President Trump is now the target of gas-pump sticker campaigns mirroring those that plagued his predecessor.
The decals, which show Trump pointing at fuel prices beside the words “I did that!,” began spreading nationwide as average gasoline costs climbed to nearly $4.44 per gallon by Thursday, according to AAA. Diesel hit a record $6.39. The stickers replicate almost exactly the labels that mocked Joe Biden during the inflation surge of summer 2022.
Trump, 78, addressed the price spike directly at a Wednesday evening rally in North Carolina. “It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that,” he told supporters. He added a prediction: prices were “going to come tumbling down … like a rocket ship in reverse.”
The timing marks a sharp reversal from February, when national averages had dipped below $3 per gallon. That was before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on Feb. 28. The conflict has since roiled energy markets, with Iran disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that normally carries more than one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox Business Network on Wednesday that 18 million barrels of oil and oil products had transited the strait the previous day, slightly down from the roughly 20 million barrels that moved daily before hostilities began. Wright also said he expected a key Saudi pipeline to resume operations “soon” after Houthi attacks forced its shutdown. The Yemen-based militants have additionally seized islands near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which about 7% of global oil supply passed in June, per shipping tracker Kpler.
The sticker phenomenon has expanded beyond fuel pumps. Anti-Trump activists have applied similar labels to meat and other goods, riffing on the president’s tariffs with slogans like “These prices are tariff-ic!” A bulk package of 100 Trump-blaming labels was listed for roughly $8 on Amazon as of Thursday morning.
Trump himself had seized on fuel costs as a political weapon against Biden, whose administration saw regular gas briefly exceed $5 per gallon in June 2022. The spike then stemmed from Russia’s war on Ukraine combined with pandemic-era supply shocks. At last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Trump attacked Democrats’ framing of the issue. “They use the word ‘affordability,’ right? It’s fake,” he complained. “They are so fake. Because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, ‘crisis.'”
Biden’s tenure saw widespread use of the identical “I did that!” sticker format, often featuring the then-president’s image, as Americans faced the highest inflation in four decades. The visual gag has now completed its partisan rotation, with Trump’s own likeness affixed to pumps from coast to coast as the Iran war grinds on.
Wright’s Fox Business interview offered one note of potential relief: the Saudi pipeline, knocked offline by Houthi strikes that had been rerouting oil away from the threatened Hormuz passage, could restore some supply flexibility once repaired.
Trump’s North Carolina appearance marked his most direct public response to the mounting price pressure, blending defiance with a forecast of rapid future declines. Whether that prediction holds may determine how long the sticker campaign continues.
Trump is scheduled to headline a rally in Milwaukee on Saturday.