President Donald Trump has been gassing up low gasoline prices, repeatedly asserting that they’re as low as $1.99, but there’s little proof to support his claims.
“There’s two states, three states that were selling gasoline at $1.99. You haven’t seen that for a long time,” the president said at a press conference on Wednesday.
It’s not immediately clear which states he was referring to as nowhere seemed to have such low prices. The Independent has reached out to the White House for comment.
Mississippi currently boasts the lowest gas prices in the country with an average of $2.69 per gallon. In the city of Gulfport, gas goes for $2.35, according to GasBuddy, a firm that tracks gas prices across the country.
Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama also have an average under $2.80, as of Wednesday, GasBuddy found. Gas is going for $2.31 a gallon at one station in Fort McLellan, Alabama, GasBuddy found.
The national average was $3.16 a gallon as of Wednesday afternoon, according to AAA. While those prices are low, it’s still a far cry from the $1.99 that Trump has been touting.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN that the last time he’s seen states with average prices below $2 per gallon was in January 2021, following the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were driving less.
Trump made similar remarks last week, when he declared: “We have no inflation.” He then claimed multiple states boasted gas prices under $2: “The gasoline just hit $1.99 today in 5 states.”
In May, the president once again claimed gas prices were under $2 in some places. “Gasoline just broke $1.98 a Gallon, lowest in years,” he wrote on Truth Social. One day before his social media post, RBOB Gasoline futures hit $1.98 per gallon, CNBC reported, perhaps explaining why Trump has been relying on that figure.
Gas prices have fallen in recent weeks. The nation’s average price of gasoline has declined for the second week in a row, according to GasBuddy data compiled from more than 12 million individual price reports covering more than 150,000 gas stations across the country.
“Nearly every state saw average gas prices decline for the second straight week, even as the nation celebrated July 4 with the lowest national average for Independence Day since 2020,” De Haan said in a statement.
