Trump’s Gas Price “Fix” Reeks of Panic

Añadido: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, it's me Sam Stein, managing at the Blowwork. Look, I just got done with a taping of Katie Tur show on MS Now, and we talked about a bunch of stuff, including redistricting. But the first thing we went over is the economy and frankly this kind of haphazard messaging that the Trump administration is doing on the economy with Kevin Hasset, one of Trump's top economic advisors, saying, "Hey, everything's great. People are spending so much money on their credit cards, gasoline, and all that stuff. How great can it be? We have all this expenditures happening from people. Well, the truth is it's not that great when you're spending a lot of money on essential services, including putting gas in your car and more money on beef and steaks and all that stuff because prices are going through the roof. What we talked about is the fact that a lot of the stuff that Trump has done, he sort of implicitly is recognizing that it's causing problems. It's why he wants to do now a gas tax holiday. It was a proposal that he debuted today.

[00:00:58]>> Mr. President, are you going to suspend the federal gas tax?

[00:01:01]>> Yeah, I'm going to uh reduce until the Let me tell you, as soon as this is over with Iran, as soon as it's over, you're going to see uh gasoline and oil drop like a rock. Going to be dropping down like a rock.

[00:01:17]>> He said he wants an 18 cent gas tax holiday, which is something that Joe Biden tried in 2022. And you know who said no? Congressional Democrats as well as some congressional Republicans. Let's see if they will sign off on a gas tax holiday now that Trump is in office.

[00:01:31]We'll have to see if they vote on it even. And only a little bit of a reprieve because frankly, you take the money out of the highway trust fund and that means less money for repairing our roads and our bridges. The other thing that Trump did uh today or reportedly is going to do is relax tariffs on beef imports. Now, why is that important?

[00:01:50]Well, the price of beef is skyrocketing.

[00:01:52]So tariffs would potentially if you relieve the tariffs that would help with that. But implicitly what it is is an acknowledgement that the tariffs that he put on beef imports are in fact causing beef prices to skyrocket. So now that he's taking them off is he acknowledging that the tariffs actually weren't great for beef manufacturers or sorry I should say for beef consumers because they need to get cheaper beef especially in time for grilling season which is coming up.

[00:02:19]All that we discussed on Katie Tur as I mentioned we discuss redistricting later on and what it means for Democrats this cycle and for the country going forward.

[00:02:26]Hope you enjoy what we had to say and as always do subscribe to the bull where you get great takes just like this. This ad is brought to you by Pocket Hose. You guys know how much I love Pocket Hose. I really love it. Carry it around with me.

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[00:03:58]>> The consumer is really really firing on all cylinders just like the corporate sector you're seeing in the earnings reports. And they're doing that because they have so much more money in their pockets. In fact, I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data. And just as Secretary Bessant said, uh, credit card spending is through the roof. They're spending more on gasoline, but they're spending more on everything else, too.

[00:04:22]>> Sam, it reminds me of the, um, Scott Bessant line where he was talking about buying your your 10th, 12th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th home. It's what's what's up with this White House?

[00:04:35]>> A little tonedeaf to say the least. I thought I would rank the best in one. A little bit even more tonedeaf. Uh, you know, shaving off that 11th home as a way to, you know, prepare for the cost going up is something that only a select few of us can uh consider. Uh, but Kevin Hass, I mean, this is he he does this time and again. He goes out there on TV and he paints this incredibly rosy but also incredibly detached picture of where the economy is. And he does it because he knows that someone is watching him on TV and that person is Donald Trump. And yes, credit card spending is going up, but as we've just outlined, it's going up for the wrong reasons. Gas is more expensive, cost of goods is more expensive, people have to pay for essential services, and so they're putting it on credit. Uh that is not a sign of a healthy economy. That's a sign of a economy that is coming apart at the seams. And if in fact gas prices are not going to go down anytime soon, uh you can imagine that inflation is likely to get even worse. Uh because it is compounding. It goes into all these transportation costs. goes into cost for a number of other goods as well. And so we are looking at a summer in which people are naturally going to be going on the road. People are going to be cooking out. You can see right there ground brief. And um the administration is looking for ways to chip at it. Uh so there's two things that are happening here. One is they're painting incredibly rosy picture uh with these types of uh cable news hits. And then secondarily is they're trying to find little ways to chip at the cost. So gas tax holiday is one of them. But the other thing that was kind of an interesting tell is that Trump is considering uh getting rid of some of the tariffs on beef uh which is an emission. Uh we should note that the tariffs were in fact responsible for raising prices in the first place. So they're nipping around the edges and we'll see if it does any good. I think in the aggregate it's only going to be a little bit of relief and the bigger picture problems will persist.

