Key members of Donald Trump’s administration have hit the panic button over the surging price of oil as a result of the president’s war with Iran.
On Monday evening, Trump, 79, made a furious Truth Social post that threatened revenge on Iran after oil prices reached over $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, flowing down to motorists.
The angry post came just hours after the president claimed his war was coming to an end.
While some senior Trump aides knew the war in the Middle East would lead to a temporary rise in the price of oil, “the size and sustainability of the market reaction caught them off guard,” according to a new report by CNN.
The average price of U.S. retail gasoline nationwide had hit $3.49 a gallon by Monday afternoon, according to price-tracking service GasBuddy. The average price per gallon had jumped by over 50 cents since the war with Iran began.
The ongoing spike in oil prices, which affects not only motorists but also the business sector, spooked MAGA insiders who had planned to use lower gas prices as a key selling point ahead of November’s midterm elections, according to CNN.
The administration has realized that despite Trump christening himself the “peace president,” his latest war has not only cost eight American military lives so far, but the fallout could overshadow any economic achievements he has made during his second term.
Financial markets around the world have been in turmoil since Trump’s war. The last time oil prices reached similar heights was after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which pushed up global energy prices.
The CNN report claimed Trump’s officials had urgently drawn up a list of actions designed to steady financial markets and reverse oil prices, which were due to be shown to the president on Monday. They ranged from easing restrictions on the flow of domestic oil to direct U.S. intervention in the global oil trade.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright attempted to placate Americans in a CNN interview that addressed the restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which caters to around 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
While the Straight can transport up to 20 million barrels of oil per day, shipping firms have baulked at using the route due to the threat of Iranian attacks on tankers, leading to supply shortages.
“We are not too long away, I think, before you’ll see more regular resumption of ship traffic,” Wright said Sunday. “This is a weeks, this is not a months, thing.”
Trump already attempted to steady the stock market by insisting on Monday that his war is “very complete, pretty much.”
But he soon appeared to contradict himself.
Speaking to reporters later on Monday, Trump said the U.S. would not let Iran “hold the world hostage” if it attempted to stop the global oil supply.
“If Iran does anything to do that, they’ll get hit at a much much harder level,” Trump threatened, a few hours before his Truth Social rant.
“They’ll never be able to recover, ever. We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them, or anybody else helping them, to ever recover that section of the world if they do anything,” he said.
Later in the press conference, Trump acknowledged oil prices had risen since the start of the war, but said they “went artificially up” because of what he labelled “a very positive thing.”
The president admitted, “I knew oil prices would go up if I did this, and they’ve gone up probably less than I thought they’d go up.”
