President Trump will address the nation on Wednesday evening on the war in Iran, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Why it matters: Leavitt’s Tuesday evening announcement on X came soon after Trump told reporters at the White House that U.S. forces could leave the Middle East in “two or three weeks.”
The address is scheduled for 9 p.m. ET. The big picture: Oil prices have soared since American and Israeli forces first struck Iran on Feb. 28. AAA said Tuesday that U.S. average gas prices had hit $4 per gallon nationwide for the first time since 2022.
Driving the news: A reporter asked Trump in the Oval Office earlier Tuesday how he planned to bring oil prices down
“All I have to do is leave Iran, and we’ll be doing that very soon,” Trump said, predicting prices would come “tumbling down.” U.S. forces are “finishing the job,” he said, giving varying estimates from “two weeks, maybe a couple of days longer,” to “maybe three,” adding: “We knocked out tremendous amounts of missile making facilities.” Of note: Trump said Tehran didn’t have to make a deal with the U.S. in order for American forces to leave the region.
And he said securing the throttled Strait of Hormuz is “not for us — that’ll be for France,” Trump said. "That’ll be for whoever’s using the strait
My god, what a fucking moron. Iran’s shutdown of the strait isn’t going to end if the U.S. leaves. They’re using it to boost oil prices, which directly benefits them. They’re setting up a toll system to profit from the shutdown. He’s smashed the hornets nest with a baseball bat, and thinks that if he stops hitting it, it will immediately return to the peaceful situation that was there before. High oil prices, and all of the economy-killing things that come with it, are here to stay for the foreseeable future.