CNN
—
The president’s imaginary list keeps getting longer.
In April, President Donald Trump claimed gas prices in “a couple” unspecified states had just fallen to $1.98 per gallon. That wasn’t even close to true. But the next day he said it was “three states” that had just hit $1.98 per gallon, which also wasn’t remotely accurate.
Trump used the “three” figure on multiple occasions in subsequent weeks, again with no factual basis. Then, during an immigration-focused visit to Florida on Tuesday, Trump made it five states with supposed sub-$2 gas.
“Gasoline just hit $1.99 today in five states – $1.99, isn’t that a nice sound?” he said, adding moments later, “We just hit, in five states, $1.99, $1.98.”
Once more, this was a lie.
The lowest state average price on Tuesday for a gallon of regular gas was about $2.71 in Mississippi, according to data published by AAA. The state with the fifth-cheapest Tuesday average, Louisiana, was at about $2.79 per gallon, per the AAA data. And the national average was about $3.18 per gallon, AAA reported.
GasBuddy, a firm that tracks prices at tens of thousands of stations around the country, did not find a single station selling regular gas for below $2.26 per gallon on Tuesday. (There are sometimes individual drivers who get special discounts.) And GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, told CNN that the last time his data showed any state average below $2 per gallon was more than four years ago, in January 2021, when demand was unusually weak because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The White House did not respond to CNN’s Tuesday request to explain Trump’s claim.
The president has a long history of using inaccurate statistics even when he could make a similar point using accurate statistics. His false Tuesday boast was especially needless given that he could have correctly said that – as CNN reported in an article earlier in the day – gas prices for this Fourth of July weekend are expected to be the lowest for the holiday since at least 2021, according to GasBuddy.
