It's the Economy, Stupid
For years, MAGA said the president is responsible for high prices. Now their own playbook is being run against them -- and there’s no way for Trump to escape.
It may come as a bit of a surprise, but electing a self-obsessed wannabe king is not, in fact, the recipe for national renewal. If you need any evidence of this, gas prices surged past $4.50 a gallon nationally today, the highest in four years.
In 2024, Trump ran on lowering costs across the board, but he focused on energy prices, promising to “slash energy and electricity prices by half.”
He also ran against “forever wars,” promising to be the “president of peace.” In his 2024 Republican Party platform, Trump said that “war breeds inflation,” and that he’d end both.
Little did we know that Trump actually meant the exact opposite. Prices have only gone up since the start of his war of choice with Iran.
Republicans were eager to share photos and videos of higher gas prices during the Biden administration and comparatively low prices under Trump. This obsession has now become one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds in recent political history.
In focusing national attention on energy prices, that attention has now come back to bite Trump in the ass. Not only are prices up, but Americans everywhere know who to blame.
While Republicans try to blame Iran, Democrats, or even regular people for higher prices, Americans aren’t buying it.
When Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, many of his supporters slapped “I Did That!” stickers on gas pumps across the country. At the time, they were praising his perceived lowering of prices while taking a swipe at former President Biden, who saw MAGA plaster stickers of his face with the same caption during his term.
Since then, photos of those same stickers against $4, $5, and $6 gas have blown up on social media because, well, it’s true. Trump’s war of choice with Iran is the reason why energy prices have spiked, why airlines like Jetblue and Spirit are now being pushed to the brink (or over), and why inflation is rising yet again.
Just this week, Marco Rubio said that the administration’s new goal with the war in Iran is to restore it “back to the way it was” before.
Translation: We gained nothing in attacking Iran, and the economic pain inflicted on Americans has been for absolutely no reason.
If the goal now is to turn back the clock to February 27th, the day before Trump attacked Iran, then why the hell did we attack in the first place? This conflict has become the textbook example of a pointless foreign entanglement, the same kind Trump railed against.
Even MAGA influencers like Alex Jones, who’s become increasingly disillusioned with Trump in his second term, have called out Trump’s hypocrisy on energy prices.
For American consumers, the worst part is that this isn’t the end. Prices are likely to continue to climb as long as we have a president who cares more about a $400 million ballroom than he does about the economic stability of working people.
For years, Republicans said the President is responsible for gas prices. Under Biden, they used this to attack him, and under Trump, to praise him. They turned gas prices into a political weapon, a meme, a punchline.
(Of course, they ignore that the price of gas rose under Biden because of Russian manipulation following their invasion of Ukraine, while gas is skyrocketing today because of yet another avoidable war in the Middle East.)
Today, that punchline has changed hands.
If Trump owned the prices when they were low (which he had nothing to do with, by the way), he definitely owns them at their peak today. With gas prices up $1.63 and climbing since the start of the misadventure in Iran, the buck stops with the president. When you spend years telling Americans exactly how to assign blame, you don’t get to rewrite the rules when the numbers stop going your way.
Higher energy costs don’t exist in isolation, but are already rippling across the economy in higher rent, flights, groceries, and everything else. What starts at the pump doesn’t stay there.
The lesson for Republicans?
Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.