Republicans have spent years hammering Gavin Newsom for California's high gas prices. Now, the Democratic governor is seizing a sudden opening to shift the blame to Donald Trump as the war in Iran sends oil costs skyward.
“Look at your cost at the pump the last few days: That was an act of the Trump administration,” Newsom told reporters two days after the first U.S. strikes in Iran.
Then on Monday, after California gasoline prices surged 12 percent in a week to $5.20 a gallon — 57 cents higher than Washington state, the nation’s second-priciest state — Newsom doubled down on social media. He called Trump a “con man with no plan” after the president said that oil prices would drop rapidly once the “Iran nuclear threat is over.”
"California's fuel prices were stable for years until Trump launched this war without a plan," Newsom spokesperson Anthony Martinez said in an email. "Where is Donald Trump's plan to lower prices?"
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, responded to Newsom’s criticism by blaming the governor for California’s high gasoline prices and saying that the Trump administration had national oil policy in hand.
“President Trump’s entire energy team, including the National Energy Dominance Council, [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum, [Energy] Secretary [Chris] Wright, and [Treasury] Secretary [Scott] Bessent, have a game plan to keep the energy markets stable throughout Operation Epic Fury,” Rogers said.
Newsom’s offensive is in line with Democrats nationally pouncing on Trump for the economic fallout of the war. But the bravado is also papering over an intractable problem for Newsom: His fingerprints have been all over the state policies regulating California’s oil and gasoline industry during a time when it is idling two major refineries, laying off hundreds of workers and charging the highest prices in the nation.
And while his administration has extended some olive branches to the industry, including allowing increased oil drilling, California still intends to phase out gasoline by 2045. Its regulators continue to push forward environmental rules that infuriate the fossil fuel companies, and the state is importing an increasingly large share of its gasoline.
Global oil prices have whipsawed since the first joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, spiking to a four-year high and spurring an international coalition to initiate the largest emergency oil release in history in a bid to calm the market. The situation has given Democrats ample ammunition to attack the White House on affordability concerns, and even Republicans in Washington are anxious about it.
For Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, the political imperative to shift the conversation to prices anywhere but in his home state is extraordinarily high.
“Make no mistake, these primaries get ugly quickly, and I think [Newsom’s] vulnerability is going to be on homelessness, crime and affordability,” said Matt Rodriguez, a veteran Democratic strategist. “I think these oil refineries are right smack dab in the middle of that.”
Republicans in California have been moving for months to keep the pressure on Newsom.
California state Senate Republicans in January called for a special legislative session on gasoline prices, warning that a “decades-long political and policy crusade against the oil and gas industry in our state” was on the verge of causing “impending gasoline price spikes.”
That request fell on deaf ears in the Democratic-controlled California Legislature. But even some members of his own party acknowledge that Newsom’s long history of oil industry antagonism, including spearheading 2023 and 2024 special legislative sessions on gasoline prices that opened the door to capping refiner profits and requiring additional gasoline storage, could be a liability in 2028.
Those special sessions make Newsom “directly responsible” for California’s high gasoline prices, Ian Calderon (D), former California Assembly Majority Leader and, until recently, a candidate for governor, said in a January interview.
“You want to get more attention, you want to elevate your national profile, and so you do that,” Calderon said. “And we end up getting saddled with, yet again, another cost.”
The Newsom administration has argued that gasoline price spikes are not new in California (after all, they’re what drew the governor’s attention to the issue in the first place) and the special session laws have helped the state stabilize the situation. One key provision of the special session package was a requirement that refiners must notify state officials one year ahead of any closure. Phillips 66 filed that notice in March 2024 for its Los Angeles refinery, and Valero followed suit in April 2025 for its Benicia refinery.
Newsom pointed to that fact when POLITICO asked him about the Benicia refinery ramping down in February.
“The special session that was supported by this Legislature, that gave us the ability to plan for this a year ago,” Newsom said. “We’ve had many meetings, not just with Valero, with many other stakeholders related to refinery issues.”
