Jeff Bezos on Saturday slammed U.S. President Joe Biden for his tweet calling on gas companies to lower prices at the pump, calling it “either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”
“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices ad the pump is simple: This is a time of war and global peril,” Biden said in a tweet Saturday. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”
Bezos on Saturday retweeted Biden’s tweet with a reply, saying that inflation is “far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this.”
“It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics,” he said in a tweet.
The national average gas price was $4.81 on Sunday, according to AAA. A record high of $5.01 was set last month.
John Kirby, a senior National Security Council spokesman at the White House, responded to Bezos’s statement, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that the White House takes “great exception at the idea that this is somehow misdirection,” Bloomberg reported.
On Thursday Biden said that Americans will endure high gas prices “as long as it takes” to quell Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion, while speaking at a NATO summit press conference in Madrid.
Biden has called on Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for three months to help alleviate the economic burden to consumers, but has encountered resistance from his own party.
The majority of the country—70% of Americans, including 43% of Democrats—disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, the results of which were released Wednesday.
Nearly 80% of Americans call the country’s economic conditions poor, including 67% of Democrats, according to the poll. Biden recently told the Associated Press he realizes he’s getting blamed, with an increase in gas prices correlating with his decline in popularity.
The AP asked Biden who is really responsible.
“If it’s my fault, why is it the case in every other major industrial country in the world that inflation is higher? You ask yourself that?” He said. “I’m not being a wise guy.”