Diesel Price Spike Raises Stakes For Trump, Gop Ahead Of Midterms

Most Americans are focused on the cost of gasoline at the station up the street — but diesel fuel costs are also poised to set an all-time high in the U.S., which in turn is expected to drive up prices for everything from groceries to postage.

A spike in diesel fuel affects a wide array of commodities that need to move across the country – including for home building, manufacturing and much more. And it couldn’t come at a worse time for President Donald Trump and Republicans, just months ahead of the contentious midterm election season in which Democrats are expected to take back the House and possibly the Senate amid intensifying voter anger over the rising cost of living and the unpopular war in Iran.

Voters may not know why the cost of goods that travel via freight are going up, but they’ll blame the party in charge, said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist and president of political consulting firm HighGround.

“The price of everything has gone up, Trump promised just the opposite,” Coughlin said. “He's gonna pay a price at the polls.”

On Tuesday, the average price for a gallon of diesel cost $5.66, just 16 cents away from the record price of $5.82 set in June 2022 under former President Joe Biden, according to AAA. Prices jumped nearly 30 cents last week as inventories of the fuel fell steeply.

For the last two months, administration officials have argued that their energy policies protected the American consumers from Iranian war price shocks and that fuel was cheaper under Trump than Biden. But diesel fuel may soon break that record and a gallon of regular gas, which stood at an average of $4.46 on Tuesday, is also closing in on the record price of $5.02.

Trump and others in his administration have repeatedly assured Americans that while prices are higher than they’d like, they will decrease as soon as the war in Iran, now more than two months old, ends.

At an unrelated event at the White House Tuesday, Trump claimed energy prices will soon “go lower than they were before.”

“Oil is at $102, that's a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged,” Trump said.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that fuel price spikes, which he called a “short-term blip,” are a “temporary aberration” that would be over in weeks or months.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers echoed that claim in a statement.

“President Trump has always been clear that these are short-term, temporary disruptions,” she said. “The President brought oil and gas prices down to multi-year lows at record speed, and as traffic in the Strait of Hormuz normalizes, these energy prices will plummet once again.”

In Iowa, farmers largely purchased their diesel for the spring planting season, but freight costs for hauling grain are rapidly increasing, said Jim Buschkamp, co-chair of the Republican Party of Black Hawk County. For now, he said the lull after the planting season and strong Republican support for Trump means that voter anger over rising costs hasn’t dramatically ticked upward that he has seen. But if there is no resolution by the fall harvest season when farmers will need a large volume of diesel again, the pressure will build just before the midterms, he said.

“Farmers might feel somewhat impinged when it comes to fuel costs, but at least they would feel that the world has been made safer and I think that would have a fairly dramatic impact upon the midterms,” he said. “So from Trump's standpoint, he's got to look at the time frame between now and October and figure out a way to resolve this thing.”

Beyond the impacts to the cost of everything from eggs to sneakers, the inflationary impact of high diesel fuel lasts much longer in the economy than gasoline prices, said John Auers, analyst at consulting firm RBN Energy. Trucking, rail and freight companies sign long-term supply contracts for their diesel, meaning that a higher price will be baked into their costs – and passed along to consumers — for months at a time.

“It goes into literally everything,” Auers said about where voters will experience higher diesel prices. “Most consumers aren’t buying diesel, but it definitely gets passed through.”

Diesel consumption is “what drives the US economy,” said Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy's head of petroleum analysis.

High diesel fuel prices will start trickling down to the every day consumer in the coming weeks, he said. That is when it could start raising the costs on clothing, appliances, home prices and more for consumers who have already shouldered price increases tied Trump’s to tariffs.

And every day that the Strait of Hormuz – which handled about 20 percent of global oil volumes before the war started – remains closed, the worse the price consequences will be and the longer the recovery will take, he said. It could take longer than a year to get oil inventories back up globally.

“Even if there's a quick reversal, this is not something that just goes away overnight,” he said. “It's going to get worse before it gets better and it's going to take a long time for it to get better at this point.”

When fuel prices hit record highs under Biden, it was largely due to post-Covid supply disruptions and because Russia’s war on Ukraine threatened global energy markets. The current price increase is largely due to the U.S. and Israel attack on Iran and the subsequent closure of Hormuz. Diesel prices in February, before U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran, were about $3.75.

At 900 truck stops across the country, prices are already at or above the record average high of $5.82, according to Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics. Many smaller owner-operator truckers are parking their trucks because they can’t make any money with diesel prices at their current levels, he said.

“It's like the worst possible time for them, because this is spring, when freight volumes improve and you need to be out there making money to catch up from the first quarter, which is traditionally very slow and sluggish, on top of a three-year freight recession,” he said.

The primary driver of the price spikes is the Iran war, though refinery outages have driven some regional increases. On Monday and Tuesday, despite assurances from the White House that the war would soon be in the rear-view mirror, a series of attacks on ships, energy infrastructure and U.S. forces threatened to engulf the Middle East once more into open warfare weeks after a fragile ceasefire went into effect. U.S. and Iran forces exchanged fire in the Strait of Hormuz area.

Meanwhile, the ripples of high prices are just beginning to roll through the U.S. trucking industry that is the backbone of the economy. More trucks have been idled because of the high prices.

About 20 percent of operators have parked their trucks amid higher fuel costs that can add up to $1,200 a week in added expenses, according to a recent survey by DAT Freight & Analytics. Half of owners are driving fewer miles and are being more strategic about what they are hauling, preferring lighter loads that require less diesel, the survey found.

“The longer it goes on, the more likely it is that we'll see transportation become a much bigger deal than it is already,” Croke said.