Trump plans to suspend federal gas tax as Iran war hammers Americans… here’s how much YOU will save

Donald Trump is planning to suspend the 18-cent federal gas tax as the Iran war sends prices skyrocketing ahead of the midterm elections.

‘We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,’ the President told CBS News on Monday.

The tax break – 18.4 cents per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel – would represent a small relief for drivers who have seen prices explode by 50 percent since the start of the war to $4.52 per gallon on average.

If introduced today the national average would fall to $4.34 per gallon, still far higher than the $2.98 price before the conflict began on February 28. 

Trump’s latest attempt to cool the market comes as Iran and the US are no closer to agreeing a peace deal, with the President slapping down Tehran’s latest response as ‘a very stupid proposal.’ 

Iran’s demands include reparations for damages inflicted in the US bombing campaign and control over the Strait of Hormuz. 

‘We will never bow our heads before the enemy,’ Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian said Sunday. 

Sixty-three percent of Americans blame Trump for the gas price surge, while more than 80 percent say pump prices are straining their finances, according to a NPR/PBS/Marist poll released last week.

Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried Republicans will pay a political price at the ballot box this November and are eager to end the war before prices wreck the midterms.

The President told reporters last week the price of oil is ‘a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.’

He has insisted prices will fall before November, even slapping down Energy Secretary Chris Wright last month as ‘totally wrong’ after Wright admitted relief at the pump may not come until 2027.

Ex-Governor Chris Sununu, a Trump critic who now lobbies for major airlines, personally warned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent Washington visit that already-high airfares will surge if the Iran war doesn’t end soon.

The Airlines for America president and former New Hampshire governor said Trump officials understand the danger.

‘They get it … and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can,’ Sununu told the Wall Street Journal last week.

The war has already claimed its first airline casualty, with Spirit collapsing into liquidation on May 2 after jet fuel prices roughly doubled in the opening weeks of the conflict and the Trump administration walked away from a $500 million bailout.

US airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March, 30 percent more than last year, according to government data.

Carriers are hiking prices as profit margins get squeezed, piling misery on families preparing for spring break and summer vacations.

The average domestic round-trip economy ticket jumped 21 percent in March from a year earlier to $570, according to the Airlines Reporting Corp.

Jet fuel is faring even worse, with the Singapore global benchmark trading at around $200 per barrel, more than double the $83 average over the same period last year.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu speaks at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership meeting on November 19, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada

But Sununu warned that even if the Strait of Hormuz suddenly reopened, ‘ticket prices won’t go down immediately.’

‘You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down,’ he told the Journal.