By Nick Valencia | March 22, 2026
ATLANTA, GA— It cost me $70 to fill up my wife’s SUV this week. It’s not a luxury car or a gas-guzzling truck. It’s a Hyundai. I selected mid-grade, 89. Then I watched as the numbers climbed past what I expected, then past what felt reasonable, then into something else entirely. By the time the pump clicked off, it was about $20 more than what we’ve been paying.
Across the country, Americans are getting a similar message and are feeling the pinch, one tank at a time.
There’s a familiar political rhythm to gas prices in America. When they rise, presidents scramble for explanations. When they fall, they take credit. Under President Donald Trump, that rhythm hasn’t just continued, it’s hardened. While he takes credit for the “good parts,” who will President Trump blame for the bad parts of the economy now?
For years, Trump hammered his predecessor over energy prices, tying every increase at the pump to weakness abroad and mismanagement at home. It was simple, effective and politically potent. But governing has a way of stripping slogans down to reality. And the reality now is this: oil prices are climbing toward levels that once defined crisis. Markets are rattled. Supply chains are bracing and a barrel trending toward $150 is no longer hypothetical.
The cause is conflict created by a president who promised to put an end to all conflicts. This is the contradiction at the center of Trump’s second act. A president who ran on ending wars is now presiding over a world where instability is expanding, not shrinking. Where military posture is once again dictating economic reality. Where Americans are paying, directly, for decisions made far from home.
Start with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which reshaped global energy markets and tightened supply. Now, add rising tensions with Iran, where U.S. military action near critical oil shipping lanes has injected new volatility into an already fragile system. Each escalation carries a cost and that cost shows up at the pump.
Most Americans don’t track oil futures. They don’t follow tanker routes or watch the Strait of Hormuz. They don’t parse military strategy. They see one thing: the number on the pump.
Even that number is becoming harder to ignore in isolation. Airports are buckling under staffing shortages tied to a federal funding crisis. There is now the expectation of immigration agents being deployed into the airport to check IDs before TSA screening. It’s supposed to start on Monday.
This is what Trump’s America 2.0 looks like in practice. Not just louder rhetoric. Not just sharper divisions. But a steady, measurable squeeze.
At the airport.
At the grocery store.
At the gas station.
There was a moment this week that went viral. a Ron Weasley lookalike in Los Angeles held up a gas nozzle to a camera and called it “expensive petroleum.”
It was meant to be funny. It wasn’t. Not when filling up a family car costs $70. The heavy dusting of pollen this week reminded us in Atlanta that summer is right around the corner, which means travel is about to collide with dysfunction. It already has.
This time though, it’s happening at a time when the working class was promised lower costs, fewer wars, and America first.
Presidents don’t control everything, but they set the conditions. They choose the fights. They shape the alliances. They decide when to escalate and when to step back. And those decisions ripple outward, across oceans, through markets and right in your wallet, or right out of it, honestly—$70 at a time.
