President Trump is expected to meet with fuel refiners and distributors Tuesday as gasoline prices remain stubbornly high and are expected to be a major midterm issue. The president is expected to discuss how to expand U.S. refining…
Page F4From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Trump's Iran strikes drove gas above $4 all August; his fix: drain the reserve, meet refiners.
As it ran on the front
The ledger for August closes with retail gasoline above four dollars a gallon on all thirty-one days, a first for the monthly average since the Energy Information Administration began keeping the series. That is not an opinion; it is the number the pumps returned. Running that column against the calendar, the price line starts climbing in the same window the administration ordered strikes on Iranian targets, a fact the White House does not dispute and does not connect. Two entries, same month, no gap between them worth noting, hon.
The second filing concerns the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The administration announced it is replenishing the reserve, phrasing that assumes a fact not yet reconciled: that the reserve was depleted in the first place, and by whom, during whose term, for what stated reason. The public record shows the reserve was drawn down and is now being refilled, at a price that is not the price it was drawn down at, a spread the filing does not itemize but the invoice will.…
…(cont) The third entry is a meeting. Oil refiners are scheduled to sit down with the administration this week to discuss what the itinerary calls stubborn prices, as though the price were a mule and not a market the administration's own war premium moved. Refiners, as a rule, do not lose money at four dollars a gallon; the margin runs upstream. The meeting produces a photograph. The photograph does not produce a lower number at the pump, and the filing will note, when the next index comes in, whether it did.
Running the three entries as one ledger: the war drove the number up, the reserve absorbed part of the difference at replenishment cost, and the remedy on offer is a sit-down with the people least exposed to the number's cost, and most exposed to its margin. That is not a motive. That is where the three columns land when you run them against each other. The gap comes out even, which is the part worth noting, because it usually does not.
“You start a war, gas hits four bucks every single day for a month straight, first time that's ever happened, then you call a sit-down with the guys who sell the gas to talk about how 'stubborn' the price is. That's not stubborn, that's a receipt with your name on it. The war's the surcharge and the rest of us are the ones getting billed at the pump.”
“Look, energy independence takes strategic patience, and the reserve numbers are being replenished, that's a positive story. The strikes on Iran are a totally separate national security matter, unrelated to — okay, it's not unrelated, the timeline's right there in the filing. We're calling the refiner meeting proactive engagement on stubborn pricing, which, fine, we caused.”
The receipts
‘Virtually emptied’
President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran has achieved a significant milestone, but it's not one that many US voters will likely appreciate. Data published by the American Automobile Association (AAA) on Monday show that the average…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.