Why Gas Price Lies Are Trump’s Kryptonite

There’s only one bit of confusion about Donald Trump’s polling numbers.

Are they the lowest he’s ever recorded as president, or just tied with his lowest numbers, recorded right after his failed January 6th coup attempt? 

Regardless, what’s clear is that voters are about as pissed with him as they’ve ever been. And there doesn’t seem to be anything popular he could quickly do to pull him out of his depths, such as finally leaving office peacefully, as he did at the end of January 2020. Renaming lakes ain't going to do it.

What’s most remarkable is that this is occurring as the one gauge that the press most associates with the economy is at an all-time high: stocks. 

The AI bubble, combined with a massive budget deficit comparable to huge government spending boosts we saw during the Stimulus and COVID, keeps pushing the Dow and the Nasdaq higher. Yet Americans have rarely felt lower. The only other president who hit these kinds of polling lows was Richard Nixon right before he did something popular: leaving office peacefully.

One thing we don’t have to wonder is what is causing Americans to reject Trump. 

He’s down on all his key issues, even “immigration,” which polls showed him dominating for years, so much so that Democrats tried to beat him by passing a version of his own brutal border bill.

But he’s most unpopular on the issue that probably most won him the presidency with the help of Elon Musk, John Roberts, and a global anti-incumbent trend: the “economy.”

And by “the economy,” we mostly mean gas prices and prices in general.

Here’s a pretty simplistic theory of why voters disdain him and his “policies” so much right now: Americans generally agree that Donald Trump is a liar.

The question is: Is he a terrible liar or a wonderful liar?

Those who see him as a “wonderful” liar love how he walks between the raindrops to achieve things Republicans never have before: ending Roe, gutting Medicaid, and turning the EPA and his entire regime into a cudgel to beat down science. They get to watch brown people chased through the streets and Black women punished for their progress. They know he’s a con and a crook. But he’s their con/crook/boss, and the rewards trickle down all over their sense of rightful domination.

The rest of the country—the 50 to 60 percent who know monarchy and dictatorship are built on the misery of the many—never bought the act. Maybe they voted Trump once or twice, but just because they were mad at the incumbent. They know they’re either in the many or could easily be among them. And being lied to, as everything is intentionally rigged to help the worst people in the country, is just a bonus insult.

The problem for Trump is that even the people who think he’s a wonderful liar have to now face that he’s a terrible liar all the time, personally, every time they put gas in their car or produce in a shopping bag.

And unless they have Fox and/or X jacked directly into their lobe, they know that the main reason prices are up—the Iran War—is absolute bullshit. Even Trump senses that as he lies about his motivation for starting the war, supposedly preventing a nuclear Iran from erasing Israel and the whole Middle East. It’s a lie Bibi Netanyahu has been selling for 30 years and a lie so bad that even George W. Bush didn’t fall for it. Trump—high as any human has ever been off his adventure in Venezuela—decided he was Bibi’s huckleberry.

And the problem is, even if it were true—actually, especially if it were true—it just calls Trump out more as a horrendous failure.

All the war has achieved is making Iran a superpower by, at least so far, giving it the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and strangle large parts of the global economy, and has emboldened the awful regime there in ways we’ve never seen before to hit us and our allies across the Persian Gulf.

This was predicted in a warning delivered to Trump by Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, who also noted that our best experts actually think this will propel the regime to build nuclear weapons more determinedly.

Of course, all of this is even an issue because Trump broke Obama’s Iran deal for absurd reasons that only really make sense inside the anti-logic of vengeance and racism.

And the worst part of this for Trump is that nobody needs to know any of this.

They just need to know that Donnie keeps bragging about how well he’s doing as he fixates on a ballroom designed by King Midas, and his kids suck up billions in grift and government contracts. It’s so hot! Everyone’s jealous! They’re all paying ME!

Meanwhile, you pull up to the gas pump and pay your Trump Tax for the cause of making Hormuz Iran’s Strait again. And all you can think, if you have any sense of your own dignity at all, is, “That damned horrible liar.”

Gas prices, as Omar Wasow said, are the “one headline everyone reads.” And the story those headlines tell—even to the people who want to believe Trump is a wonderful liar—is that he thinks you’re a fool.

HERE’S THE OPPORTUNITY FOR DEMOCRATS: Gas pumps could be the best ally we've ever had against Donald Trump's lies, if we let them be. Even if this war drags on—as 21st-century wars started by Republican presidents tend to do—gas prices fluctuate. Insurance premiums won’t, especially once the GOP’s Medicaid gutting hits full force on January 1, 2027. With every Democrat on the trail, it’s time for one message: He lies and divides us so he and his donors—the polluters, data barons, and tax-evading billionaires—can rip you off.

Imagine the pitch: “Donald Trump thinks you’re a fool who can’t spot a 3, 4, or 5 on a gas pump. He lies about gas prices just as he lies about the millions he’s uninsured, the hospitals he’s closing, and the data centers spiking your energy bills. He’ll keep doing it until we prove his days of fooling America are numbered. We’re paying now, but with your help, Trump and his Republican cronies will pay soon.”

As Paul Waldman—author of White Rural Rage—noted, Democrats must take this message into rural red districts. Voters there may not trust anyone left of Laura Loomer, but they trust the pump. Connect the dots. Then those shuttered hospitals will stand as monuments to the real pain behind his empty lies.

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