A Detroit man named Ke’chon Wheaton asked Vice President JD Vance how to get low gas prices again after he voted Donald Trump into office twice, first in 2020 and then again in 2024. The 43-year-old barber said he mainly voted Trump not office for a second term because “gas prices fell during his first term.”
On Saturday (October 17), VP Vance participated in a CBS News town hall in the Flat Rock / Greater Michigan area. Wheaton said he saw gas prices as low as $1.17 a gallon in Detroit when Trump was in office back in 2020. However, he now claims he is “paying $4.33 a gallon for gas.” Wheaton asked, “I wanted to know, what aren’t we doing that we could be doing to obtain the previous Trump administration’s gas prices?”
Before Vance could answer, Wheaton slipped in a second question about United States Senator candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) and his opponent Mike Rogers (R-MI). Wheaton asked, “I plan on voting for El-Sayed in this upcoming election, and I wanted to know, why should I vote for Miek Rogers instead?”
VP Vance replied:
“Okay, well, I really appreciate that, man, and appreciate the question and obviously the support in 2024. I’m vice president because of it, but I think that first of all, I recognize that gas prices are too high right now. And I think it’s important to be honest about why they are so elevated. And there are a few different things going on. So the first thing that’s going on, obviously, is what’s happening in the Middle East, particularly the fact that the Iranians are shooting at every commercial ship that they can. It’s a global energy market, so that’s pushing up the price of fuel everywhere. But there are also a lot of things that we’ve done already to lower fuel prices and, frankly, to keep them from going even higher. We’ve never had a situation like this, where you have effectively the largest state sponsor of terrorism that’s trying to completely choke off world energy supply. The fact is that if we just, like, left and we let the Iranians control shipping out of the Strait of Hormuz, what that would mean is you would pay a lot more for gasoline. There are also other things that we, frankly, should have been doing years ago, and we are now doing quite affirmatively. So a couple of days ago, I was in Texas, and we announced that we were going to use what’s called the Defense Production Act to massively increase the amount of refining capacity that we have in the United States of America. That’s actually the biggest reason why gas prices are so high is because when Joe Biden was president, we had about 20% of American refining capacity that went offline. We’re slowly bringing that online, but it does take a little bit of time. And because we shut down so much refining capacity, we were more susceptible to this shock that we’ve seen in the Middle Eastern energy prices. So there’s a lot that we are doing. It’s just, we also are working against an Iranian regime that’s shooting at commercial shipping.”
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