President Donald Trump bragged this week that gas is down to $1.98 a gallon in a “couple of states.”
In fact it isn’t, anywhere.
“No state had an average gas price even close to $1.98 per gallon [as of} Wednesday,” CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins posted on X after fact-checking by the network.
“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 Triple A.
While gas prices are down, the national average was about $3.17 per gallon on Wednesday, according to the AAA data, wrote CNN’s chief fact-checker Daniel Dale. Drivers were unlikely to find even a single 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.
The White House was unable to substantiate Trump’s figures, though spokesperson Harrison Fields chided reporters to get out of their “big city bubble” and check the gas prices in “Middle America” — where they’re also not $1.98.
Yet Fields claimed they’re at “record lows.”
“Gas prices aren’t near record lows in a single state. Current prices are far above record lows,” Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy said in an email to Dale.
Trump also claimed to reporters that the high price of eggs plummeted 92 percent, which is also not true.
The day Trump took office, Grade A eggs in the U.S. were $5.81 a dozen. Last month they were up to a record high of $6.23 a dozen, according to the latest Consumer Price Index reported April 10.
The president has also claimed that his tariffs — paid by American companies importing foreign goods and the U.S. consumers buying the products — were bringing in $2 billion a day.
The federal agency that collects the tariffs says the country has collected $500 million on the levies since April 5.
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