[00:06:20]>> Sam, I I thought Republicans were the one that ones that wanted to get a handle on the national debt.

[00:06:26]>> Well, they do and there's a Democratic president. Um, and that's time and time again what we see. So, I was around during the Tea Party wave 2010. Uh, this was the rallying cry. Uh, and then subsequently they gain into office and during the Trump administration debt went up. Um, they don't cut back on spending. Um, they do cut taxes. Uh, those in combination drive up the debt.

[00:06:47]And, and look, I mean, there will be cuts uh here and there uh that they will propose. And I will give I guess if you're monommonically focused on that, you can say, well, they're cutting back on food stamps and Medicaid and all things, but they did just uh embrace a $ 1.5 trillion defense budget uh which is an exorbitant uh amount of money uh greater than I think it was like something the next eight countries combined in terms of their defense budget. So, you know, it's selective spending cuts, uh, constant call for tax cuts. And so, the calls for deficit reduction and debt reduction are pretty much uh, basically when a Democrat is president.

[00:07:24]>> We talk about this a lot about people not trusting the system, but correct me if I'm wrong, Sam, I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but the the turnout for presidential elections the past few cycles has been breaking records. So, even though people aren't trusting the system, they are still showing up, >> right? And and that might be related, right? I mean, so one of the rallying cries for Trump during the 2024 was to make the election too big to rig, if you remember. And so he sold his people on the idea that if you just came out and voted in such vast numbers, they can't cheat you out of a win. Uh now everything about it was sort of preposterous. They've investigated voter fraud allegations nauseium uh in multiple states and found vanishingly few instances of it. But it was a motivating factor for his folks.

[00:08:12]Uh and you know similarly obviously when Trump's on the ballot uh and you know even during the COVID pandemic that is an incredible motivator for Democrats who feel very petrified by the presence of him in the Oval Office and so they go out and they vote too. Um we'll see if these trends continue. Uh obviously having this amount of distrust in the you know the the the security of our elections and the results and the accuracy of the results is a huge problem. Sam, when we we look at the way this redistricting has happened in the middle as as Basil was saying um of a census cycle, there are a lot of people that have moved around this country over the past few years, especially because of co and are these parties totally sure is the Republican party totally sure that the districts they're drawing today in 2026 look the same way they did 6 years ago when the cens or whatever it was 7 years ago when the census was being done. Is it the same place or have the the demographics changed? Has the political makeup changed? And are they running a risk of having a maybe a lot, you know, maybe a purple district instead of a deep red district after they've redrawn these maps?

[00:09:29]>> I guess both can be true. They're pretty sure uh they have very granular data on voting histories. They know exactly where to draw these lines to maximize their opportunities. They're not doing this just, you know, with crayon.

[00:09:39]They're doing it with precision. And uh, frankly, they're doing it in a way that even in a huge wave election year, they're going to win seats because of this. Uh, now I will say Democrats are still accurately favored to win the House because the backlash against Trump is going to be so profound that it will carry them over. And also, the Republican uh, majority is so thin already that it doesn't take too much.

[00:10:02]But here's a scary proposition. What's to stop Republicans from just simply doing this all over again in these same states should they see the results and say, "Ah, we got to tinker with these lines a little bit." And then on top of that, obviously, Democrats in some of the trifecta Democratic states are going to do exactly this before the 2028 cycle. This is the beginning of the bifurcation of the House. It's not the end point. This is going to be something that happens every couple years uh modified with, you know, the most up-to-date data and statistics that they can compile with districts kind of revised down to the street uh to make sure that each party optimizes as much as they can. And we're going to have a future in which there's probably like a dozen house seats that are competitive each cycle. Should be dystopian.

[00:10:44]>> Sam, it sounds like you are on board with my retirement plan of changing the Constitution and getting rid of Jerry Mandering. I'm going to give you a call.

[00:10:53]No, we're going to do it together.

[00:10:55]>> You and me. Okay. Yeah.

[00:10:56]>> Be the change you want to see in the world. You and me. All right.