There’s a lot that Americans don’t understand about the presidency, the economy or how those two interact. Accordingly, presidents tend to get credit for things out of their control in good times and likewise catch the blame for events beyond their remit in bad times. Inflation and gas prices are two particularly prominent examples where the White House usually has few levers to pull that can move the needle.
Kudos to Trump for finding a loophole that I had not considered: starting a needless war against one of the world’s major oil suppliers.
Since last week’s start of the U.S. and Israeli-led military campaign against Iran, energy prices have surged. As CNBC noted Monday, the war nobody — well, almost nobody — asked for has caused “the largest oil supply disruption in history, more than double the previous record set during the Middle East crisis of the 1950s, according to an analysis by consulting firm Rapidan Energy.”
The sudden staunching of the flow of oil is multicausal. Israeli forces struck 30 fuel depots in Tehran over the weekend; more attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure could mean a further drop in the global oil supply. Meanwhile, fears about reprisals against vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical choke points for maritime shipping, caused a major backlog of tankers unwilling to take the risk of crossing the narrow stretch of ocean separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula. That backlog caused Iran’s Arab neighbors in the Gulf to cut production, further stressing supplies worldwide.
Taken together, as The Associated Press noted, prices for oil went soaring beyond the roughly $70 a barrel that was the norm before the war started: “The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, briefly surged to $119.50 per barrel on Monday — its highest level since the summer after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. West Texas Intermediate, which is produced in the U.S., also soared to $119.48 per barrel at one point.”
Prices declined again Monday when Trump claimed the war was “very complete.” That would likely be a surprise to the Iranians, given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declaration the next day that “today will be, yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran.”
Oil prices were still hovering around $86 per barrel as of Tuesday evening. All the uncertainty Trump unleashed has quickly been felt at American gas stations, according to the latest figures from AAA. This CNBC chart illustrates how quickly the spike in prices came after the war began:
(While the chart ends with Monday, the average continued to creep up, hitting $3.54 on Tuesday, 50 cents higher than the same time last year.)
There’s plenty of room for things to get worse, despite Trump’s sweaty claim Sunday that a gain in “short term oil prices” was a “very small price to pay” for “safety and peace.” Because while Trump’s claim that the war was very complete may have caught investors’ eyes, in the same conversation with CBS News, he also said he was “thinking about taking it over” — it being the Strait of Hormuz. That may be why CNN reported Tuesday that, according to unnamed U.S. intelligence sources, Iran was beginning to seed the strait with mines, sure to further hamper oil tankers’ transit. It’s hard to believe that just three years ago, the GOP was hammering President Joe Biden as the average gas price in the U.S. hit a record. The cost at the pump for Americans increased as the world’s demand for oil reached pre-pandemic levels, even as U.S. production was higher than ever. Not helping matters was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted Biden to halt imports of Russian oil. I wrote at the time that the “president does not, as [Republicans] would have you believe, have a dial in the Oval Office that he uses to set gas prices.” Much as with his tariffs and their inflationary pressure, Trump has managed to find a way to prove me wrong about just how much power a president can have over the economy. While there’s no dial that he’s turning to set gas prices, in unleashing this war, he is absolutely the root cause of the rising rates we’re seeing. (And ironically, he is reportedly considering reducing the Biden-era sanctions on Russia to help ease the strain on global supplies.) So far, Republicans have tried to claim that there’s nothing to worry about politically from the climbing prices. But we’re in an era where the U.S. is a net exporter of oil and domestic drilling pushing to its full capacity. Without their plea to just drill more to fall back on, and Trump’s general denial of a problem, the pain at the pump could soon translate into pain for the GOP at the ballot box.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
