President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Americans’ increasingly perilous finances and rising prices aren’t on his mind at all as the months-long impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continues to fuel surging inflation and skyrocketing gas prices across the United States.
Trump made the shocking confession as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.
Asked about the continuing pocketbook pressures faced by everyday consumers as a result of the war he started more than two months ago, he told reporters: “I don’t think about American financial situation — I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
The president’s comments came just hours after the Labor Department released inflation data showing the Consumer Price Index spiking 3.8 percent from the same point last year, including a .06 percent jump last month in the CPI.
Gasoline prices surged by a whopping 5.4 percent last month alone as the ongoing standoff between the U.S. and Iran has blocked the waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply transits each year.
Trump became irate when pressed by reporters on whether his policies have done anything to fulfill his campaign promise to lower prices that consumers had blamed on the Biden administration when they voted to return him to the presidency for a second, non-consecutive term in 2024.
He claimed his administration’s efforts are “working incredibly” because inflation had cooled to roughly 1.7 percent before he elected to start a war against Iran and ignore longstanding concerns that Tehran would react by closing down the Strait of Hormuz and thereby crippling the global economy.
At the same time, he suggested that anyone who is concerned about Americans’ economic conditions wants Iran to acquire nuclear weapons while also claiming that the economy is in good shape because stocks are high.
“Anybody that wants them to have a nuclear weapon is a stupid person. So we said we’re going to take the greatest stock market in history and we’re going to go down a little bit. And actually that turned out to be incorrect, because our stock market is now at the highest point in history, which frankly, surprised a lot of people,” he said.
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