CNN’s Audie Cornish warned that President Donald Trump Thursday that he was falling into the same economic trap as his predecessor when he declared the U.S. did not need the Strait of Hormuz to remain open.
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The 80-year-old president insisted that the U.S. already controlled much of the global oil market, specifically pointing to Venezuela’s oil reserves, so commercial shipping through the Middle East waterway now effectively controlled by Iran was not crucial to American interests, but panelists on “CNN This Morning” disagreed.
“Any oil executive will tell you you cannot – it’s not it’s not like a faucet,” said Axios correspondent Alex Thompson. “You can’t just suddenly have tons of oil flowing. It takes years of building up infrastructure. A lot of infrastructure had been degraded in Venezuela.”
Mike Dubke, who briefly served as White House communications director early in Trump’s first term, pointed out the U.S. does not import oil through the Strait of Hormuz, but Cornish called out his argument as irrelevant.
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“When the president announced a cease fire, the thing he said is if we didn’t stop, there might be a global recession,” she said. “Like, he said that when he explained to everyone why he wanted a pause in fighting, so it’s hard not to picture a return to fighting leading to the scenario he introduced, which is a global recession.”
Dubke agreed, saying that global oil reserves were already running perilously low, and he added the U.S. remained a net exporter despite shortages in Europe and elsewhere, but Cornish said that only went so far in public opinion.
“I’m fascinated because I think from the Biden era, we learned that the White House can say all it wants about how well things are going,” Cornish said, “but if people don’t think it’s feel it’s going well, nothing can save you.”
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