you don’t trust the media, you can just take it from Trump himself. Here’s what he said at a rally in North Carolina in June 2023: “We had the worst, the worst problems and the worst cost of energy in 60 years. We had it down to $1.87 three and a half years ago, a gallon. And we actually had it lower than that, but we won’t even talk about that because I had to save the oil companies that were all going to go bust. I said this is the first time I’ve ever said we got to get it up a little bit. I actually called Russia and the king of Saudi Arabia.”
And here’s another quote from a rally in Georgia that same month: “Gas prices were at $1.87 a gallon. We actually had them lower than that for a little while, but I had to get them up. We were going to lose the oil companies. They were going so low they were getting killed.”
“Well,” you might say, “that was a good thing. The pandemic had caused oil prices to drop so steeply that it could have wrecked the economy.”
But this isn’t about whether Trump’s deal to cut oil production was right or wrong. The point is that his deal with Russia, the Saudis, and OPEC lasted until the end of April of 2022. As the global pandemic drew to a close and people started using more oil, the price of a gallon of gas began to increase due to reduced supplies, peaking at an average price of $4.93 per gallon in the U.S. in June of 2022. Once full oil production resumed after Trump’s deal expired, the price began dropping steadily, going as low as $3.08 in January 2025 when Biden left office.
And so my first point is this: if you’re going to say that gas was more expensive under President Joe Biden, you should first understand that the only reason it got that expensive was because of a deal that Trump made before Biden took office. Biden had nothing to do with.
My second point is this:
I don’t care what Biden did or didn’t do. He isn’t the President anymore. Trump is.
Before you think I’m some kind of a Biden fanboy with a Biden flag and Biden bumper stickers and a hat that says “BIDEN WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING,” let me make this clear: I was never crazy about the Biden Presidency. I thought Joe Biden was a fundamentally decent man who was probably a great politician back in the era when politicians outwardly believed in decorum and fairness and basic human decency. He was not the man for the job in 2020, and he definitely wasn’t the man for the job in 2024, and his ego coupled with the lack of a primary caused the Democrats to fumble a Presidential election that should have been winnable by a particularly charismatic tree stump.
But the key takeaway here should be that, regardless of his failings, Biden is no longer the President and hasn’t been for more than a year.
“Gas is cheaper than it was under Biden!” Yeah, for now. We’ll see how long that lasts. Also, who cares? As much as there is to recommend it, I don’t have the ability to live in the past. I live in the year 2026, where Trump’s endless unforced error of a war with Iran has caused the price of gas to go up. I want to know what he’s going to do about it, other than claim gas is actually really cheap in defiance of our observable reality.
Back in the day, President Harry S. Truman had a sign on the resolute desk that said “The buck stops here.” The buck has never once stopped with Trump, although he has done a thorough job of weakening it against the yuan.
