(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump on Tuesday demanded that gasoline retailers immediately lower prices at the pump, warning of “big problems” if they fail to pass along the benefits of falling crude oil prices to consumers.
In an early-morning post on Truth Social, Trump said gasoline prices remain too high despite U.S. crude oil trading at about $68 a barrel and continuing to decline.
“Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY!” Trump wrote. “They’re too high considering that Oil is now at $68 a Barrel, and heading south.”
He urged retailers to “start targeting around the $2.50 a Gallon number,” while accusing some stations of price gouging.
Price gouging “is totally illegal,” Trump wrote, adding that if gas stations don’t lower prices at the pump, “big problems lie ahead!”
Trump also singled out California, saying the state should reduce gasoline taxes that he argued are inflating prices for drivers.
“Soon the Tax will be higher than the Product itself,” he wrote, adding that Californians were being “abused” by their state government.
Trump’s warning comes less than a week after he said he had directed the Department of Justice to investigate whether gasoline retailers and oil companies were failing to lower pump prices in line with the sharp decline in crude oil prices following the U.S.–Iran ceasefire agreement.
At the time, Trump accused companies of “gouging” consumers and said retail gasoline prices were not falling quickly enough despite crude prices dropping “like a rock.”
Gas Prices Continue to Ease
National gasoline prices have been trending lower in recent weeks as global oil markets stabilized following the easing of tensions in the Middle East.
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average price for regular gasoline stood at $3.91 per gallon on June 29, marking the fifth consecutive weekly decline and the second straight week below $4 per gallon.
The average was down from nearly $4 a week earlier and more than 50 cents lower than one month ago, when drivers were paying about $4.51 per gallon.
AAA said declining crude oil prices and improving fuel supplies have helped push prices lower, although demand is expected to rise as a record number of Americans prepare to travel over the Independence Day holiday weekend.
The U.S.–Iran conflict disrupted crude supplies in the Persian Gulf, driving prices to multi-year highs.
However, since the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17, agreeing to extend a ceasefire to give room for negotiations on a lasting peace deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, oil benchmarks have fallen sharply from peaks above $126 per barrel for Brent and nearly $120 for West Texas Intermediate (WTI).
After five straight monthly increases, analysts have cut their 2026 oil price forecasts for the first time since the Iran war began, following the U.S.–Iran deal reopening the Strait of Hormuz and easing concerns over prolonged supply disruptions.
A monthly Reuters survey of 31 economists and analysts forecast Brent crude would average $84.50 per barrel in 2026, versus $90.44 projected last month. WTI was seen averaging $79.49 per barrel, down from May’s projection of $84.63.
However, some analysts said that lingering geopolitical risks mean that the potential remains for crude prices to rebound.
“We believe that the market is being too optimistic over the speed of the supply recovery as well as its sustainability,” Warren Patterson, ING’s head of Commodities Strategy, wrote in a Monday note.
“Furthermore, we have seen a significant tightening in global oil inventories since the start of the conflict, which leaves the market more vulnerable relative to the pre-war environment.”
Some energy experts have said that gasoline prices typically do not fall as quickly as crude oil prices due to factors such as delays in refining, transportation, and distribution.
Chevron chief financial officer Eimear Bonner said last week that lower crude prices should eventually translate into cheaper gasoline for consumers but noted that the process takes time.
“There is a lag between … reductions in oil prices and when that shows up at the pump,“ she told CNBC on June 25. ”But we expect that prices will come down as things continue to normalize.”
Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
