Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has absolutely shredded CNBC host Joe Kernen on the Iran war and President Donald Trump’s broken inflation promises.
Trump won the 2024 presidential election in part on his promise to lower rising costs for Americans, but as Buttigieg noted, inflation is now higher than it was when his ex-boss, former President Joe Biden, left office.
It’s been nearly six weeks since the U.S, alongside Israel, began striking Iran as Trump claimed the country posed an imminent threat with its nuclear ambitions and development of long-range weapons. Fighting has stopped for the most part since Tuesday, when a two-week ceasefire was announced, but the U.S. and Iran remain on fragile ground.
Americans quickly began to see the effects of the war last month as oil prices soared following Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which transports about a fifth of the world’s oil. Americans are now paying, on average, more than $4 per gallon for regular gas and nearly $5.70 per gallon for diesel.
Inflation has also surged 0.9 percent since February, according to the Consumer Price Index for March. Inflation now sits at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, government data shows. Driving higher inflation is the cost of energy, with gas prices rising a whopping 21.2 percent in March.
Buttigieg, a Navy veteran who served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, put the Iran war into his perspective during an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box Friday, “When a president sends you to war…you do it with some level of confidence, some level of assurance, that your chain of command, all the way up to the president of the United States, would not do this if they didn’t have a choice.”
Kernen defended the Trump administration’s decision to attack Iran, saying that the country had “slaughtered” its own people, had a history of killing Americans and was “stirring trouble all around the world.”
“How do you feel about that regime being left intact by this president?” Buttigieg replied.
“I don’t know what might happen,” Kernen said. He then probed the former transportation secretary, “So, you don’t want this to work. And it was just a bad move. And you just want us to pull out now.”
Buttigieg responded: “There’s no obvious way out now. But I want to make sure that this ends in a way that, first of all, our economy can recover, that we’re not paying so much for gas. Right now, oil’s 100 bucks, jet fuel’s 200 bucks, gas is over four bucks, diesel’s like $5.50 and up.”
“You averaged $3.80 under Biden for four years,” Kernen interjected. The host was seemingly referring to gas prices. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, gas prices under Biden averaged around $3.50 per gallon.
Buttigieg pushed back: “And when we left, inflation was lower than it is today.”
The annual inflation rate rose 2.9 percent in December 2024, according to the Consumer Price Index.
Buttigieg and Kernen began talking over each other as the conversation got more heated.
“His central campaign promise was he was going to take inflation and drive it down and instead, he took inflation and it’s up,” Buttigieg said of Trump.
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