Trump Calls the Iran War a “Fortune.” Pump and Jet Fuel Prices Tell a Harder Story
President Donald Trump said “We're making a freaking fortune” about money the United States is collecting from the Iran war, in remarks reported by Yahoo Finance on October 25, 2026. He also claimed that the oil price surge tied to the conflict was filling U.S. coffers with hundreds of billions of dollars. The remarks came while U.S. gasoline stood at $4.29 per gallon, according to Fortune.
The other side of the ledger is less flattering. Brown University estimated that Americans have spent nearly $143 billion more on gasoline and diesel than they would have without the war, according to KCRA. A separate study, reported by Reuters, found U.S. consumers have paid an average of $471 more for higher fuel prices since the war started on February 28.
Pump prices are high by recent standards. AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.2858 a gallon as of October 26. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the federal agency that tracks energy prices, puts the 2025 average retail price at $3.10 a gallon. That makes the October figure roughly 38 percent above last year's mean, or simple average. ABC News reported that the national average topped $4 a gallon on 158 days in 2026, a new record. The EIA's 2016 to 2025 average was $2.89.
Diesel and jet fuel show the same pattern in sharper form. Gulf Coast jet fuel spot prices, meaning the price for fuel bought for immediate delivery, rose from $2.43 a gallon in February to $4.63. That is an increase of 90.53 percent, according to Fortune. For airlines and trucking fleets, that is an input cost move, not a headline.
The White House has made its own claims about the period. It stated that President Trump secured U.S. majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil, which it called “the biggest oil deal in world history.” In October, the White House announced emergency tax relief on diesel fuel, which it described as saving Americans up to $100 per fill. The White House has also claimed that Trump brokered an end to the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran. As of October 27, the U.S. war with Iran was eight months old.
In my view, the central tension is one of measurement. A claim about government receipts and a claim about household spending are different ledgers, and they are not interchangeable. Brown's figure is a counterfactual estimate, meaning it compares actual prices with an assumed baseline of what prices would have been without the war. No one observes that baseline. Any honest comparison would need the government's gains measured on the same basis: the same time window, the same counterfactual, and net of whatever relief or spending the administration is funding.
The diesel tax announcement is itself a signal. A government that counts pump-price gains as revenue while offering pump-price relief is, in effect, treating fuel costs as both a windfall and a political liability.
For households, the practical question is simple. Gasoline is the line item people see every week, and the EIA baseline shows how far current prices sit above recent norms. For businesses that burn jet fuel or diesel, the 90 percent move since February is the more consequential number, because it feeds into costs that do not reset when a headline does.
Rhetoric about a fortune is easy to say and hard to audit. The measurable items are the pump price, the counterfactual spending estimate, and the jet fuel spot series. Those are the figures to track as the war moves into its ninth month.
