On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses how right-wing media are spinning economic consequence of the Iran war
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From the March 20, 2026, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): The spike of oil prices as a result of Donald Trump's war of choice with Iran has made life more financially challenging for nearly all Americans. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the world's largest exporter of oil, Saudi Arabia, has issued a stark warning that oil could spike to as much as $180 a barrel should the war in Iran continue through April. From their reporting, while that would sound like a bonanza for a kingdom still heavily leveraged to oil revenue, it is deeply concerning. Prices that high could push consumers into habits that slash their oil use, potentially for the long term or trigger a recession that also hurts demand. Want to bring in former senior adviser to president Biden and former national economic adviser to presidents Obama and Clinton, Gene Sperling.
Angelo is still with me. Gene Sperling, what's going to be the economic impact for American consumers if oil prices continue to rise to the level that the Saudis are predicting there?
GENE SPERLING (GUEST): It's frightening. I mean, right now, you have a situation where AAA says, on average, we've gone up pretty much a dollar in just a month. And, you know, oil prices are still, you know, between 100 and 115 going back and forth. If it goes up to 180, you know, it's not just the price at the pump you're going to see. You're going to see all sorts of ways that people are double hurt.
If you look at, you know, one of your, people, Catherine Rampell, was talking about farmers who've been hurt terribly by tariffs and now are paying higher fertilizer costs because of the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz for shipping nitrogen fertilizers. There's another article in the Washington Post that talks about the small business people who got decimated by the tariffs are now facing huge amounts of cost in oil, in in higher oil and gas prices. And what we know is that at first, the prices just hit overall inflation. They hit just the oil or food or some other things. But the longer it goes on and the higher it goes, the more those higher oil prices, creep into all sorts of different products that in some way rely on oil, for their production.
And that means that you get sweeping inflation more structural. That's going to handcuff the Federal Reserve. People are going to be spending less on other things. The economy will be getting worse, and at the same time, inflation will be going up. Not just overall inflation, but core inflation because oil will start raising the pry higher, a $180 a barrel.
Oil will start raising prices and production throughout the economy.
MENENDEZ: So, Angelo, meanwhile, Trump, his allies, they're insisting Americans just deal with these rising prices. They tell them it's a small price to pay for a war that they can't decide whether it isn't about uranium or about regime change. Let's just listen to the way they have been spinning in the past few days.
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You are using World War two as your bar for how bad things could be, Angelo. You know that you are not in a great spot. You have pointed out to me many times the fact that the promise is often, yeah, prices are going to go up, but then they're going to come way down. And I would even posit, Angelo, that Americans would be willing to pay a little bit more if they understood what it was they were paying more for. But to ask them to sacrifice in the name of question mark seems a little antithetical.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): It's a big jump. I mean and, you know, they can say in one of their repeated refrains these days is, you know, short term pain for long term gain. They're at least acknowledging that there's going to be some pain now, but they're still pushing this notion that there's a pot of gold on the other end of this, and you just have to sort of ride with Trump because it's going to be great on the end. And, you know, W 2 is a comparison, but there's another one too.
You know, if you look at what's happening in industry press and the energy sector, in those reportings, what they're saying is that this so far is worse than the initial disruption during COVID. And that if it continues for at least another two to three weeks, we're looking at a global recession, if not a depression. And this ties into what Gene was talking about earlier. I mean, that the long tail of this will be substantial, and I don't know how they're going to be able to reconcile that or spin that for their people. Because there's a lot of Trump and his allies that are getting a lot richer, and all their people sort of know that, and they're willing to go along with it.
But to your point, they haven't really been told why. They've just been told this is essential, that it's existential, that is a good thing, it's supposed to benefit them, but they literally don't have a reason. And I think that's going to be a tension point that, you know, will brew up some point over the summer, and I don't think he'll ever be able to spin that around. Maybe he'll just ignore it. Like, he's ignored the Epstein stuff and other things, but it is a real gap that they haven't quite figured out how they're going to navigate.
And just to put a bow on it, to compare, in the first two weeks of the Russia invasion of Ukraine, Fox News talked about energy security, energy independence 329 times. I mean, they just went hair on fire about this, that it's all going to unravel. Look at what Biden's done. He hasn't done enough to protect gas prices. Everything's going to go away.
In the first two weeks of this crisis that would that Trump created, they talked they mentioned it scantily 12 times, and most of the time they mentioned it is in the context of Trump is doing a great thing for our energy independence. So they weaponized it against Democrats and made it such an issue. Now they barely talk about it.