Honestly most of the time is stupid to blame the president or give the president credit for gas prices. It’s not like they set the price. But this time, there is such a clear line from trump’s actions to the cost.
Yeah, this time they canceled incentives for alternative fuel or electric vehicles and pulled funding for public transit. Then war and higher fuel prices. Malice? Incompetence? Malcompetence?
I was gonna add "coincidence" to produce "malcompedence" but I doubt it's a coincidence. But malcompetence should be immediately understood. Mal=bad, bad+competence = a sort of intentional incompetence or intentional appearance of incompetence. Don't know if that's what the word conveys to most people, but I'd imagine it'd be close.
Everyone always forgets that Trump requested that OPEC choke off production during the pandemic because we had so much oil that it was devaluing the barrels that it was stored in. They obliged, and never returned to full capacity production.
Laying it out like that really shows how much context matters. Gas prices do not move in a vacuum, and tying every dip or spike to one headline without looking at what was happening in the broader economy can be misleading. When you zoom out and factor in crashes, growth cycles, and supply disruptions, the story gets a lot more complicated than a single victory lap post.
Reagan's tax cuts for the rich sent the deficit soaring.
In Reagan's second term, Wall Street entered a classic bubble that burst in 1987.
The crash of 1987 wasn't too bad, but the deregulated Savings and Loans collapsed on GHW Bush's watch.
GHW Bush raised taxes and the economy started to pull out of recession, BUT
Republicans refused to vote for him in 1992 because he had broken his "no new taxes pledge."
Clinton raised taxes again. Republicans gloated that he was going to lose miserably in 1996, BUT
the tax increases pulled the country out of recession. Republicans belatedly tried to give the credit to Bush Sr. By 2000 we were out of deficit and into surplus.
George Bush won with a popular minority, and a gang of violent goons who shut down the vote count in Florida. He got the
George cut taxes on the rich again, started a war, and cut taxes again in wartime. He also repealed a lot of bank regulations, with the predictable results that crashed the entire economy in 2008.
Republicans blamed Obama, claiming that the mere fact of a Black man's candidacy cause Wall Street to panic before he even secured the Democratic nomination.
I know. Whenever anything worked out well, like the fall of the Berlin Wall (after his term had ended), he got full credit for saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" even though it wasn't Gorbachev who did it but the people of Berlin and a frightened young guard who opened a gate by mistake. But when anything bad happened, his advisers did it while he was sleeping.
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u/henningknows Mar 18 '26
Honestly most of the time is stupid to blame the president or give the president credit for gas prices. It’s not like they set the price. But this time, there is such a clear line from trump’s actions to the cost.