Trump Chief Hassett Blames Strait of Hormuz Problems on ‘Guys Living in Caves’

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett discussed the current state of the Strait of Hormuz during a Wednesday morning conversation with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.

Bartiromo asked Hassett for an update on the strait — which has been at the center of the months-long conflict between the United States and Iran — while noting oil prices have recently dropped.

The question led Hassett into a riff about “guys living in caves”:

BARTIROMO: Now, you’ve talked so much about this productivity boom, Kevin, and is that what’s driving that 4% growth? I mean, look, it’s interesting to look at oil prices this morning because they’re doing exactly what the president has been predicting. They are dropping like a rock as the talks continue and the white house confirmed positive talks on Iran in Qatar yesterday between Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and regional leaders. What can you tell us about the ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz right now as oil prices this morning are at 68 and change. Today’s national average gasoline now at $3.84 a gallon, that’s down from $4.32 a month ago. Is there anything you could tell us in terms of the update in the strait this morning?

HASSETT: Right. Well, the president gets an update on the movement every day and a lot of that update is classified so one those speak carefully and gently about it. The bottom line is the traffic went way up basically after the deal was made, way, way up, heading up close to what you would expect. There were a couple of hiccup days but now we’re heading back up again and we’re very, very bullish as the market should be that there’s going to be a heck of a lot of traffic moving through every single day. I think one of the ways to think about the straits is there are a bunch of guys living in caves that live in straits that may not be in communication with the folks that we’re dealing with that have stuff better than a rubber band they can shoot at a boat and whether there’s a few more of those or not is something nobody knows but there are good faith negotiations going on with leaders that Jared and Steve trust and we expect very much this is going to be something that cruises to normalcy sometime really, really soon.

Watch above via Fox News.

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