Trump’s ‘Freedom Fuel’ push is a flimsy answer to rising gas prices
“FREEDOM FUEL HAS ARRIVED,” the White House’s X account announced this week. The post touted the first “Freedom Fuel Network” gas station, “lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th President.” The White House’s announcement provided few details, leaving the reader — and the viewer of the accompanying video — the impression that the administration, whether through subsidy or takeover, was directly intervening to lower gas prices.
Freedom Fuel, however, is not stealth Marxism from a president fearmongering about “communist” Democrats. “A VERY smart Retailer, located throughout the Northeast, is stepping up,” Trump announced on social media before the July 4 weekend. “They are doing this because they love the U.S.A.” It is not clear who runs the Freedom Fuel Network, with 25 stations in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. The Delaware Department of State lists a filing for Freedom Fuel Network LLC from June 23, but no other information.
But whoever is behind Freedom Fuel, Trump’s praise is emblematic of his second year back in the White House: a half-hearted, poorly thought-out stunt.
The administration later clarified that its support is strictly promotional.
Though the White House post on X said, “President Trump is leading the charge to lower gas prices this summer,” the administration later clarified that its support is strictly promotional. “The administration is not involved in the company, nor has the administration given the company any funding. There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs,” a White House spokesperson told CNN.
Trump is apparently hoping for copycats. For days, he has complained that gas prices are not as low as they were before he recklessly started a war with Iran. Now he is lobbying for other retailers to do what Freedom Fuel has done. “This Retailer is taking the lead,” he wrote in that social media post praising the mystery retailer. “And others should follow.”
Trump, in other words, is asking for volunteers to ease the economic pain that his own policies have caused. Such presidential requests have a checkered history. Herbert Hoover, the president with whom Trump most fears comparisons, declared more than a year into the Great Depression that the “local communities through their voluntary agencies have assumed the duty of relieving individual distress and are being generously supported by the public.” He said, “The result of magnificent cooperation throughout the country has been that actual suffering has been kept to a minimum during the past 12 months.”
The suffering was in fact far from minimal, and the economy would find salvation not in private enterprise or individual fortitude, but in government spending and relief.
James Downie is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily.
