President Harry Truman famously declared that “the buck stops here,” meaning the responsibility for what happens to the country ultimately lands in the Oval Office. But now, with gas prices skyrocketing due to the disastrous war on Iran, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett tried to pass the buck from current President Donald Trump to former President Joe Biden.
But even Fox News — a network famously sympathetic to Trump — wasn’t buying it.
While appearing on the Fox show America’s Newsroom, Hassett was asked about the rising energy crisis by anchor Bill Hemmer. After attempting to count the ways the Trump administration had taken action to keep prices down, including the “second-largest release of the strategic reserve on record,” Hassett ventured a stab at Biden.
“Joe Biden,” said a visibly squirming Hassett, “he’s the one who had the biggest release of the strategic reserve, and there was no supply disruption at the time. He was just trying to offset all those terrible energy prices and get gas prices down ahead of the election. And so…”
But Hemmer cut him off, asserting, “OK, but that was then, and this is now,” before noting that the price of Texas crude oil had shot up from $67 a barrel at the end of February to $111 by the beginning of April. “How high can it go?”
Hassett attempted to handwave this away, saying, “Oh, well, you can see that right now our economy has so much momentum that it’s humming along,” calling the high prices a “temporary phenomenon” that will “end very soon.”
As the national gas price average passes $4 a gallon and continues to climb, the Trump administration has made it very clear that it doesn’t want to accept responsibility for the high price tag.
During President Donald Trump’s national address on Wednesday, for example, he insisted that the “increase has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict,” failing to mention that Iran only took such action after Trump started the war in the first place.
Trump has been consistently dismissive of gas price concerns, saying at the end of March that the rising costs of the war don’t “matter to me.”