U.S. President Donald Trump laughs with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent after asking him if he wants to be Fed Chair, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 5, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recalled in his Thursday column that when President Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2024, he promised lower fuel prices. After 18 months, he still hasn't delivered. In fact, things are worse.
While campaigning for office, Trump promised he'd cut fuel prices by 50 percent within 12 months of taking office. He promised that if America just started drilling, more things would be cheaper. That lack of understanding about the global petroleum market has persisted in his second term. Now he's painting high gas as the price Americans must pay for freedom.
“For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a [nuclear weapon],” Trump said last month at a rally on Long Island. “So, remember that when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4. It’s OK. I’ll never apologize; I did the right thing.”
Politifact made it clear that even halfway through Trump's first year, he couldn't get gas prices to fall below $2 a gallon. First, he tried to claim that he succeeded in bringing gas prices down. "But it wasn’t true in April, and it wasn’t true in early July," the report noted. That was before the war with Iran began.
The new plan Trump hatched would take oil from Venezuela. It isn't expected to work, CNN reported, and it could be a decade or more before Americans see any real impact.
Trump's solution currently is to dodge accountability for his missteps in Iran and instead blame Ukraine, according to Krugman.
Krugman pointed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has spent the past several days attempting to shift responsibility for the energy shock too.
While appearing on “Fox & Friends,” Bessent said Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil facilities were reducing global refining capacity and increasing prices. Krugman acknowledges that some of these strikes may be affecting supplies, particularly when it comes to diesel prices, which have risen more than crude oil. However, he said, Bessent is leaving out the details for why Kyiv might be targeting Russian oil infrastructure. The reality is that Ukraine is fighting a prolonged war against Russia and is attempting to weaken the military and economic foundations of Putin’s invasion.
Krugman also blamed the Trump administration for undermining Ukraine, a U.S. ally, all while refusing to offer realistic alternative fuels. Early on in the first year of Trump’s second administration, Bessent reportedly traveled to Kyiv to demand a massive share of Ukraine’s future rare earth mineral revenues. In return, Ukraine would get little security guarantees or aid.
Krugman called the proposal a kind of colonial resource-extraction arrangement. According to details cited from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's book, Regime Change, Bessent lost it over the Ukrainian president.
“I’ve dealt with this little f——,” Bessent would say to associates about President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “He’s tricky. He’s like the special-needs child for the Europeans. And he’s acting like Mr. Bean on crack.”
Krugman recalled the disastrous meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in which Trump proclaimed, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
As Krugman explained, now it appears Trump is the one who doesn't have the cards.
"So while I’m sure that Bessent and Trump wish that Ukraine would stop blowing up Russian energy assets — they would demand that Ukraine stop, if they could — they can’t, in practice, do anything to change Ukraine’s war strategy," Krugman closed. "To put it bluntly, they’re not in a good position. They don’t have the cards."