The Trump administration has started to panic about the spiking price of oil.

While senior Trump aides had anticipated some brief surge in oil prices in the first days of the war with Iran, the size and sustainability of the market reaction caught them off guard, people familiar with the internal discussions told CNN.

Now, asoil prices hover near $100 a barreljust over a week into the war and US gas prices are moving sharply higher, it’s prompted a belated rush to try to reassure investors and seek ways to tamp down the impact. But the administration is confronting the limits of its power — and the reality that President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war abroad threatens to wipe out some of his key economic accomplishments at home.

“It’s hard to see anything but continued upward pressure on prices,” said Neil Atkinson, a longtime energy analyst and former head of the International Energy Agency’s oil industry and markets division. “People will get hurt at the pump.”

Officials spent the weekend and Monday urgently drawing up a wider array of options aimed at calming financial markets and limiting theimpact of oil’s surge on US gas prices, the people familiar said. Those ideas have ranged from more limited regulatory actions, such as easing restrictions on the flow of domestic oil, to far more extreme steps like directly intervening in the global oil trade. Trump aides were expected to present a slate of options to the president as soon as Monday, according to the people familiar.

For now, shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at an effective standstill, disrupting roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply with little sign of when tankers will again be able to safely traverse the critical waterway off the coast of Iran.

Few shipping firms have been willing to risk the threat of Iran firing on their tankers since the US and Israel bombed Iran more than a week ago, creating a backlog that’s driven up global oil prices at a historic pace.

Oil prices early Monday neared $120 a barrel before backing off somewhat, a level not seen since the early stages of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022. That run-up has swiftly rippled through to gas prices in the US, spurring a 51-cent-per-gallon jump in the national average over the last week.

The spike has prompted alarm throughout the Trump administration, where officials had originally planned to make lower gas prices a key pillar of the GOP’s efforts to hold onto their majorities in November’s midterm elections.

That level of urgency picked up markedly over the weekend, the people said, as the price of oil hit $100 a barrel and it became clear that the administration’s initial steps had largely failed to allay fears of a prolonged energy crisis.

Source: Drudge Report