Washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump falsely claimed Thursday that some states saw gas prices fall to just $1.98 on Wednesday.
Trump was responding to a journalist who asked him at the White House how long Americans can expect to experience higher prices because of his trade policies.
Trump claimed Americans have already seen the situation “get much better,” alleged the reporter is not “truthful,” then added, “You have gasoline that hit $1.98 yesterday in a couple of states.”
That’s not true. No state had an average gas price even close to $1.98 per gallon on Wednesday. The two states that were tied with the lowest average gas price on Wednesday, Mississippi and Tennessee, were both at $2.70 per gallon, according to data provided by AAA.
The national average was about $3.17 per gallon on Wednesday, per the AAA data. And Wednesday drivers were unlikely to find even an individual gas station selling a gallon for $1.98 or less.
GasBuddy, a firm that tracks prices at tens of thousands of gas stations around the country, found zero stations selling for under $2 on Wednesday, said Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis. The lowest price GasBuddy found on Wednesday was $2.19 per gallon at a station in Texas. Of more than 500 metro areas whose prices are tracked by AAA, the one with the lowest average price, Abilene, Texas, was at about $2.57 per gallon.
Trump has repeatedly made false claims about prices as he attempts to defend his tariff plans, which Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday are likely to lead to both higher prices and slower economic growth. Trump wrongly asserted in his Thursday comments at the White House that “the price of groceries is substantially down,” a claim CNN debunked after he delivered a version of it on social media earlier in the day.
CNN asked the White House on Thursday to explain what Trump was referring to when he claimed that a couple of states’ gas prices hit $1.98 on Wednesday. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields emailed a response that did not attempt to substantiate the claim – and instead added another false claim.
Fields correctly noted that gas prices are more than 50 cents lower today than they were at roughly the same time last year, when Joe Biden was president. But Fields also said reporters stuck in a “big city bubble” should go “visit the Middle America, where gas prices are at record lows.”
Fields didn’t define the term “the Middle America,” but his assertion is wrong regardless: today’s gas prices across the country are significantly higher than in various past years even when adjusted for inflation.
To cite just two examples, average gas prices are higher today (about $3.17 nationally, per AAA) than they were at various points of Trump’s first term and at various points of the 1990s, when the national average spent some time below $1 per gallon; $1 in March 1999 had the buying power of $1.94 in March 2025.
“Gas prices aren’t near record lows in a single state. Current prices are far above record lows,” De Haan of GasBuddy said in an email.
Fields didn’t immediately respond to a follow-up request to explain this false claim.
