US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that soaring gas prices in the country do not bother him, even as US oil prices have now surged 20% since last Friday.
“I don’t have any concern about it,” he told Reuters.
“They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”
US oil prices on Thursday recorded their biggest one-day increase since May 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching an 11-month high.
This comes a week after Trump boasted about falling gas prices during his State of the Union address.
In his interview with Reuters, Trump said he is not looking to tap into the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and he believes the Strait of Hormuz – a critical shipping route through which one out of every five barrels of oil on the planet passes – will remain open because Iran’s navy “is at the bottom of the sea.”
Iran controls the north side of the strait and has appeared to choke off the flow of oil tankers through the channel, with no crude vessels transiting on Wednesday, CNN reported.
Oil prices briefly stabilized on Tuesday after Trump promised maritime insurance and US navy escorts for tankers in the region, if necessary. But the surging prices in the following days suggest fears persist over energy supply disruption that is likely to continue as the conflict in the region deepens.
Trump told Time on Wednesday he has “no time limits” for the war with Iran, though he previously said that he expects the war to last four to five weeks.
The conflict is already testing the resiliency of the global economy, as soaring energy costs and supply disruptions could drive up inflation and weigh on economic growth.
To limit the economic shock, the US, for example, has given India a “30-day waiver” to purchase Russian oil currently stranded at sea – an ironic turnaround after Trump slapped India with tariffs last year in a bid to pressure its government to stop funding Moscow’s war against Ukraine through crude purchases.
CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Matt Egan, Samantha Waldenberg and Rhea Mogul contributed to this post.
