Oil prices are larger now than they have been when President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. But Trump posted a wildly deceptive chart on Friday that wrongly suggests oil prices are decrease than they have been upon predecessor Joe Biden’s departure.
The textual content on the prime of the chart claims, “Oil is Down 25% or $30 Per Barrel Since Sleepy Joe.” The chart has two bars: a blue bar labeled “Biden $120” and a a lot smaller inexperienced bar studying “Trump $90.” An arrow factors downward from the “Biden” bar towards the “Trump” bar.
Here’s the large drawback. The worth of oil wasn’t wherever near $120 when Biden left workplace.
US crude oil futures really closed below $80 per barrel on January 20, 2025, the day of Trump’s second inauguration, and on January 17, 2025, the final full buying and selling day below Biden. By distinction, after a spike in oil prices triggered by the conflict Trump launched in opposition to Iran in late February, US crude was buying and selling above $94 per barrel most of Friday morning.
So the place did Trump’s chart get its key “$120” determine? It seems that’s a reference to the approximate peak in US crude closing prices below Biden. But that peak got here in 2022, greater than two years earlier than Trump returned to workplace, within the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The chart fails to reveal the truth that the “$120” determine is from 2022. Worse, it actively misleads readers with the title declare that “Oil is Down 25% or $30 Per Barrel Since Sleepy Joe,” because the phrase “Since Sleepy Joe” creates the impression {that a} decline from $120 per barrel has occurred since Biden left the White House. In actuality, US crude had already declined to about $80 per barrel by the top of 2022, Pavel Molchanov, an funding strategist focusing on commodities on the funding agency Raymond James, famous in a Friday e mail.
Former Biden administration financial spokesperson Jesse Lee posted on X on Friday in response to the chart: “It just bears repeating: the spike in oil prices under Biden (long gone by when Trump took office) was due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The spike under Trump was due to his own war of choice.”
US crude prices declined early throughout the second Trump presidency, they usually have been beneath $60 for a lot of January 2026. (Molchanov emphasised that, generally, “Oil prices reflect global supply/demand fundamentals, which are much broader than who happens to be in the White House at any given time.”) But they jumped after the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February, briefly exceeding $110 per barrel in early April earlier than declining, in suits and begins, to their Friday stage.
While attempting to advertise his financial report, Trump has repeatedly described excessive 2022 prices and inflation readings as in the event that they have been the figures Biden handed to him in 2025 — thus implicitly taking credit score for the progress of the ultimate two-plus years of Biden’s four-year time period.
For instance, Trump has repeatedly said he “inherited” the worst inflation in US historical past or the worst in additional than 4 a long time — not mentioning that the inflation price within the month he took over from Biden, January 2025, was 3.0%, a lot decrease than the 40-year excessive of 9.1% that was set in June 2022. (The most up-to-date accessible price, for March 2026, is 3.3%.)
Trump has used an identical tactic when discussing gasoline prices. He has repeatedly said that gasoline topped $5 per gallon below Biden with out mentioning that this peak, a AAA nationwide common of about $5.02 per gallon, occurred in June 2022. The common had come all the way down to about $3.12 per gallon on Trump’s inauguration day in January 2025; it had elevated to $4.55 per gallon as of Friday.