“I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.”
Donald Trump said that on Saturday night at the Guardian Centers in Perry, Georgia, nine days before the midterms, about the money flowing to American oil producers since he took the country to war with Iran. He knew how it would sound, because he said so first: his own staff had begged him to leave it out.
Read the full passage and the money has an address. In USA TODAY’s footage of the speech, Trump says “the United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” then explains where: buyers “are coming to Texas and they’re coming to Oklahoma and they’re coming to Louisiana and they’re taking that oil.” Within a minute the figure grows to “hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars.” Every time he says “our country,” he means the companies that sell the oil.
The other side of that ledger can be counted. AAA put regular at $4.29 a gallon on Sunday, against $3.06 a year ago. The Energy Information Administration says Americans burned 8.9 million barrels of gasoline a day in 2025. At 42 gallons a barrel that is roughly 374 million gallons a day, so the $1.23 difference comes to about $460 million a day out of drivers’ pockets, or more than $3 billion a week. That is our arithmetic on public numbers, and it is conservative: it leaves out diesel, which AAA has at $6.35. Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker puts the war’s extra gas and diesel bill at about $1,100 per household so far.
So the “fortune” is real. It is also a transfer. A commuter in Macon pays it, and a producer in Midland or a shareholder in Houston collects it. Folding both into one “we” is the trick of the whole passage, and it is spin.
He offered one defense on the spot: “you’re still paying lower than Biden and Obama.” Half of that is false. The highest average of the Obama years was $3.93 in May 2011, so Sunday’s price is 36 cents above anything Obama-era drivers ever paid. It is below the $5.06 peak of June 2022, and that single month is the only comparison in which the line holds.
Voters have already decided who owns the price. In Texas, the first state Trump named as a winner, 91 percent of registered voters told CBS News and YouGov this month that the war is pushing oil and gas prices higher. Nationally, a New York Times/Siena poll of likely voters taken October 12 to 19 found 73 percent disapprove of how he is handling gas prices, including 42 percent of Republicans. That is the backdrop for a president already at 32 percent in CNN’s polling.
We think his advisers were right and that he understood exactly why. A president who believed voters were fine with $4.29 gas would not have announced that he was ignoring his staff to say it. The tell is the next promise. Minutes later he pledged a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to every adult if Republicans keep Congress, roughly $1 trillion by his own estimate, paid for with “all the money we’re taking.” Drivers are being told that the money taken from them at the pump will come back as a campaign check, and only if they vote the right way.
Barack Obama was working the same weekend with a very different closing message. Gavin Newsom summed up Trump’s in one post: “Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency.”
Who is actually making the money Trump described?
Oil and gas producers and exporters, chiefly in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, the three states he named. Households see the same money as a higher fuel bill.
Did Trump say when gas prices will fall?
He said prices are “temporarily high” and will fall “dramatically” once the war is over and tankers move through the Strait of Hormuz again. He gave no date.
Is gas cheaper now than under Obama and Biden?
Not compared with Obama: today’s $4.29 average is higher than his $3.93 peak. Only against Biden’s June 2022 record of $5.06 is it lower.