Daily Kos84%
The hidden cost of Trump’s ‘Freedom Fuel’ gimmick 86%
By Lisa Needham97%
7/14/2026, 12:01:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Politically Right Leaning Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 80.4% saturation with 436 hits. Analysis detected 2,378 faulty-reasoning hits from 542 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 77.3% and a BS Rank of 86% (3,272 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 85.10% of the article peer group.
President Donald Trump is always eager to take credit for achievements—but not to actually do the whole achieving thing in the first place.
That part is for suckers and losers, of course.
So it’s no surprise that his “solution” to high gas prices is to do some behind-the-scenes fiddling to make it look like gas prices are coming down without them actually coming down.
And it’s all in a flailing attempt to solve a problem that is entirely of his own making, thanks to his disastrously stupid war in Iran.
In his latest genius move, Trump is pushing the “Freedom Fuel Network,” which consists of 25 gas stations that are somehow selling gas for mad cheap.
Yes, 25 whole stations nationwide.
Really moving the needle there, sir.
Masterful gambit.
He’s even been having the official White House social media accounts hype the project, complete with oh-so-grateful consumers praising Trump, because this is what our government does now.
The price?
$3.47.
Sigh.
But it’s not really “cheaper” in the way anyone actually understands that word.
“The stations lowering prices via the Freedom Fuel Network in [Pennsylvania], [New Jersey], etc. are simply being subsidized—the stations are losing money—which is being paid for by someone or some entity.
The stations are likely losing 20-50c/gal,” industry analyst Patrick de Haan explained.
Subsidizing gas prices isn’t illegal or new.
T-Mobile recently did a promotion in California where it took over several Shell stations to sell $1.99/gallon fuel, picking up the difference in cost and slapping pink branding everywhere.
It seems pretty likely that this is what inspired Trump to do the same, seeing as the “Freedom Fuel Network” registration didn’t exist until about three weeks after the T-Mobile takeover.
Oh, and it was also registered by Corporation Trust Company, which the Trump family often uses to register their private enterprises.
Related | Gas prices climb as Trump says ceasefire with Iran is ‘OVER’
But that doesn’t actually make sense.
Gas stations have some of the thinnest profit margins out there, ranging from 15 to 40 cents per gallon or even lower for independent stations.
So if you can do grade school math, you can see that lowering the price of gas by, say, 50 cents a gallon is not actually a sustainable business model.
It’s also nowhere near what T-Mobile ate to bring a gallon all the way down to $1.99.
Actual experts say that there’s no real way a retailer can survive selling gas at 50 cents below market rate—especially when they had “never heard of the Freedom Fuel Network until the White House announced its existence.”
Indeed, estimates show that each of these 25 stations could lose about $250,000 per month, which isn’t really going to work out in the long term.
So basically a secret company, which just happens to be registered by the Trump family’s preferred corporation, is subsidizing gas prices out of the goodness of its heart, and surely there’s no quid pro quo bribe situation happening, right?
Everything that Trump does, he does on the cheap—and he does it poorly.
Freedom Fuel is going to go the way of the Incompetent Pool Guy is set to reap more taxpayer money, mark my words.
Speakers
1speaker2.2%attributed speech530writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coveragePatrick de Haan
12 attributed words100% of attributed speech100% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.