Republicans have long ridiculed Jimmy Carter as a feckless figure who did little to help a limping economy and was outsmarted by foreign adversaries like Iran. President Donald Trump once used the occasion of Carter’s 100th birthday, in October 2024, to declare him a success — at least compared with Joe Biden.
Now, with few options at their disposal to tackle the record-high diesel prices battering farmers and truck drivers, and with just six weeks to go until the midterms, growing pockets of the Republican Party are reaching into the Carter playbook.
In the past three days, the concept of a diesel export ban caught fire among Republican lawmakers. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa spearheaded the GOP jailbreak when he endorsed the proposal on Saturday, saying in an X post that “high diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME.”
Republicans are falling back on a Carter-era idea that only deepened rock bottom for farmers.
Now a stampede of Iowa Republicans is rushing to back the proposal, as diesel scaled to a record high of $6.53 per gallon nationwide. It’s more than double the price from a year ago, thanks in large part to the Iran war and, to a lesser extent, the war in Ukraine. Republicans are demanding immediate action.
“Iowa farmers are filling combines this week at the highest diesel price this state has ever seen, while oil companies ship record amounts of American diesel overseas,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks said, calling companies to “sell American diesel to Americans first.” The three-term congresswoman’s re-election race has been rated as a toss-up by Inside Elections, a nonpartisan publication.
Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is campaigning to replace retiring Sen. Joni Ernst as Iowa’s next senator, joined the pack as well. Other House Republicans also introduced legislation last week to implement a temporary diesel export ban through January 2027 just before they skipped town until after the Nov. 3 midterms.
For now, there’s little to indicate that the White House is seriously considering a diesel export ban. On Tuesday, Trump said he had “called for it within my people,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration was studying its overall feasibility.
Diesel prices have shot up about 70% since the Trump administration and Israel launched their war with Iran in late February. Different from gasoline, diesel fuel powers the large trucks and heavy freight vehicles carrying food, furniture, clothing and energy products to their destinations. It’s also critical in operating farm and construction equipment, as well as the composition of home heating oil. Diesel is the concealed lifeblood of the U.S. economy, and Republicans are panicking that its price is about to spiral out of control.
The fact that Republicans from ruby-red states are clamoring for government intervention underscores the dwindling levers they have left to pull in their campaigns to keep control of the House and Senate. Polls have shown Republicans are struggling to persuade voters to give them another chance to quell rising prices, with inflation topping their list of concerns. That’s hard to pull off when Trump has dismissed affordability as a “fake” Democratic-manufactured crisis as recently as the GOP midterm convention.
And so Republicans are falling back on a Carter-era idea that only deepened rock bottom for farmers.
In January 1980, Carter implemented a grain export ban to punish the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan. “I am determined to minimize any adverse impact on the American farmer from this action,” he said in a primetime speech. Seventeen million tons of American wheat, corn and soybeans would no longer flow to Soviet livestock.
It wasn’t popular with most Republican or Democratic lawmakers from the Farm Belt — the latter was still a thriving species in Congress instead of an extinct one. The Senate rebuked Carter eight months into the export ban. Grains piled up at storage bins and prices plunged, sinking many farmers into financial ruin. Other grain-exporting nations like Argentina, Brazil and Australia stepped into the void, replacing U.S. farmers who lost their Soviet market share.
Ronald Reagan campaigned against the grain export ban and lifted it in April 1981, shortly after taking office. He later bashed it as “a cynical, wrongheaded, totally unfair grain embargo” that backfired on the U.S. by also demonstrating that the country was an unreliable trade partner. Doesn’t that ring familiar?
Energy analysts today are wary about enacting a diesel export ban. They argue that domestic diesel inventories would climb and lead to lower prices in the short run. But by removing diesel from the global market, prices would shoot up over time and ripple through many parts of the East Coast that still rely on imported diesel. Enclosing diesel domestically doesn’t mean international supply and demand will magically decrease into a lower sale price.
“The U.S. is not short of diesel. The world is,” wrote Patrick De Haan, chief petroleum analyst at Gas Buddy, a price-tracking platform, on social media. “A potential export ban treats the global price problem as if it was a U.S. only problem, and the cure would be far worse than the disease.”
Republican desperation ahead of the midterms is growing. By endorsing a diesel export ban, they’re dusting off a flawed, antiquated blueprint and hitting the panic button.
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