Trump says gas should be $1.87 a gallon. Here’s what that would mean.

It’s become a common refrain during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: Gasoline prices would plummet if he returned to the White House, falling as low as they were when he was in office.

“When I left office … gasoline had reached $1.87 a gallon. We actually had many months where it was lower than that,” Trump told reporters outside his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, this summer. “But we hit $1.87, which was a perfect place, an absolutely beautiful number.”

Trump has mentioned this target price of $1.87 a gallon more than 19 times on the campaign trail, according to a Washington Post analysis of his remarks. But supporters say the figure, which does not appear on Trump’s campaign website or in the 2024 Republican Party platform, is less a precise goal than a powerful reminder how rising prices have hurt consumers in recent years.

Energy experts and economists, however, say the suggestion that he could slice gas prices by more than 40% — the national average is currently $3.15 — underscores how candidates can overstate their ability to shape the economy. And in this case, they warn, achieving what Trump is proposing could have severe consequences for many of the industries he is vowing to support.

For gas prices to fall to $1.87 a gallon, crude oil prices would need to dramatically drop to just $20 a barrel, according to calculations by Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University. For context, West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the U.S. benchmark, was trading around $71 a barrel on Wednesday. The only time oil prices dipped near $20 a barrel in recent years was “during the pandemic,” Finley said, “when oil demand was in a free-fall and the Saudis and Russians were having a price war.”

Companies generally can’t break even on oil production when the price of a barrel falls below $45, according to Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston. If crude prices plummeted to $20 a barrel, Hirs said, top U.S. oil producers would probably pull back on major investments.

In this scenario, spending on drilling could screech to a halt. Refineries could shutter. The impacts could be especially acute in energy-rich states such as New Mexico, Colorado and others, where taxes on oil and gas production help fund schools and local governments.

“Trump wants rock-bottom gasoline prices, but he also wants booming oil production. It’s hard to get both,” said Ben Cahill, an energy economist at the University of Texas at Austin. “And in a lot of states, production has a huge impact on the state’s fiscal balance.”

Gas did not, in fact, cost $1.87 a gallon when Trump left office. The national average gas price for the week of Jan. 18, 2021, was $2.38 a gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Prices did drop to a monthly average of $1.84 a gallon in April 2020, a trend that experts attribute to pandemic-related restrictions.

Americans have been enjoying relatively low gas prices in recent weeks, despite geopolitical tensions in the Middle East that have rattled global oil markets. Average U.S. gas prices now hover around $3.16 a gallon, down from $3.55 a gallon at this time last year, according to AAA.

Yet gas prices averaged $2.48 a gallon during Trump’s first term compared with $3.49 a gallon during President Joe Biden’s term so far, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — a trend that Trump has tied to higher inflation during much of Biden’s presidency.

“We’re going down and getting gasoline below $2 a gallon,” Trump said at the Economic Club of New York last month, pledging to “bring down the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares and housing costs.”

Such remarks should be “taken seriously but not literally,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm. “I take what he says in those speeches as a metaphor for deregulation and encouraging domestic production, but I don’t think returning to that price is likely to be easy or pleasant if it’s to be taken literally.”

Presidents have only a limited degree of power to bring down prices at the pump, energy economists say. Domestic gas prices are largely determined by global oil prices, which are largely dictated by the coalition of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia.

“Nothing Trump says will get gasoline prices below $2 a gallon,” Hirs said. “But if it is done, it’s going to demolish the U.S. oil and gas industry and infrastructure.”

Experts say gas prices have been higher during the Biden years because of both economic and geopolitical forces. The economy’s rapid recovery from the pandemic created more gas demand, pushing prices upward. Then the invasion of Ukraine sparked a global backlash against Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer, sending prices even higher. Biden has sought to tamp down prices by releasing millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the national stockpile.

Economists say gas prices were lower when Trump took office, meanwhile, because the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had flooded the market with excess supply to undermine U.S. producers during the Obama administration. Then at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, oil demand cratered as governments imposed lockdowns and far fewer people drove or flew.

Conservative groups that have been crafting policy proposals for a second Trump term welcomed the former president’s focus on gas prices.

“I think someone who is saying, ‘I’m going to get gasoline prices down below $2 a gallon’ can be very persuasive,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, which helped draft Project 2025, a conservative plan for the next Republican administration.

“People care about the price of a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread and a gallon of gasoline,” she added. “Supermarkets don’t post milk and bread prices, but gas stations all post the price of gasoline.”

Asked for comment on whether pushing gas prices down to $1.87 a gallon could have dire effects, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an email: “Are you going to note how that’s what gas cost in his first term, and none of that happened? Or nah?” Leavitt did not respond to follow-up questions.

Mia Ehrenberg, a spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, declined to comment but pointed to the vice president’s economic plan, which states that “prices at the pump have been falling for consumers.” The plan also touts record U.S. oil production under Biden, arguing that the administration’s aggressive climate goals have not hampered the industry.

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Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.