The Valero announcement triggered the Newsom administration to act. Within a week, Newsom tasked one of his top appointees, Siva Gunda, the vice chair of the California Energy Commission, with ensuring that refiners "continue to see the value in serving the California market." The agency voted in August to delay the industry-hated refinery profit cap for five years.
Behind the scenes, Gunda was meeting with executives from Valero and other refinery companies in hopes of staving off the refinery closures. He said in an interview that he flew multiple times to San Antonio, where Valero is headquartered.
“It was important for us to continue those conversations and make sure that they understand that the Energy Commission and the state are here to be partners,” he said.
On the legislative side, lawmakers hoped to secure funding to help pay for Valero to maintain the refinery, but didn't manage to get a deal, according to Assemblymember Lori Wilson (D), who represents Benicia and co-led a working group on petroleum.
Last year’s legislative dealmaking was crowded with a staggering suite of big-ticket energy items, and by the time Wilson’s vision came into focus, “there was no time to talk to the Legislature about it,” she said.
With the legislative fix failing to materialize, Valero announced in January that it would begin idling the Benicia refinery the next month, and expected to idle most of its processing units by April. The company also said that it “anticipates” importing gasoline to the Bay Area “in the near term.”
Gunda said that there is a distinction between idling a refinery, which means that the facility is not operating, but could be restarted in the future, compared to closing, which would involve a permanent shutdown and selling off parts.
Gunda and others in the Newsom administration point to the continued possibility of saving the refinery as a victory.
“I think the signals from the state, the collaborative conversations that we've been having with Valero, I think led to the point … of them keeping the optionality of potentially being able to sell,” Gunda said.
Valero did not reply to a request for comment. But during a January earnings call, Rich Walsh, Valero general counsel, said that the company was moving forward with its announced plan.
“As we’ve shared with the governor and the CEC, we are going to be importing some gasoline, and/or gasoline blend components, over the near term,” Walsh said. “We’re working cooperatively with state officials, the CEC and governor, on our plans.”
Whether or not a sale to save the Benicia refinery eventually comes together, the fact remains that California has become significantly more dependent on imported gasoline in the past three months. (Phillips 66 followed through on idling its Los Angeles refinery in December.)
That’s put California, which has historically refined the vast majority of its gasoline in-state, on the path to importing a much larger share of its fuel supply. The Newsom administration has begun to embrace some of the upsides to the model, including the possibility of new companies joining the gasoline game, which could add price-stabilizing competition.
And some oil companies are coming around to the idea, too. Phillips 66 has kept its Los Angeles marine terminal operating and wants to set up the first ever pipeline carrying gasoline into California.
But there’s downsides to imports. As there’s fewer refineries, the impact of a single facility going offline unexpectedly, like if there’s a fire, could have a more amplified impact, according to independent oil analyst Tom Kloza. And the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California has come out against policies that could increase gasoline imports and potentially kill in-state jobs.
Finally, there’s the factor that the war in Iran has laid bare: International commodity markets are at the mercy of foreign affairs, and those fluctuations can hit California drivers at the pump.
But that’s nothing new for California. The state has imported more gasoline than it exports since 2015, which has tied gasoline prices to fluctuations abroad ever since, according to Ryan Cummings, chief of staff of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
The state has been “pricing gasoline off of the international market since 2015, so one more refinery coming offline doesn’t change that dynamic at all,” Cummings said.
Communicating that complexity of gasoline economics to voters is a tall task, illustrated by Newsom’s office putting out a lengthy gasoline fact vs. myth release on Tuesday. And that’s before factoring in the complex mix of environmental programs, taxes and industry profits that make up the price California drivers pay at the pump.
It’s a much simpler message to point out that California has the priciest gasoline in the country. His political antagonists are doing it now.
“Gavin Newscum destroyed the oil and gas industry in his state and Californians have been paying the price at the pump for years,” Rogers, the White House spokesperson, said in a statement reacting to the governor’s criticism of Trump on gasoline prices.
And regardless of any progress that Newsom is able to make on the issue before his term ends, it’s likely to haunt him moving forward.
“It’s not like gas prices are going to be $2.50 when he leaves,” Rodriguez, the Democratic strategist, said. “The question is, will his answers be credible to voters … or is that going to be a huge Achilles' heel?”
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