Republican strategist Karl Rove on Friday criticized President Trump’s insistence that the U.S. economy is thriving despite rising prices amid the Iran war.
Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Friday that the “economy was doing unbelievably from the standpoint of Wall Street.”
Rove told Fox News’s Gillian Turner that the president should “start by not gaslighting” the American public about the state of the economy.
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“The president made a mistake, in my opinion, last week in saying we’ve got the greatest economy in the history of the world and prices for groceries and gasoline and everything are coming down rapidly,” he said. “That’s not the experience of the American people.”
Rove agreed with Vice President JD Vance’s recent assessment that “throwing slogans at people about the free market” is not an effective counter from Republicans to the rise in socialism among candidates on the left.
However, the GOP strategist added that he also had “a slight disagreement” with Vance.
“I think he’s right: you do not need to call them names, you need to depict what is wrong with socialism,” Rove said. “But frankly, free markets is one of the reasons why we’ve been successful as a country and one of the reasons why socialism is a mistake.”
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The Trump administration has sought to appease affordability concerns amid the U.S.’s ongoing military operations against Iran.
Fuel prices have surged in the U.S. and across the globe during the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to crossfire in the region. Around a fifth of the world’s oil consumption flows through the key waterway during peacetime.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Thursday that the Trump administration would impose greater economic pressure next week to force Iran to reopen this trading passage.
“Watch this space for more announcements coming next week because we are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of the economic isolation of a country,” Bessent said on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”
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The U.S. has already levied economic sanctions against Iran and imposed a naval blockade in the strait that has already cost Tehran billions in revenue, according to a Pentagon official.
Trump said during a Friday speech in Long Island, N.Y., that he planned to declare the strait “a territory of the United States,” despite it falling under the jurisdiction of Oman and Iran. The president did not expand on how his administration would achieve this goal.
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