These things are not a sign that Trump is some kind of fool who doesn't know what he's doing. They show that he knows what he's doing better than the defenders of orthodoxy do. It's why he was willing to send out Covid stimulus checks to people and Biden was not.
We last had country-wide price controls in the US under Nixon, not under some putative left-of-center pol. When the mob grows restive every politician who has any sense at all does the same thing. The putative left-of-center pols are often more constrained in their ability to do so because they have to guard against the idea that they are socialists, and as a result they are more vulnerable in this way.
There is an old joke among actual leftists that in the US, people think that the more a government does something, the more left it is. But of course fascists can run a welfare state, and fascists can intervene in pricing. They just have to virtue signal the latter as looting. They wouldn't say that the government is buying up more oil to lower oil prices for consumers, but they would say that they invaded Venezuela and took its oil.