(CNN) — The domestic politics of the Iran war can mostly be summed up by two words right now: gas prices.
And perhaps no issue better epitomizes the administration’s haphazard messaging strategy when it comes to the war.
President Donald Trump on Monday directly contradicted Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s comments just a day earlier about how long gas prices could linger. While Wright had told CNN that we might not see gas under $3 per gallon until 2027, Trump called him “totally wrong.”
Days before, Trump contradicted his own words on the very same subject. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has contributed to some inconsistent messaging here, too.
In other words: It’s a mess. The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have taken any care to drive a consistent message that wouldn’t ultimately come back to bite it in the backside. And the situation reinforces how Trump and his team seemed to anticipate a much shorter war or at least underestimated how much damage Iran could cause to the global oil supply.
Let’s recap.
On March 8, about a week into the war, Wright told CNN’s Jake Tapper that gas would be back under $3 per gallon “before too long.” When pressed on how long, he indicated it was just weeks away.
“In the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing,” Wright said.
Wright then told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that there was a “very good chance” this would happen by the summer.
But as the weeks rolled on and the Strait of Hormuz remained closed, Wright’s prediction was proven false. More than seven weeks into the war, gas remains around $4 per gallon, according to Gas Buddy.
By April 12, reality seemed to set in. Fox News aired an interview in which Trump said gas and oil prices might not even drop at all before the November midterm elections.
“It could be [lower], or the same, or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo.
But when Trump spoke with Bartiromo just days later for her Fox Business Network show, his tone shifted dramatically.
He said that “gasoline is coming down very soon and very big.”
“I think they’ll be much lower before midterm,” he added. “Much lower.”
But sandwiched between those two interviews, Wright started to walk back his own comments. When asked about sub-$3 gas by the summer, he said, “by the summer is an aggressive time frame now.”
And on April 15, Bessent seemed to want to adjust the goalposts. The talk had been about gas under $3, and he said at a White House briefing that he was “optimistic that sometime between June 20 and September 20, that we can have $3 gas again.”
But he also switched his phrasing, mentioning “gas with a three in front of it” — which could mean anywhere from $3.00 to $3.99.
“I’m optimistic that during the summer, we will see gas with a three in front of it sooner rather than later,” Bessent said at the same briefing.
That’s a rather modest prediction, given gas was just a shade over $4 per gallon in the national average at the time. (Gas in many areas of the country already had a three in front of it, and it wouldn’t take much to drop the average to that point.)
But it was Wright who offered perhaps the most pessimistic comments to date on Sunday.
Speaking to Tapper again, he suggested it would be a while before gas would drop below $3.
“That could happen later this year,” Wright said. “That might not happen until next year.”
He then emphasized that $3 per gallon gas is an ambitious goal, calling it “pretty tremendous in inflation-adjusted terms.”
But those comments apparently didn’t sit well with Trump, who spoke Monday with The Hill and directly undercut his energy secretary.
“No, I think he’s wrong on that,” Trump said. “Totally wrong.”
Trump and his team have offered confusing and often-contradictory messages on the Iran war from the beginning. But Trump contradicting Wright so directly and so quickly stands out. It’s especially striking since it was only about a week ago that the president was sounding quite pessimistic himself.
Trump, of course, seemed to think better of those comments and quickly adjusted course.
This is a critical issue, given gas prices are the most in-your-face reminder about the ongoing cost of this war and that they could take a while to fall even if the war ends quickly.
But there just seems to be almost no message discipline — no united front on what the administration is supposed to tell people about how long they’ll have to deal with higher gas prices.
Trump’s desire seems to be an “all is well” emphasis that assures victory and price relief are just around the corner. The obvious problem there — and Wright’s original prediction that high gas prices would only last weeks, not months, is a case in point — is that officials look inept when that doesn’t pan out.
The energy secretary said “weeks” was a “worst case.” But even if peace talks are successful this week, it seems unlikely gas prices could drop that much, that quickly.
Which would suggest we’re in a worse situation than even the worst-case scenario that the Trump administration envisioned.
So it’s justifiable for Americans, who the administration led to believe this would be a temporary hardship, to wonder if Trump officials have any idea what they’re doing.
The-CNN-Wire
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