Fact check: Trump posts wildly deceptive chart on oil prices

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — Oil prices are higher now than they were when President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. But Trump posted a wildly deceptive chart on Friday that wrongly suggests oil prices are lower than they were upon predecessor Joe Biden’s departure.

The text at the top of the chart claims, “Oil is Down 25% or $30 Per Barrel Since Sleepy Joe.” The chart has two bars: a blue bar labeled “Biden $120” and a much smaller green bar reading “Trump $90.” An arrow points downward from the “Biden” bar toward the “Trump” bar.

Here’s the big problem. The price of oil wasn’t anywhere close to $120 when Biden left office.

US crude oil futures actually closed below $80 per barrel on January 20, 2025, the day of Trump’s second inauguration, and on January 17, 2025, the last full trading day under Biden. By contrast, after a spike in oil prices triggered by the war Trump launched against Iran in late February, US crude was trading above $94 per barrel most of Friday morning.

So where did Trump’s chart get its key “$120” figure? It appears that’s a reference to the approximate peak in US crude closing prices under Biden. But that peak came in 2022, more than two years before Trump returned to office, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The chart fails to disclose the fact that the “$120” figure is from 2022. Worse, it actively misleads readers with the title claim that “Oil is Down 25% or $30 Per Barrel Since Sleepy Joe,” since the phrase “Since Sleepy Joe” creates the impression that a decline from $120 per barrel has occurred since Biden left the White House. In reality, US crude had already declined to about $80 per barrel by the end of 2022, Pavel Molchanov, an investment strategist focusing on commodities at the investment firm Raymond James, noted in a Friday email.

Former Biden administration economic spokesperson Jesse Lee posted on X on Friday in response to the chart: “It just bears repeating: the spike in oil prices under Biden (long gone by when Trump took office) was due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The spike under Trump was due to his own war of choice.”

US crude prices declined early during the second Trump presidency, and they were below $60 for much of January 2026. (Molchanov emphasized that, in general, “Oil prices reflect global supply/demand fundamentals, which are much broader than who happens to be in the White House at any given time.”) But they jumped after the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February, briefly exceeding $110 per barrel in early April before declining, in fits and starts, to their Friday level.

A regular Trump tactic

While trying to promote his economic record, Trump has repeatedly described high 2022 prices and inflation readings as if they were the figures Biden handed to him in 2025 — thus implicitly taking credit for the progress of the final two-plus years of Biden’s four-year term.

For example, Trump has repeatedly said he “inherited” the worst inflation in US history or the worst in more than four decades — not mentioning that the inflation rate in the month he took over from Biden, January 2025, was 3.0%, much lower than the 40-year high of 9.1% that was set in June 2022. (The most recent available rate, for March 2026, is 3.3%.)

Trump has used a similar tactic when discussing gasoline prices. He has repeatedly said that gas topped $5 per gallon under Biden without mentioning that this peak, a AAA national average of about $5.02 per gallon, occurred in June 2022. The average had come down to about $3.12 per gallon on Trump’s inauguration day in January 2025; it had increased to $4.55 per gallon as of Friday.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.