Trump isn't happy that gas prices are falling more slowly than crude oil. He's not the first president to be frustrated. Ben Werschkul Washington Correspondent Wed, June 24, 2026 at 6:01 AM PDT 3 min read CL=F President Trump slammed oil companies in an early-morning social media post on Wednesday for prices at the pump that are not falling as quickly as crude oil prices since energy began flowing more freely through the Strait of Hormuz . "Customers are being 'gouged,'" the president wrote on Truth Social just after midnight, adding that he had instructed his Department of Justice to investigate. "Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I'm seeing!" Trump's frustration with the lag is a common one among presidents it flummoxed President Biden just a few years ago and is reflected in price fluctuations in recent weeks. Both crude oil and pump prices have been falling over the last week, but crude has moved down at a faster pace. International benchmark Brent Crude is down over 5% between June 18th and 24th, according to Yahoo Finance data . Read more: When will gas prices go down? But the national average of gasoline in the US tracked by the American Automobile Association (AAA) shows a more modest 2.5% drop over the same period from about $4.02 to $3.92 per gallon. Over the last month, crude oil prices have been down over 27% while gas prices have been down 13%. It's clearly a frustration for Trump and comes in the face of repeated promises from the president and his aides that, once the Strait of Hormuz opens, the pain being felt by drivers would ease as prices drop "like a rock." At times, the president and his team have also promised that Americans would quickly see pump prices lower than the average of $2.98 per gallon before the war in Iran began. Yet energy observers have often described the tendency of prices to ease after an oil shock as fluttering down more slowly. As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis explained in 2022 , crude oil and refined gas prices don't always move in tandem, a phenomenon known as "rockets and feathers." They often shoot upward together (like a rocket), but when crude oil prices later fall, gasoline prices sometimes drift down at a much slower rate (like a feather). The formal economic term for the phenomenon is "asymmetric pass-through," and it stems from a variety of causes in energy markets, primarily the lag between refiners buying crude oil and then selling their refined product. Profit-taking is another factor as firms preemptively protect their bottom lines in moments of uncertainty by raising prices more quickly. President Donald Trump is seen in Pennsylvania on Tuesday before returning to the White House. (Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images) MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images What it means in practice is that drivers are often the last to feel relief when oil shocks ease, and that can lead...
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