Whether it causes one to laugh or shout, President Donald Trump has a remarkable record of changing everything he says and thinks, often at the confusion of everyone. His June 17 press conference in France was a prime example of that. Despite assurances for weeks that Iran’s economy was on the brink of collapse, and that the U.S. had everything under control, Trump dropped the act and admitted just how desperate things were becoming with Iran’s continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
“We run out of reserves at about four weeks,” Trump said, referring to the U.S.’s stockpile of petroleum reserves it has been rapidly drawing down. He said it would be “bedlam” if the oil ran out. “We could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years,” he claimed, but if the war continued, the strait may “never be open.” “You wouldn’t have oil for maybe years.”
Stock markets would “go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” Trump said. “The one thing I didn’t want to see, is I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened.” Trump also said that “the one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that, and who knows what would have happened. But bad things happen.”
So, the people attacking me for not being tougher on Iran “are stupid people,” Trump said. He later made this point on Truth social: “These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.”
