President Trump said, calling into CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday morning, that he expected the economic impact of the Iran war would be much worse. Since the war began, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost and regained about 10% of its value, and the price of oil has fluctuated from around $ 70 up to $ 110, and for the past couple of weeks appears to have stabilized around $ 90 — roughly 30% higher than pre-war levels. “I thought the market would be down 20% and oil would be $ 200,” Trump told CNBC hosts this morning. “I said to my people-they’re all gathered, all these wonderful guys, Scott Bessent, Howard-they’re all doing a good job. I said, Fellas, I got a little bad news for you. I’m going to put a little wrinkle in your numbers. ‘Why, sir?’ We’re going down to a place called Iran,” Trump said. “And they said, ‘Wow, that’s going to be bad.’ I said, Yeah, it’s going to hurt the market, and it’s going to drive up the price of oil and whatever it is. But that’s peanuts compared to what would happen if we let them get nuclear weapons.” “The fact is that we took this little journey-and if you had told me that the Dow is almost-I’m looking at your screen-literally back to 50,000, and that oil is at 90 as opposed to 200, I would be frankly surprised,” Trump said. “The stock market is up!” Trump said. “The S&P is where it was when we started this whole thing. I thought it would be down 20%, or down a very substantial amount. Even when it was down more a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised-I thought it would be down much more, and I thought oil would be much higher. And I’m very happy to say that it wasn’t.”

CNBC HOST: You’ve been very clear about wanting lower rates. But with the situation in Iran right now, with higher oil prices, most people tell us that that’s going to have to wait. The market itself is not anticipating lower rates or any rate cuts until at least the second half of this year. There’s only about a 41% chance of that, according to the market. Will you be disappointed if your new Fed chair, if he gets approved, doesn’t cut rates right away? DONALD TRUMP: I would. But let’s talk about Iran first. Iran-if you-I’m looking at your numbers now as I speak. I mean, the market’s up. We’re going to be at 50,000. That’s where we were just a little while ago when it started. And when I hit 50,000 on the Dow and 7,000 on the S&P, I said, Well, I hate to do this to everybody, but I’m going to have to journey down to a place called Iran and make sure they don’t have a nuclear weapon-because they will blow up the world. Do you want to see a bad stock market? Try blowing up the Middle East, and then Europe, and then they come for us. And we’re not going to let that happen. So I said to the people-I said to my people-they’re all gathered, all these wonderful guys, Scott Bessent, the whole group, Howard-they’re all doing a good job. I said, Fellas, I got a little bad news for you. I’m going to put a little wrinkle in your numbers. Why, sir? We’re going down to a place called Iran, and we’re going to make sure that they never have a nuclear weapon, because they’re religious fanatics, and they will use that weapon to blow up the world. But they’ll start with Israel and the Middle East, and we’re not going to let that happen. And they said, Wow, that’s going to be bad. I said, Yeah, it’s going to hurt the market, and it’s going to drive up the price of oil and whatever it is. But that’s peanuts compared to what would happen if we let this happen. And I told them-47 years, other presidents wanted to do it. They never had the guts, the courage to do it. I said, We have to do it. And they understood that-very professional. They’re great guys, great people. And so I said, we’re going down and we’re going to do our little thing. And we did. And we’ve, you know, knocked out-we’ve totally won the war. But you know, if you read The New York Times, you’d think, Oh gee, when are we surrendering? We have totally beat them-militarily and otherwise. I mean, I wish you could hear the conversations we have with them. We are victorious. If we left right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild. And they can’t get the nuclear material because it was obliterated by the B-2 bombers that went in. They never got the credit they should get. They’ve tried to get down there-you know, we have cameras from Space Force on it all the time-they’ve tried to get down, they can’t get down. That place was obliterated. They did such a good job. The left tries to demean it all the time-like, Oh well, maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated. It was. And they can’t get it. The fact is that we took this little journey-and if you would have told me that the Dow is almost-I’m looking at your screen-literally at 50,000, and that oil is at 90 as opposed to 200, I would be frankly surprised. And you know what is happening? Boats are finding other sources. They’re going up to Texas and Louisiana. They’re going to Alaska. They’re going to other places. It’s an amazing phenomenon. When there are problems, people find out how to take care of things. The straits are very important, but people have found alternatives. Look at your numbers right now-the stock market is up. The S&P is where it was when we started this whole thing. I thought it would be down 20%, or down a very substantial amount. Even when it was down more a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised-I thought it would be down much more, and I thought oil would be much higher. And I’m very happy to say that it wasn’t. And when it’s over-and it will end-they want it to be over immediately. I just looked at a chart: World War I, four years and three months. World War II, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, 19 years. Iraq, eight years. I’m at five months, okay? Five months. I would have won Vietnam very quickly. If I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won here-because essentially we’ve won here. People can play games. The Democrats can say, Well, we should have done better. No matter what-if I did it in one week, they’d say we should have done better. Look at Venezuela-I took it over in 45 minutes. It was basically 45 minutes. And by the way, a very strong military country. We took it over in a day-but let’s be nice-we basically took it over in 45 minutes.
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