President Donald Trump blurted out a stunning dismissal of pain at the pump as his approval rating sinks, telling reporters, “This is peanuts,” and he doesn’t “even think about that.”
The president spoke to reporters on Tuesday morning against the backdrop of the massive and cacophonous East Wing construction project and took questions for about 45 minutes.
In one exchange, he praised CNN’s Harry Enten not long after Enten delivered a breathless report on a new round of sinking approval polls — all in the 30s.
But that didn’t stop Trump from delivering a new version of the gaffe he uncorked before his China trip, insisting he doesn’t even think about gas prices in his pursuit of victory in Iran:
REPORTER: Mr. President, you’ve pushed to suppress the federal gas tax–.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah.
REPORTER: Are there other initiatives that you’re thinking of (CROSSTALK) to try to lower costs–
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, there may be. It’s very temporary. Yeah, there may be. Anything to keep it down.
Look, as soon as this war is over, gas is going to–. You know, I had gasoline down to $1.85 cents in Iowa. I was in Iowa and the stations had it at $1 and 85 cents. But I was down to– in many cases, less than $2 a barrel, a gallon.
And then I said to myself… This is great. We just hit a new high in the stock market. Everything’s going good.
I’m sorry, but we have to go down and take a little journey down to– we have to do something with Iran. We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon.
You want to see the world exploded? You want to see a problem?
And this is peanuts! And I appreciate everybody putting up with it for a little while. It won’t be much longer.
But you’re going to have, and frankly, there is so much oil out there. One of the things that is happening is these big ships are coming up to Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, and they’re loading up.
But I don’t even think about that. What I think about is you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon, and they won’t have a nuclear weapons, and then they fully understand it.
Watch above via White House Press Pool.
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