“A lot of people believe that you’re at your best when you’re fighting for the American people,” Jones began with the requisite obsequiousness. He pointed to a segment in which people at a diner in Texas were asked about their concerns and said both immigration and the economy.
“What are you going to do to give us some relief when it comes to this inflation?” Jones continued. “People going to, you know, whether it’s the gas station or to the grocery store and they’re being hit hard. How do you fix that in the first hundred days?”
“First of all,” Trump began, “let me speak to the people in the diner. I saw the vote and it was 100 percent Trump. None for my opponent. And I love you in the diner.”
Fox’s Will Cain had asked for a show of hands related to the Republican primary contest in the state and Trump was the overwhelming choice. Later in the show, as he was mentioning how well he did in the polls, Trump claimed that “we just saw the vote in Texas” because “the diner was a poll.” The diner was not a poll, but we digress.
He came back around to the question.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill. And we’re going to get prices down. Energy is going to bring it all down,” Trump said. “We’re going to get a lot of that oil. We’re going to get the oil and gas right from Texas and other places, but from Texas largely.” (Remember: Texans are voting in the Republican primary today.) He closed out his comments by once again praising Will Cain and the people in the diner.
As noted Monday, the politics of the coronavirus pandemic have inverted for Trump. In 2020, he failed to win reelection in part because of his handling of the pandemic. In 2024, though, the lingering effects of the pandemic, including the surge in gas prices that accompanied resumption of demand, plays to Trump’s advantage.
It is true that the surge in inflation in 2021 and 2022 was in part a function of energy prices. Gas prices have been higher under Biden than they were under Trump — there’s a difference of more than $3 per gallon between the price during the pandemic lull in demand and the surge that occurred in 2022. The difference in the average prices under each president is much more modest, but Trump and his allies like to point to his lowest price and Biden’s highest (or at times, far higher) to make the contrast.
So Trump’s argument is ostensibly that he will reduce inflation by drilling for oil. There are just two problems with that.
The first is that “drilling for oil” is just a standard bit of Trump’s patter, something he seems to have picked up from Sarah Palin back in 2008. Remember his dictator-but-only-for-a-day thing? He said he wanted to be a dictator for that day so that we could “drill, baby, drill”: He wanted this absolute authority so that he could endorse a policy that has become a cultural shorthand for blue-collar work, climate-change-denialism and red-blooded American conservatism.
The second problem is that domestic oil production under President Biden is already higher than it was under Trump. Biden doesn’t talk about this much since a big chunk of his base of support is, in fact, hostile to increased fossil fuel consumption. But it’s true — and it hasn’t done much to lower gas prices. Because prices are so dependent on the international market, more domestic production doesn’t correlate to lower prices at the pump. If it did, the graph below (which dates back to last summer) would show prices moving down as production when up and vice versa. Instead it shows prices moving all over the place.
That was all Trump offered to Jones: drill, baby, drill. He has in the past suggested another effort to combat inflation, cutting government spending, but he didn’t mention that Tuesday.
In part, that’s because he doesn’t have to. Again, thanks to the now-inverted politics of the pandemic — and no doubt thanks to the revisionism that occurs any time a president leaves office — it is simply taken for granted that the pre-pandemic economy was a function of Trump’s skills and the recent economy a function of Biden’s ineptitude.
When CBS News asked Americans how they would expect prices to change depending on who won in 2024, most people said that Biden’s policies in a second term would make prices go up. A plurality said that Trump’s would make prices go down. Even among Democrats, a quarter of respondents said that Biden’s policies would make prices go up further in a second term.
Why? What policy, specifically, will Trump implement to make prices go down? Well, he’ll drill and — hey, by the way, did you see the folks in that diner? Great crew. Wishes he could be there with them. Back to you, Lawrence in the studio.