Iran war pushes gasoline prices past $4 per gallon

On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to bring gasoline prices below $2 per gallon. As recently as mid-January, the price had fallen to $2.78, a roughly 8% decline from the start of Trump's second term a year earlier. 

Then, in late February, Trump launched a war on Iran — and prices at the pump spiked, as Iran countered U.S. and Israeli attacks by shutting oil tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries about one-fifth of the world's oil.

As of April 10, the national average price for a gallon of gasoline reached $4.15, according to the American Automobile Association, similar to the $4.16 reported by the GasBuddy price app.

Getting gasoline down to $2 a gallon would have been a challenge for Trump even under the best of circumstances — over the past two decades, the national average price of gasoline has only fallen that low during the Great Recession of 2008-09 and in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when consumer demand cratered.

But with gasoline prices now more than twice as high as Trump's promised target — and at risk of rising higher the longer the strait is closed — the likelihood of $2-a-gallon gasoline anytime soon has greatly diminished. We rate this promise Stalled.