US President Donald Trump said Thursday he was not concerned about rising domestic gasoline prices, even though US oil prices have risen 20% since last Friday.
“I have no concerns about that,” he told Reuters.
“It’s going to go down quickly when this is over, and it’s going to go up if it goes up, but that’s much more important than a little bit of a bump in gas prices.”
U.S. crude oil prices on Thursday hit an 11-month high, the biggest single-day increase since May 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.
The remarks came a week after President Trump boasted about lower gas prices in his State of the Union address.
In an interview with Reuters, Trump said he had no intention of tapping into the country’s strategic oil reserves and said he believed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane through which one in every five barrels of oil on earth passes, would remain open because Iran’s navy is “at the bottom of the ocean.”
CNN reported that Iran appears to be in control of the northern part of the strait, blocking the flow of oil tankers through the strait, and no crude ships were passing through it on Wednesday.
Oil prices briefly stabilized on Tuesday after President Trump promised marine insurance and U.S. Navy escorts for tankers in the region if needed. But a sharp rise in prices in the days that followed suggests continued concerns that disruptions to energy supplies could continue as regional conflict deepens.
President Trump told Time magazine on Wednesday that there is “no end date” to war with Iran, although he previously said he expected the war to last four to five weeks.
The conflict is already testing the resilience of the global economy, as soaring energy costs and supply disruptions could push up inflation and weigh on economic growth.
For example, to limit the economic shock, the United States has given India a “30-day exemption” to buy Russian oil currently stranded at sea, an ironic turn after President Trump imposed tariffs on India last year to pressure the Indian government to stop financing Russia’s war against Ukraine through oil purchases.
CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Matt Egan, Samantha Waldenberg and Rhea Mogul contributed to this post.
