Trump Has Declared War on Cheap Gas. Again.

Ms. Sarin, a contributing Opinion writer, served in the Treasury Department in the Biden administration.

For President Trump, lower energy prices haven’t been just a nice bit of relief for American consumers. They’ve been a signature bragging right, proof of concept for his administration’s whole approach to the economy and to America’s position in the world, as well as a valuable counterexample to the higher overall costs that his tariffs brought about.

“Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, especially energy,” he said during his recent State of the Union address. “When they see energy going down to numbers like that, they cannot believe it. It’s like another big tax cut.” A few days later, he boasted about those numbers in Corpus Christi, Texas, where Energy Secretary Chris Wright actually pumped gas.

The focus is back on energy prices at the moment, but unfortunately for the administration — and American consumers — those prices have now gone in the opposite direction thanks to the war in Iran. Gas prices declined by about 6 percent during the year after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, but by early last week, those successes had been erased: Average gas prices rose last week from $2.98 to $3.41, one of the largest weekly increases ever recorded.

Jet fuel costs are surging too, with major U.S. airlines reporting that they’ll probably need to raise ticket prices soon. Crude oil prices jumped more than 40 percent after the conflict began. Last week alone saw the largest weekly price rise in 35 years, about twice as large as the effect when Russia, a significant oil producer in its own right, mounted its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Amid all the fighting, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s crude oil and natural gas usually passes, has basically halted; prices have already surpassed $100 a barrel, twice what the president has frequently cited as his goal and as a key to tackling inflation. Prices came down a bit this week, but the market is betting on a disruptive and sustained period of volatility.

The administration is reportedly scrambling for ways to get gas prices back down. Mr. Trump has said the war will end quickly, but even if it does, prices are likely to remain high for some time. Economists call it “rockets and feathers”: When there are big increases in the cost of crude oil, consumer prices shoot up like a rocket, but when wholesale costs go down, the cost of a tank of gas falls slowly, like feathers.

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