Oil Was Higher Under Biden on 7 Percent of His Days

The claims

First: this post is one day old

The screenshot labels the post "10mo." The archive of Trump's Truth Social output records it with an original post date of Monday, September 14, 2026, 12:31 pm EDT, status ID 117270347763611160.^[1] The text in the archive matches the screenshot word for word. Mediaite and Newsweek both covered it as Monday's posting.^[10][3]

The graphic is internally inconsistent on this point as well. Its reply says "602 days in office." Counting from the inauguration on January 20, 2025, day 602 is September 14, 2026 — the same day as the post. A reply written on the day of the post cannot be answering something from ten months earlier.

Where the "10mo" came from is not something this check can establish. Screenshot tools and repost viewers mislabel relative times, and the image may have passed through several hands. What is verifiable is the post's actual date, and it is not ten months ago. The distinction matters because it decides which oil prices and which inflation readings the claims should be tested against.

Oil: true for seven percent of the Biden presidency

Trump wrote that "Even Oil was higher under Biden than it is right now." Brent spot prices come from the Energy Information Administration, so this is a question with an arithmetic answer rather than an argument.^[4]

Biden's daily peak was $133.18 on March 8, 2022, so there were days under Biden when oil cost more than it does now. There were 72 of them, out of 1,011 trading days between the two inaugurations. On the other 939, oil was cheaper than it is today.

The monthly series tells the same story from the other direction. Brent averaged $83.52 a barrel across Biden's term and $77.65 across Trump's so far.^[5] Trump's term-average is the lower of the two, which is a real point in his favour and one the post does not make. What the post claims instead is a comparison against right now, and right now sits above 92.9 percent of Biden's presidency.

The step from $70.89 in February to $103.13 in March is the month the conflict with Iran began.

"Prices are coming down sharply"

Trump excluded oil from this one, so the fair test is the consumer price index with energy already stripped out. Core CPI, which removes food and energy, comes straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.^[6]

Every figure is positive. Prices did not come down in any of these measures; they rose. Excluding energy entirely, the price level is 1.83 percent higher in August than it was in January.

The charitable reading is that Trump meant the rate of increase rather than the level, which is the usual slippage in this kind of claim. That reading does not rescue it either. Core inflation ran at 2.50 percent in January, peaked at 2.85 percent in May and was 2.45 percent in August — five hundredths of a point below where the year started.^[6] A 0.05-point move over eight months is not sharp. On the all-items measure, inflation is higher than a year ago: 3.40 percent in August 2026 against 2.92 percent in August 2025.

Whose price increases

The highlighted claim is that price increases "were caused by Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, not by 'TRUMP.'"

One part of the first half holds. Inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, and Trump inherited a price level already far above its pre-pandemic base.^[3] A president taking office in 2025 does not get to reset that, and the elevated baseline Americans are paying from is inherited.

The causal part does not hold, and it fails in both directions. Sequence alone does not establish cause, and the sequence is messier than either side's version.

Read one way that supports Trump: inflation ran at 1.36 percent in his last full month and reached 7.87 percent before the Ukraine shock, so most of the climb happened on Biden's watch. Read another way it does not. The larger share of pandemic fiscal support was enacted under Trump, who signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in March 2020, against the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan under Biden a year later.^[12][13] A stimulus-driven account of the surge implicates both men, with the bigger bill bearing the earlier signature.

The strongest evidence cuts against crediting or blaming any US president. The same surge hit economies that passed neither bill, and hit them harder. Euro-area annual inflation peaked at 10.6 percent in October 2022, and UK CPI at 11.1 percent the same month, its highest since 1981 — both above the American peak of roughly 9.1.^[14][15] Work at the San Francisco Fed decomposing the period finds much of the excess concentrated in Covid-sensitive categories, where supply rather than demand moved prices.^[16]

A pandemic disrupted global supply and a war disrupted global energy. Those are the movers, and neither is the property of a US administration. The honest reading is that "caused by Biden, not by TRUMP" asserts a precision about presidential causation that the data does not support for either name. This check does not substitute the mirror-image claim that the surge was Trump's doing; that one fails for the same reason.

The "not by TRUMP" half is where it breaks. The single largest mover in the current numbers is energy, and the energy spike traces to a decision of his own: US strikes on Iran alongside Israel in February 2026 opened a conflict that has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.^[3] The Brent table above shows the result, from $70.89 in February to $117.29 by April. Other pressures are also in play, including attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and disruption to Saudi facilities, and no president controls a global commodity market. But a sitting president who orders strikes that disrupt oil supply cannot describe the resulting prices as somebody else's doing.

Tariffs cut the same way. The administration's own remedy for grocery costs in August was to waive tariffs on up to 300,000 tonnes of imported beef for 90 days, which concedes that the tariffs were raising the price.^[3]

The Iran claim cannot be checked

"We prevented Iran from having a Nuclear Weapon" is rated Unproven rather than false, and the reason is that verification has stopped.

Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon, and US intelligence assessed that no weaponization decision had been taken before the June 2025 strikes.^[7] Both of those cut against the claim as much as for it: the thing said to have been prevented was not, on the public record, underway.

More to the point, nobody outside Iran can currently confirm the state of the programme. IAEA inspectors withdrew after the 2025 strikes, and following the February 2026 escalation the agency reported it could no longer carry out verification in Iran at all. As of this month inspectors have not regained access, and the fate of a stockpile of roughly 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent is unknown.^[8][9] A claim of prevention made during a verification blackout is not checkable in either direction.

"Not a word of this is true"

The reply is the more accurate of the two posts, and it still overstates.

Its checkable specific is right: "602 days in office" lands exactly on September 14, 2026. And its central charge, that prices have not come down and that the man in charge is blaming his predecessor, survives every test above.

"Not a word of this is true" does not. Inflation did peak at 9.1 percent under Biden. Oil did trade higher under Biden than it does now, on 72 days. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. Trump's post is a chain of cherry-picks and a false claim about prices falling, and it is not a document in which no sentence corresponds to anything. Rhetorically the phrase mirrors Trump's own "I hope everyone realizes," which is presumably the point, and it is still a claim that the piece cannot support.

"Pushing us towards economic ruin" is the kind of forecast no dataset settles, and this check does not attempt to rate it.

What would change these verdicts

The oil verdict rests on one number, today's price, and it moves. Brent falling back under about $84 would put it below the Biden average and make the comparison defensible on the merits rather than on a 7 percent tail. The post's own prediction, that oil will "drop like a rock" when the conflict ends, is the mechanism by which that would happen, and it is testable the moment the conflict does end.

The price verdict is firmer. It would take outright deflation, a falling index rather than a slower-rising one, for "prices are coming down" to be accurate, and no measure here is negative. September CPI, due next month, is the next reading.

The Iran verdict would resolve in either direction the moment IAEA inspectors regain access and account for the 60 percent stockpile. Until then it stays Unproven, and anyone asserting it confidently, in either direction, is working without evidence.

The timestamp is the one thing that will not change. The post is dated September 14, 2026, and any version of this graphic still captioned "10mo" is misdating it.