A man worth more than $6 billion just told a room full of Republican donors that he knew his war would jack up prices on working Americans — and “it didn’t matter” to him.
That’s a direct quote from President Trump, speaking Wednesday night at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., where he casually admitted that the economic pain crushing tens of millions of families was always part of the plan.
“I thought that the energy prices, oil prices, would go up higher. I thought the stock market would go somewhat lower,” Trump told the crowd. “But it didn’t matter to me. It’s short-term.”
Short-term. That’s what a 79-year-old billionaire calls it when you can’t afford to fill your tank.
🚨 Trump on Iran:
— Zain Sajjad (@ZainSM8) March 26, 2026
“I thought oil would spike and stocks would fall — but it didn’t matter to me.”
A reckless mindset — treating war and markets like they’re disposable.#Iran #USA #Trump #Breaking #Markets pic.twitter.com/HctNSfNS4s
Crude oil has repeatedly topped $100 a barrel since Iran closed off the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow shipping route that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil — in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli attacks Trump ordered. Gas prices are climbing. Economists are warning about a recession. And the guy who started it all is at a donor dinner saying he knew this would happen and didn’t care.
Trump dressed it up in the language he always uses when he doesn’t want to explain himself. “We had to cut out the cancer,” he said, calling Iran’s nuclear program a threat that justified all of it. “Now we’re going to finish it off.”
He also claimed that “numerous” former presidents over the past 47 years “wished” they had started a war with Iran but “didn’t have the guts to do it.” This is a lie he’s told before. Every living former president — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — has denied Trump’s claim that any of them secretly confided support for his war.
The war itself is now nearly a month old, with no clear end in sight, despite Trump’s repeated insistence that it will wrap up soon. It has cost billions of dollars. It has tanked his poll numbers. And it has made life measurably worse for the people he swore he’d fight for.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday put Trump’s approval rating at a second-term low of 36 percent. His approval on the economy hit 29 percent — lower than anything Joe Biden recorded during a term defined by post-pandemic inflation and sky-high gas prices.
Let that sink in: Trump is now polling worse on the economy than the guy he spent years calling a disaster on the economy.
An Associated Press/NORC survey out Wednesday found that 45 percent of Americans said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about being able to afford gas in the coming months. These aren’t abstract numbers. These are people choosing between filling the tank and buying groceries.
This is the same president who spent months before the war telling Americans there was no cost-of-living crisis. He called complaints about affordability a “hoax.” Now he’s started a war that made affordability objectively worse and his defense is: I knew it would happen, but I didn’t care.
The political fallout is already landing. The GOP is predicted to lose control of the House in the midterms, and the Iran war is one of the biggest reasons why. Trump’s deeply unpopular conflict has given Democrats a gift they didn’t even have to manufacture — a Republican president on tape admitting he chose war over his own citizens’ wallets.
Trump’s net worth is estimated at more than $6 billion. Gas prices are “short-term” when you’ll never pump your own gas again in your life.
The White House has not commented.