Desperate Donald Trump has humiliated his own energy secretary in a row over gas prices.
Chris Wright, 61, told CNN on Sunday that he did not think they would drop below $3 a gallon until at least 2027.
In a phone interview with The Hill, the president, 79, disputed that assessment. “No, I think he’s wrong on that. Totally wrong.”
Trump said he believed prices would dip “as soon as this ends,” in reference to his unpopular war in Iran.
This, and in particular Iran’s restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, has caused crude oil prices to spiral.
The price spike was made worse after the U.S. seized an Iranian vessel in the region on Sunday.
Wright made his downbeat forecast on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union with the U.S. pump average sitting at $4.05 a gallon, according to AAA—nearly a buck higher than 12 months ago.
The shale-gas veteran was grilled on air by Tapper about his own pledge six weeks earlier that sub-$3 fuel would return within a matter of weeks, not months, as the Daily Beast reported.
The pain at the pump has become a serious political millstone around the president’s neck. Trump’s economy approval cratered to 31 percent in a CNN poll at the start of April—a second-term floor that undercuts every reading ever posted by Joe Biden on the same measure, the Beast reported.
A JL Partners survey in December found that almost half of registered voters think life has become less affordable since Trump returned to the Oval Office.
The president has swatted away the grumbles as a Democrat “hoax” and “con job,” even as his gamble on Tehran sent pump prices above $4 a gallon for the first time since the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A 10-day truce was agreed with Iran on Thursday, though Trump on Sunday accused Iranian forces of blowing through it with fresh attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Vice President JD Vance, 41, is due in Islamabad on Monday to head a U.S. team meeting Pakistani and Iranian officials. However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it had yet to sign off on whether the talks will actually happen.
The president also hit back at a separate Reuters dispatch on Monday that claimed Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir had used a phone call to urge him to rethink the American naval siege choking off Iran’s ports—with the wire service saying Trump had agreed to weigh up the intervention.
The president insisted to The Hill that Munir had not raised the subject at all, bragging that Iran was hemorrhaging $500 million every day under the clampdown. “We control it. They don’t control it,” Trump said.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of Energy for comment.
