The decals show Trump pointing at the price window alongside the caption “I did that!” They mirror labels that mocked his predecessor, Joe Biden, when inflation hit four-decade highs in the summer of 2022. Detractors have placed them on pumps across the country as the war with Iran grinds on.
AAA said 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.
Trump addressed the costs in North Carolina on Wednesday evening, telling supporters, “It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that.” He then predicted that prices were “going to come tumbling down … like a rocket ship in reverse.”
Average gas prices had dipped below $3 per gallon nationally in February, before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic on Feb. 28.
The high pump prices have been attributed to Iran wreaking havoc 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 on Wednesday that 18 million barrels of oil and oil products went through the Strait of Hormuz the previous day, slightly down from the roughly 20 million barrels of oil that transited the strait each day before the war.
Gas prices kept going up even after the uptick in oil shipping because 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, according to data from shipping tracker Kpler.
The sticker campaign has expanded beyond gasoline. Other anti-Trump labels have been placed on goods like meat to protest the president’s duties on foreign goods, with one variation 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.
Biden faced similar anger when the average cost of regular gas briefly topped $5 a gallon in June 2022 amid fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine and a post-COVID pandemic supply shock.
Trump dismissed affordability concerns at last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas. “They use the word ‘affordability,’ right? It’s fake,” he said. “They are so fake. Because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, ‘crisis.’”